A Partner Through the Pandemic: Building Long-Term Relationships with Institutions
A view of the quad and surrounding campus at Albion College.
2019 - An Escalating Engagement
The summer of 2019 saw our initial engagement with Albion College, a liberal arts college about an hour west of Detroit (sorry, it’s a Midwest thing where we measure distance by driving time instead of actual mileage). After delivering a successful live stream production of the commencement of Albion College’s Class of 2019, the school’s marketing department reached out to us to collaborate on producing video content for recruiting next year’s incoming class. We developed the My Albion campaign to showcase how Albion College offers students a supportive environment to explore their passions and make their college experience truly personalized. We spoke with students pursuing a variety of degrees that came from an even wider variety of backgrounds but they all had one thing in common: they loved Albion College and how the school supports its students.
Upon completing the original run of the My Albion campaign, the school and our company entered into a long-term commitment to provide video support and create more digital marketing content throughout the year of 2020. There were changes happening both at the school and within our company but our adaptability to these changes enabled us to not only maintain but strengthen our working relationship with Albion. We had a great creative consultation session with the admissions team and formulated a series of concepts that we were planning to film over the course of the year. There was an air of hope and excitement about these projects. Then March rolled around and another change had challenged us to adapt once again: the COVID-19 pandemic.
2020: A Stark Contrast
As with nearly everything in our world, 2020 was a very different experience compared to 2019. Our meetings with the admissions department became exclusively virtual. When we did go out to campus for filming, we were limited to both the areas we could access and the people we could visit. The feelings of hope and excitement from the year before became ones of uncertainty and caution. Thankfully, the unwavering support from the school was still present and stronger than ever as we were able to create marketing assets for the admissions team and to transition to produce photo and video assets for the school’s virtual map website.
The challenges that faced our collaboration gave us the chance to fortify our relationship with the school by evolving our processes to fit within the school’s needs during a viral pandemic. We shifted the messaging focus from offering students a personal experience to offering students a chance to learn in-person as Albion College was one of the few higher learning institutions that offered it for the 2020 fall semester. Despite all of the adversity, 2020 saw the highest enrollment figures that Albion College had had in years. Our mutual support, understanding, and flexibility with the school was the foundation of the success our collaboration had achieved.
The new incoming students at Albion College participate in team activities to become better acquainted with each other during Matriculation Day, an activity that wasn’t held the year prior.
2021: A Welcomed Return to (Somewhat) Normal
While this year’s collaboration hasn’t quite felt exactly like 2019 (will anything ever feel that way again?), it certainly felt more like 2019 than 2020. There was a new energy in the air around campus again. Students were eager to attend not only classes but student gatherings such as Briton Bash and Homecoming in-person once again and for some, for the very first time. The year was full of change and new beginnings, from student-life expanding beyond the campus again to inaugurating a new school president.
2021 also saw our partnership with the school expand as we began a successful collaboration with the Events Department of Albion. Once again, our flexibility was tested with the evolving events schedule and once again, our collaboration persevered with our contributions to the Creating with Courage campaign. With effective communication, adaptability, and prioritizing the needs of our client as the times changed, our relationship with the school is stronger than ever and has us filled with familiar feelings for the potential of 2022: hope and excitement.