Quinnipiac Student Media Print Campaign
At Quinnipiac University, I was heavily involved in the student media organizations there. I even had the opportunity to manage the radio station, WQAQ, during my senior year there. During that time, Quinnipiac Student Media (QSM) as a whole underwent a lot of changes meant to increase student interest and involvement. To help the process, I developed a visual identity that would print boldly and stand out among all of the other school organizations. Working with the other managers, I created a print campaign to raise awareness of QSM among the students, administration, and local businesses.
The campaign consisted of three-parts. The first was an info card, given out to students from all the media booths at the Student Involvement Fair. The second was a poster campaign, to advertise the Student Media Summit. The last was a comprehensive marketing kit to help sell ads to local businesses and other organizations.
The Info Card
The info card is the first introduction to Student Media for incoming Freshmen. I needed to make sure to present all all the information well - and quite frankly, there was a lot of it. It took a lot of editing, but all of the information made it's way on there. The QSM visual identity proved its effectiveness here, splitting the sections out visually.
Working with a local printing company, I sourced and printed the postcards. The stock had to be bright enough that the vibrant colors would carry through, but solid enough that it could stand up to being tossed around with all of the other orientation materials. We printed a good three thousand of these, not just for the Involvement Fair, but also to hand out in classes and events. These cards lead to the most successful recruitment year QSM ever had in recent years.
The Poster
An event isn't any good if no one knows it's happening. The Quinnipiac Media Summit is a meeting to introduce interested students to all the media organizations, but for so many years barely any students knew it was even a thing. I needed to change that.
The key here was to make sure that interested students were aware of the meeting (just because they took an info card doesn't mean they read it) and telling them what it's all about. The visual identity worked in our favor - a lot of people recognized it from the materials they received at the involvement fair. The bold icons and lettering got the idea and date across quickly and gave all the crucial info from a distance.
We printed these posters at multiple sizes and trimmed them all by hand (Xacto Knife 101), and organized their posting all over campus. We made sure to hit all of the important areas: not just the cafeteria and student center, but also around the Communication School, English classrooms, and Gym. That year's media summit was the biggest yet, and QSM enjoyed a nice swell in popularity on campus
Also, free pizza is always a huge selling point.
The Marketing Kit
The final piece to the print campaign was a marketing kit to sell in QSM to local business and other school organizations. We split the groups into print, broadcast, and web, with all of the options laid out for potential advertisers. The QSM-branded color scheme carries across the entire piece to identify the orgs and show opportunities to advertise with one group across multiple media.
I set up the raw inDesign file to be easily modified if prices or dimensions change. Everything is governed by paragraph, character, and object styles, with easy imports for Word and Excel documents. This is a document that will live and grow for many years (and has)!
One thing that I am overly proud of is the back cover infographic. The best part, though is that the school breakdown graphic is exactly proportionately accurate. It took some math, probably more math than it's worth for the amount of people that would notice, but it was extremely satisfying.
