(Scroll to the bottom for work samples.)
The challenge: The Institute for Humane Studies needed a way to market its grant programs to graduate students in the social sciences.
The opportunity: Build awareness for our grant programs by becoming a valuable and trusted resource for busy graduate students.
My role in the project: I was a project manager, creative copywriter, and content producer for this assignment. I needed to develop audience-focused messaging that was informed by the needs of the graduate students we were trying to reach. And ultimately, content that built awareness and brought in applications for our grant programs.
Step 1 was to understand what graduate students needed at this point in their academic careers. So I went to academic conferences, talked to students at a few IHS events, and conducted competition research to understand how related organizations communicated with students.
Step 2 was to figure out what content we already had and how we could improve it, so I conducted a content audit which helped me understand how to re-message across all communications.
Step 3 involved working closely with the grants team to refresh the organization’s branding and messaging across our email campaigns, website, and print materials.
Step 4 involved creating content and analyzing its performance. Based on research and feedback, I worked with my team to position our organization as a trusted career resource for PhD students. While we had the high-level funding programs, we needed content for students who weren’t ready to commit to filling out a time-intensive application for these programs. We needed to identify talent and then build trust with those people. To accomplish this, I collaborated with professors and program officers to produce the following:
- A career advice blog, with opportunities to sign up for more advice via email.
- Live webinars (and recorded videos) where students could get mentorship from established professors.
- Interactive webinars, where students could get feedback on their papers from experts in their field.
- Ebooks, with more detailed information about how to apply for graduate school, how to find funding, etc.
- Graphics and compelling ad creative for social media and ad campaigns (I helped develop the concepts, wrote the copy, and managed the process).
- Email newsletters that provided advice, information on upcoming conferences, funding opportunities, and more.
- Email streams provided occasional reminders about our funding programs.
Results: Thanks to our messaging, lead generation, and content marketing efforts, we doubled the number of students applying for scholarship and grand programs from the year before. The graduate student advice blog tripled in page views over the academic year through search engine optimization, with a 0.5% conversion rate from blog post to email newsletter.
Work Samples
Note: These samples are from a full-time role. IHS is not one of my clients.
Writing Sample 1: Professionalizing the tone of IHS's emails.
I also worked closely with our graphic designer to reimagine our print materials, develop ad creative, and concept graphics for our website and for social media. It was incredible to work with such a talented designer to bring dry words to life while reimagining our verbal and visual brand.
Writing Sample 2: The graduate student brochure (for conferences)
Writing Sample 3: The PhD Scholarship bookmark (for conferences)
See additional graphics below. Please note that I collaborated very closely with a graphic designer within the organization to create these, and the images in the holiday graphic were created by a different designer who was contracting with the organization.