University of Maryland Clark School of Engineering
For our college, it was a fresh start in marketing communications.
“The A. James Clark School of Engineering at the University of Maryland—College Park” is a mouthful.
It’s also ranked the 21st best graduate engineering school in America according to US News, tied with Harvard. Now we may be a little biased, but we think they deserve to be ranked higher. Because when we got under the hood during our initial research, we uncovered a wealth of evidence that distinguishes them from their peers. Not the least of which is the fact that they’re the only top program in arm’s reach of the Nation’s Capital and one of the most important cities in the world, giving them incredible access to partnerships in government and the private sector that pours rocket fuel (sometimes quite literally) into their research and attracts top-of-their-game minds from around the world.
So in order to make them more of a household name, we shortened theirs. We helped them gain the internal confidence to begin referring to themselves simply as “Maryland Engineering,” (which is what the rest of the world called them anyway).
We also developed a campaign spotlighting the OTHER household names, like NASA, Boeing, and Amazon who turn to UMD every day when they need access to amazing researchers and talented, diverse graduates ready to enter the workforce. We helped them build new websites, social media templates, and guided them through an internal copy workshop so they could carry the message of Maryland Engineering to the world.
But we didn’t stop there. With a robust internal team spanning many departments we needed to create a thorough set of guidelines and tools to make executing work turnkey. This included a library of iconography that, when embedded in headlines, creates a more dynamic layout.
I am especially excited about the brand guidelines as they provide communicators from departments across the School of Engineering with a framework for implementing elements from the new brand.
Matt Lauman, Senior Graphic Designer
University of Maryland, A. James Clark School of Engineering
The system we developed also demonstrated how the brand could live in a range of campaign mediums and gave the Maryland Engineering team the confidence to launch it on their own. The brand was introduced alongside Maryland Engineering introducing a new dean.
We definitely made a splash.
Olga Costello, Marketing Coordinator
University of Maryland, A. James Clark School of Engineering
And speaking of those ads, they’re outperforming all benchmarks. In the first two months of the campaign — which targeted engineering academia, government decision makers, and industry leaders — it generated 6M+ impressions and 13K+ clicks on their landing page with average users spending four minutes on it.