University Marketing

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Abilene Christian University won eight awards, including three Grand Awards, in 2010 regional Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) competition. Awards were presented March 29 at CASE’s annual District IV conference in Austin, Texas.

University Marketing winners included Grand Awards in periodicals improvement (for “ACU Today magazine”), brochures/flyers/booklets (for “Introductory Viewbook”) and viewbooks (for “Academic Viewbook”); second place Excellence Awards in logo design (for “Study Abroad Logo”), publication design series (for “Live Up Campaign”) and color photography series (for “A Semester to Last a Lifetime” in ACU Today magazine’s Fall 2009 issue); a third place Achievement Award in viewbooks (for “Introductory Viewbook”); and a fourth-place Special Award in admissions, recruitment and promotional literature (for “Football Recruiting Guide).

CASE represents more than 3,000 institutions and 60,000 higher education professionals in alumni relations, communications, marketing, advancement services and development in 61 nations. District IV includes colleges, universities and schools of all sizes in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, New Mexico and Mexico.

ACU has won 97 regional awards and four international medals from CASE since 1985. Its winning Live Up and viewbook entries for 2010 were developed in concert with Stamats Communications and Corey Patterson, ACU’s director of enrollment marketing.

At the Austin conference, Ron Hadfield, assistant vice president for university communication, and Scott Kilmer, director of new media, presented a breakout session about ACU Today’s work to present its award-winning magazine to readers in multiple mediums, including print, Web and blog formats. Hadfield is editor of ACU Today, and Kilmer helped the magazine develop its Issuu.com site in 2009. Issuu hosts major Abilene Christian publications here.

Hayden Scruggs

We are proud to announce that Hayden Scruggs, one of our marketing interns from 2009, was selected for the coveted Holt Lunsford Commercial (HLC) endowed scholarship and paid internship position for the summer of 2010 in Dallas, Texas. Hayden was instrumental in the formation and successful launch of our new integrated marketing campaign that we have dubbed “Game Day.” Her leadership and professionalism was evident by her success in recruiting local Abilene businesses to become Wildcat Partners.

This summer, Hayden will relocate to Dallas and be introduced to all facets of the commercial real estate industry, including project management, data analysis and interaction with clients at HLC.

HLC is the second largest commercial real estate provider in the Dallas/ Fort Worth metroplex, overseeing approximately 36 million square feet of office and industrial product in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and Little Rock for private and institutional owners. Holt Lunsford, a 1985 ACU COBA graduate, is founder and CEO of HLC.

Upon her completion of this prestigious internship, Hayden also will be awarded a $4,000 scholarship for her Fall 2010 and Spring 2011 studies at ACU.

Way to go, Hayden!

University Marketing recently made six entries to 2010 Addy Award competition, sponsored by the Abilene chapter of the American Advertising Federation (AAF), and all six won in awards presented Feb. 25 at Fairway Oaks.  Four entries won Gold Addys: “LiveUp” in the Brochure/Campaigns category, “Intro Viewbook” in Brochures/color and “Academic Viewbook” in Brochures/Color, and “The Promise” (2009 President’s Circle film) in Elements of Advertising/Cinematography. The “2008-09 Mobile-Learning Report” won a Silver Addy in Annual Report/Color and “ACU Today” won a Bronze Addy in Magazine Design. In addition, “Intro Viewbook” was judged Best of Show.

Several of these awards are related to the “LiveUp” enrollment marketing campaign developed in conjunction with Stamats Communications. “LiveUp”-themed materials were rolled out in recruiting efforts this last year, helped ACU set an enrollment record in Fall 2009, and will influence our design of future marketing materials for the university.

Gold and silver Addy winners advance to AAF regional competition. ACU is no stranger to the Addy Awards, having won 260 of them since 1984, including 93 Gold Addys and five Best of Show honors.

While awards are not our motivation for doing effective and exemplary work for ACU, they do provide a source of pride and accomplishment for our team, as well as an acknowledgment from our professional peers of the quality of our work for you and ACU.

Over the past year, members of our marketing and video production teams traveled to Uruguay, Oxford and Germany to capture first hand the study abroad student experience. What they found was not the typical classroom or student life. They found students who were engaged in real-world learning and international cultures.

Scott Delony, our digital media specialist and adventurist extraordinaire, captured most of this video footage and created these video snapshots about ACU’s international centers.

Study Abroad		Oxford, England
Latin America		Germany

To see all Study Abroad videos and quicktakes from students, visit the Study Abroad website or ACU’s YouTube channel.

Student videographer Jonathan Davis also shot and edited the College of Business Administration’s Global Apprentice video series.

Two issues of ACU Today magazine can now be viewed on Issuu – including the first Bonus Coverage available only to online readers. The Summer 2009 issue is now joined by the Fall 2009 issue, which is a 76-pager, thanks to 24 pages of Bonus Coverage related to the cover story about the university’s Study Abroad program.

With its “page-turning technology,” Issuu provides a features-rich way to view what is essentially a 3D-looking PDF of the magazine. Each online issue is searchable and has live hot links to any URL appearing in the print edition. 

Issuu versions of the magazine should make a huge difference in our international alums’ ability to keep up with news of their alma mater. Otherwise, alums living abroad would expect to wait weeks or months for their issue of the magazine to arrive. 

We will soon be adding other back issues of ACU Today to Issuu, where other high-quality university publications can be found, such as the 2009 Mobile-Learning Report and the new-style Football Recruiting Guide (previously the Football Media Guide). 

We also are using WordPress to create a new blog for ACU Today.  The design complements the new design of the magazine, and will be soon supplemented with older content from the magazine’s original blog. Associate editor Katie Noah Gibson and I will be the primary authors, but I am hoping to add content from some of the magazine’s professional freelance writing staff, each of whom is an ACU alum. We are blessed with some great writers and I hope this can be a forum for some of them to contribute even more often.

We’ll be adding some additional features and widgets to the blog this week. Our aim is to make this a between-print-issues, regular stopping place for alums to learn more about ACU news and people than we might otherwise be able to share with them via other Web sites or in the 48 pages of the print version.

Over the weekend, Facebook introduced a new way to entice your advertising audience: use their friends. Now, when you create an ad for a fan page or group on Facebook, you can select “Target users whose friends are connected to: _____.”

How is this helpful? Of course, the effects are yet to be seen, but the supposition is that targeting friends of fans will lead to better conversion and more effective use of advertising dollars. The key to this change is that when “Friends of connections” is added, the ad will appear to a prospective fan, followed by the name of their friend who is already a fan. The ad plus the friend’s name will encourage them to become a fan out of admiration or peer pressure from their core relationships. Here’s an example of how it works.

Over the weekend, the ACU fan page awareness ad was updated to target friends of connections to the ACU fan page. Now, the ad will be ACU alumni, but not already fans of ACU). They will see this ad:

Not only does the ad show the original message that I created, but it also attaches “Scott Kilmer is a fan,” which will obviously make all 53 people rush to their desks, laptops and phones to join this glorious community! The referral system is completely automated. The only difference is that now our ad is targeted to friends of the 8,446 fans.

The numbers for this new feature are a little troubling. When I activated this feature, Facebook estimated that only 980 people fit this category (alumni non-fans whose friends are fans of ACU), while there are close to 15,000 disconnected ACU alumni on Facebook. I hope this number will rise significantly as the new feature rolls out across Facebook’s servers.

New way-finding signage has begun appearing on campus this fall to help visitors become more quickly familiar with ACU. Large purple signs now mark major entrances, and smaller purple signs help direct pedestrians to specific locations. University planners will continue to determine the location and information for both sizes of signs, and more will be installed as funds become available.

Colleges, departments and offices interested in helping accelerate the funding of way-finding signage for their visitors should contact Creative Services for more information.

A big “thank you” is due to Creative Services’ senior designer Greg Golden for developing these, and engineering them to be produced with the help of a local vendor, which saved the university thousands of dollars on each sign.

The exterior signage design also complements ACU’s interior signage program, which satisfies all requirements of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act and presents a consistent look across campus for these important tools in helping inform visitors. There are four styles of ACU signs to designate interior rooms, each featuring Braille and molded letters/numbers raised from the sign surface. These customized interior signs must be ordered through Creative Services, where other samples also are available. Note that old-style “blade” signs above or near the top of doors are not ADA-compliant. Watch for more info about that to come.

Faculty have been using Class Blogs since the beginning of the Fall semester. Now Campus Blogs are available for offices, departments, groups and individuals. Find out more at blogs.acu.edu. Click on the Class Blogs or Campus Blogs button for more information. The ACU Blog Guidelines will answer most of your questions.

To request a blog, visit blogs.acu.edu/request.

Tomorrow, I will present to the American Assoc of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers Strategic Enrollment Management conference or AACRAO SEM for short.  I’ve been asked to join the panel on social media by Khori Whitaker of Inside Track, by recommendation of Brad Ward.  Joining Brad and I will be Billy Adams from OU and Andrew Meyers of Hope College (Holland, MI).

While Billy, Brad and Andrew talk about recruiting and admissions strategy, I am excited to share with the attendees something I believe is very unique to our efforts – retention.  Since early this semester I have been working with Hayley Webb, Director of Student Retention and Services, on how to use the data we gather from students (tweets, blog posts, pictures posted, links referenced) to identify if they are “at-risk” of leaving the university.  Let me be clear, my task here is not to make any judgment on the content that pours through the social networks, instead I see myself as a router of that information to the appropriate offices established on campus to handle these types of situations.

You@ACU! - YouTube

Other points to share will be the great success of the You@ACU! campaign that was created by Hayley and the student team.  Since the program launched in late August, we have had over 200 user generated content (UGC) posts of dorm life, campus activities, football games, alumni reunions and only a few were removed before being broadcast publicly on campus or at Shotwell stadium.  This is a great program and one that I hope to really focus on in coming months so that we can be better prepared for data collection and review in 2010-11.

Last, in the spring of 2010, I am planning a pet project to aggregate all social media onto a single microsite.  PutOnYourPurple.com is the domain I’ve chosen (available – pending purchase).  This site is planned to be more of the human interest or community-in-action side of New Media with content aggregated from social networks, submitted by our alumni, students, faculty and staff showing how they are changing the world.  A great example of this concept is Oregon State’s Powered by Orange.