Leading the way.
Excellence in higher education.
UMass Global is a recently launched online higher education institution. Its opportunity is to leverage the power of the venerable, highly ranked UMass brand to support a leading online global university.
The context
Online secondary learning in on the rise. Student seeking an affordable, flexible highly regarded alternative to the traditional model are constantly in search of new programs. With better known, major players like Southern New Hampshire university and University of Phoenix, among others, the challenge for brand, mindshare and enrollment are all critical to UMass Global.
The conflict
Achieving aggressive growth goals meant not only creating volume impressions, but making impressions, at all, starting at ground zero. Not only was volume crucial, but also confronting reputational issues about online adult learning, managing a leadership change and building relevance with non-traditional students with many options. But that’s exactly what we did.
The idea
What did we do? We punched up and turned up the volume with traditional media relations, augmented by an aggressive social media program. We leveraged our A.I-driven tools to quantify UMass Global’s narrative in the market. In our analysis we uncovered that they were structurally behind in impressions, they did not own the narrative they wanted to own and they were highly undisciplined in their social media and their hashtag strategy. Armed with the data, we partnered with the UMass Global leadership and communications teams to frame the narratives we wanted to own. We then mapped the media and social channels and got into market quickly with aggressive media outreach and thought leadership. We activated against pitch opportunities with a steady focus on driving UMass Global into the top-tier placements and have moved the market narrative in under three months.
