IU Indy: Un-hiding Your Impact

Situation

It can be a challenge to draw attention to smaller parts of a large and sprawling organization. That was a challenge we helped IU Indianapolis address. As a stand-alone university within a larger system, IU Indy is comprised of the primary campus but also two regional campus centers at some distance, including IU Fort Wayne about two hours northeast of Indianapolis in the corner of the state. After separating from the Purdue Fort Wayne campus, IU Fort Wayne found that many people throughout the city didn’t even know that IU Fort Wayne still existed. Obviously, this made for a challenging recruitment situation!

Solution

In fact, IU is all over Fort Wayne. Since the programs IU taught in Fort Wayne included numerous medical programs (including nursing), dental programs, social work, and public health, and since the faculty were for the most part active practitioners who also taught on the IU Fort Wayne campus, we decided to highlight where exactly they could be found.

We collected from the faculty all of their places of practice and mapped them online, including an interactive checkbox feature that allowed us or other users to toggle on or off the different categories of program. We then came up with a clever marketing hook that illustrated how IU is in Fort Wayne that allowed us also to use wordplay with the abbreviation of the state: “IU IN FW.” We emphasized that the faculty are from Fort Wayne and practice all over the city.

We developed a marketing rollout calendar for the spring yield season. We sent a sequence of messages to highlight the different programs and build continually toward an impressively comprehensive map showing how pervasive the university is throughout the city.

Success

We were excited to quickly see thousands of impressions and reach as we rolled out the campaign. Engagement rate varied by program obviously but reached over 8% for some programs, making this one of our more effective recruitment and yield campaigns, not to mention the effect it started having on increasing the visibility and presence of the campus in the city. In concert with our other recruitment efforts, this campaign helped us push total enrollment at IU Fort Wayne to over 1,000 students for the first time in the history of the school!