The team gained valuable insights from internal and external stakeholders, including the leadership team, enrollment team, marketing team, current students, alumni, faculty, and staff. This helped us understand Washington College’s unique identity and how to position it competitively in the higher education landscape. Through these insights, we discovered why students choose to attend Washington College, how to expand into new markets for Washington College, and what prospective students want to know about Washington College.

With this data, we developed strategic drivers to guide the creation of an enrollment strategy. This phase involved leveraging both internal and external research to shape the communication strategy. Our roadmap included content for emails, postcards, and SMS texts, along with a communications calendar and metrics for evaluating success and identifying areas for improvement.

Although regional differences necessitated running three separate campaigns, our “Not that Washington” campaign quickly proved successful. This campaign effectively differentiated Washington College from other institutions with the same namesake and clarified its location in Maryland. Our digital marketing efforts significantly boosted brand awareness, and our email marketing campaign generated a substantial number of qualified inquiries. Following the launch of the campaigns, we built reports within the CRM to enable the Washington College team to easily track the success of each campaign.

By engaging with key stakeholders and developing a comprehensive enrollment strategy—which included list buying, digital marketing recommendations, a communication plan, and CRM optimization—we crafted creative assets and measured the effectiveness of each effort. This holistic approach significantly boosted both brand awareness and qualified leads for Washington College.

Defining the HSU Experience

Pulling insights from internal and external stakeholders, including leadership, the enrollment team, marketing team, current students, alumni, faculty, staff, and even business leaders in the area, we started to gain a better understanding of what makes Hardin-Simmons stand out in a very saturated market. 

We realized all their competitors were similar in look, feel, and messaging (even brand colors). Everyone was saying and doing the same thing, which was very safe. We saw an opportunity for HSU to stand out by doing something different: embracing and proudly owning the Christian heritage and cowboy traditions that were unique to the University.

“We are cowboys.”

That concept became the rallying cry and tagline establishing the true essence of what made Hardin-Simmons the university it is. 

But what are cowboys? Cowboys are hard workers, people who push forward through any challenge that arises. Cowboys stand up for what they believe and finish what they started. They’re responsible. They’re natural born leaders. They have grit and passion for what they do.

Cowboys aren’t defined by the dust on their boots. They’re defined by their character. 

This campaign shows that it doesn’t matter where you’re from or what you do. The cowboy spirit lives in each one of us.

We are Hardin-Simmons University.
We are cowboys.

It’s How You Finish

At the center of the brand launch was a website redesign. Improving the site’s information architecture, creating clear navigation paths and a content strategy with a clear audience in mind, led to the biggest benefit: telling the Athens State story in a more compelling and effective way. 

To bring clarity to Athens State’ brand, we created a brand strategy that included a brand platform and a brand identity campaign. The campaign elevated the University’s modern approach to creating career-ready graduates and spoke to its unwavering effort to offer degree options for non-traditional students ready to finish their education.