As discussed at last Thursday’s staff town hall meeting, the research provided by SimpsonScarborough in our positioning project was varied, deep, and fascinating. I wanted to share some of the graphics I used at the meeting as I understand some of the word clouds would have been hard to read in that format (and some of you were not there!) Just know that while these are top of mind associations that some audiences had, they are part of a much larger set of data points that the positioning experts are turning over to inform the next phase of the project. These word clouds below demonstrate the following: the larger a word, the more time it was chosen by survey recipients in that audience group.

Top of mind associations:

Prospective students and their parents associate Bryn Mawr with community, the liberal arts, and its small size.

Prospective Parents

Prospective Students

Internal audiences most frequently associate Bryn Mawr with community, rigorous academics, liberal arts, and its small size.

Faculty and Staff

Alumnae/i

Current Students

Other takeaways:

Part of our challenge in this project is to develop a suite of messaging tools that will attract right-fit prospective students, in addition to prospective faculty and staff, donors, and others. For the student audience, SimpsonScarborough felt like there is enough data to support the continued importance of owning our position as a women’s college and clearly setting expectations for prospective students on who will thrive in our culture. How that will happen is what we will solve for in the next phase of the project. Enhancing the way we discuss the benefits of a women’s college, and the culture and values of Bryn Mawr, will go a long way toward helping students decide if they will be a good fit here.

Also, the research did demonstrate that we meet and exceed some expectations of our prospective audiences, and that there is a perception gap between other expectations of prospective student audiences and the actual experience of our current students. An example of this gap would be to better define, to the best of our ability, what “Liberal Arts” means at Bryn Mawr, and how our approach really benefits our students. Anyone particularly interested in this topic should pick up a great book I read in 2022 called “The Evidence Liberal Arts Needs,” which illustrates the problem of how liberal arts as a concept is not commonly defined in the United States and how colleges might overcome that problem. Think of it this way: if you are applying to a law school, or any other professional program, you more or less know what is involved and the likely outcome. It’s a bit harder of a nut to crack for liberal arts institutions because “Liberal Arts” means different things to different people. So we’ll be keeping our eye on that too.

Some examples of ways prospective students and internal audiences align are the following:

When asked to choose descriptors of the personality of the Bryn Mawr community, most audiences chose: Intellectual, Hard-working, High-achieving, Scholarly, Passionate, Curious, Ambitious, Creative.

When asked to choose phrases that align with the values of our community, most audiences chose: Intelligence, analytical skills, and the truth; the freedom to explore new ideas, encouragement to take on difficult challenges, striving to continuously improve, commitment to integrity and honesty, and embracing the joy of learning out of personal interest.

Finally, I did share this too at our town hall but for those who couldn’t be there, you might find this interesting.

More than 70% of current students, alumnae/i, faculty, and staff who filled out the surveys selected these attributes as the top strengths of our college:

•Beautiful campus (92% students, 90% alum, 95% fac/staff!)
•Personal attention
•Access to resources at nearby colleges
•Location in a major city
•Multidisciplinary, liberal arts education

(The list does go on from there…)

Anyway, I hope this give you a flavor of the types of opinions and attitudes that our partner SimpsonScarborough is pouring over right now. It certainly has my brain turning as well as the brain trust within many other campus offices. There will be no update from me this Friday as we will receive the next set of deliverables next week as we begin phase two, which is the messaging phase of this project. Based on the data, how do we begin to formulate a way to talk about the college? Stay tuned.