Just a brief invitation this week for faculty/ staff to sign up for next Wednesday’s on-campus presentation from SimpsonScarborough to learn about the most recent versions of our creative concepts. (Last week’s post better explains the details.) Thanks to those who have signed up already!
Faculty/Staff Creative Positioning presentation Wednesday, April 3 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. RSVP to info@brynmawr.edu Light refreshments will be offered
Otherwise, next week SimpsonScarborough will be meeting with several other campus constituencies to discuss the creative concepts, and then the concepts will be tested with a national audience of likely prospective students and families. We’ll get lots of feedback before selecting a single creative direction and ensure it resonates the way we want it to.
Hello again, blog readers! It’s been a couple of weeks since my last update and a lot has happened since then. One, I was on vacation last week, and two, we launched the third phase of the positioning project.
On Monday, March 18th, we received the first round of work for our creative concepts and related materials. This work includes quite a lot of deliverables and SimpsonScarborough has been clearly very busy.
Items we are reviewing include the following…
We are reviewing potential changes to make our college wordmark/logo more legible at any size, especially smaller sizes, and in all use cases.
We are developing a common structure for the design of wordmark/logos for academic units as well as some college units.
We are exploring a refresh the design of our college seal for legibility/scalability while retaining many of the unique historical elements (this will take Board of Trustees approval).
And we are reviewing two early concepts for creative directions we can follow for the look and feel of our materials moving forward. This is perhaps the part many people find the most fun, where we explore a unifying theme behind items such as textures, fonts, colors, photography style, and more.
Our assessment of these items includes not only our personal opinions, but also more importantly, what the concepts and designs are communicating and what will resonate with our key audiences on and off campus.
As previously mentioned, SimpsonScarborough is returning to campus to present about the above items on April 3 and 4 and take questions. Faculty and staff are invited to participate and I am offering first chance at seats to you, dear blog readers. We will be only hosting an in-person meeting, though, in the Old Library London Room. Please join us!
Faculty/Staff Creative Positioning presentation Wednesday, April 3 2:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m. RSVP to info@brynmawr.edu Light refreshments will be offered
Monday, we kicked off this week with a focused campus visit from two of our SimpsonScarborough partner team members who led us through several feedback sessions to help finalize our positioning platform. As always, special thanks to those returning to deliver next round feedback and a special virtual thumbs-up to the gaggle of blog readers who contributed in the afternoon. I hope the chance to think bigger thoughts about the kinds of emotions we wish to evoke with our positioning was enlightening.. and a little bit fun. Our visitors also staged some “roving focus groups” with students to get their take as well.
Tuesday, I met with representatives of our Board of Trustees External Relations committee, who were also helpful in their next round feedback.
I think the hardest part of this phase for feedback participants was wrapping one’s brain around the idea that what we were producing are concepts that our later work will be based upon. These concepts are not a unique selling proposition, nor are they words that will show up on a brochure or webpage, but will mostly exist to help my team and SimpsonScarborough develop the actual campus guidelines we will be using. But until you know what idea of Bryn Mawr College you want to evoke, it’s hard to write language around it. Or, create official colors and fonts, etc.
So in this vein, the foundational promise that we developed is the emotional connection that should be felt, seen, or heard in every experience where people touch our College. It’s a feeling we want to leave people with. And our final Promise now reads like this:
Delight in the pursuit of truth: At Bryn Mawr College, the pursuit of truth — both personal and intellectual — is not a destination but a continuous journey. On this journey we welcome all lantern bearers regardless of where or how they start their pursuit. Together, as Mawrters, we light the way, making bright the dark and illuminating the path ahead.
And underneath that Promise are four Pillars that support that idea and will be fleshed out via messaging and visuals: Wisdom, Connected, Confidence, and Leadership. We are on the verge of finalizing the descriptions of each Pillar that will give us even more direction.
Well, I want to go to college there, don’t you?
Looking ahead, SimpsonScarborough will be heads down preparing for the start of the third phase of this project, the Creative Concepts Phase. Personally, I think all the phases are fun, but many people will consider this the most fun part of the project. Here is where we flesh out things like our new College color palette, official fonts, photography style, messaging tone, and more. We will also begin to examine our official wordmark/logo and decide whether any tweaks or changes might be needed. They will be presenting some of their initial creative ideas on 3/18 to my team and some other office representatives, so I will not have any blog updates until after that point. They will also return to campus in early April for round two of the Creative phase, when you will again be invited to participate in feedback sessions.
Special shoutout to blog reader Sarah Robertson who emailed in response to last week’s post about our Latin motto and its various interpretations. We appreciate all contributions!
A quick reminder that two members of our SimpsonScarborough team are visiting campus Monday, 2/26, to present the final round of Positioning Platform work. If you would like to attend, we’ve changed the format slightly to be more of a workshop than a presentation, and we could accept a small list of new RSVPs.
Monday, February 26th Faculty/staff session 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Choose one: Guild Room 203 or Zoom RSVP your choice to info@brynmawr.edu
This week, I led several sessions to review the second round of Platform work with faculty, staff, trustees, senior staff, and representatives from multiple offices. What I like about iterative work like this is finding where different people’s feedback align, so our direction to SimpsonScarbough is clear and actionable. We had many thoughtful discussions about what students look for in their Bryn Mawr College experience, and how that experience can be described in a few words. We’ll see the final round of this work Monday.
However, I wanted to tell you about something else I found out about last week. Many of you know that the College seal has a motto in Latin: veritatem dilexi. The question I have for you is this: what is the translation of that motto in English? My understanding is that Latin can have variance in a translation, and that seems to be true in this case.
There is a webpage on the College website, written long before my arrival, that speaks to the origin of our College seal and it’s an interesting read for you Bryn Mawr history nerds out there. Oh, just me? Okay. Well, basically it says the minutes of the Board of Trustees meeting in 1903 where the seal was proposed suggested the motto translation would be “I have chosen truth.” But is that still our translation?
More modern reactions seem to indicate that somewhere along the way, the translation for our Motto became “I delight in the truth” or even “I love the truth.”
I think all those translations are interesting and relevant. Does anyone know anything about this evolution though? Ping me directly or leave a comment on the blog.
This week, SimpsonScarborough was heads down working on revisions to the Positioning Platform from feedback we delivered last week. This is conceptual language to help evoke the emotional connection people have to Bryn Mawr. It will help support the outward-facing language and creative work yet to come.
On Monday, February 26th, representatives from SimpsonScarborough will be back to campus to present the final form of this language. As promised, I am extending the first invitation you, our loyal project blog club, to join our faculty/staff session that afternoon to receive a first-hand look at the Positioning Platform work and meet some of our partners on this project. Any Trustees following along hopefully will be part of our planned External Relations gatherings on this topic.
Please email us at info@brynmawr.edu to RSVP by 2/23 and let us know if you plan to join in person or remotely. In-person seating is limited. If you cannot join, there will be other opportunities for feedback during later phases as well.
The second half of this phase is the Integrated Experience Strategy, which will help govern ways we can unify how our community experiences Bryn Mawr. More on that in a few weeks.
Meanwhile, we begin phase three next month!
In case you are curious, on-campus training for all the deliverables is now scheduled to begin in July. So we have a lot of work to do between now and then to finalize everything but there is beautiful light at the end of this multi-lane road.
I am not sure if you heard the cheering coming from the Office of College Communications this past Monday, but if you did hear it, that was the sound of the Institutional Positioning project moving from phase one to phase two! We have left the in-depth research and discovery phase behind and now we are moving into applying that research into all the various deliverables that will make up the new positioning for Bryn Mawr College.
(I see we have a few new subscribers as well. If you have missed any prior updates, you can always go to the main blog page to read in reverse chronological order about anything you may have missed.)
On Monday, our friends at SimpsonScarborough, our positioning partner, delivered round one of the Positioning Platform. This work was meant to begin the process of generating a framework for how our priority audiences will “experience” the college. Their presentation contained a few slides that I will share with you here.
In this project, we will have the best success if our positioning appeals to both the “functional” features of Bryn Mawr, and also presents the emotional connections people have, or could have, with the college. Because attending college isn’t purely a functional transaction, right? It’s not like choosing a toothpaste! “I have X need, and so Y product will solve that problem for me.” Students and employees who choose Bryn Mawr are also entering a long-term relationship with the college. Students will go on to join our strong alumnae/i community, and that is lifelong. You’re never not (oof, double negative) going to be an alum of your alma mater. Similarly, while an employee may or may not be accepting a position as a faculty or staff member for life, it will likely always reside on their resume. So we want the draw, and the sustaining connection, to be fulfilling and authentic on many different levels.
The Positioning Platform will address top research takeaways—a need to highlight our culture and values and illuminate the depth of our academic quality. We are in the process of reviewing two deliverables this week: a “Positioning Promise,” which helps to explain the emotional connection that should be seen, felt, and heard in every college experience; and also the “Positioning Pillars” that help to support the Promise by furthering the emotional connections. Thanks to the representatives from offices across campus who have engaged in this early form of the work.
Next Friday, we will receive round two of this language plus some new deliverables that will include more externally facing language used to describe Bryn Mawr. And then we’ll receive a third round to iterate even further on 2/26, when SimpsonScarborough will be on campus to present the final drafts. More on that opportunity soon!
It is also clear to me how much energy is going on behind the scenes at SimpsonScarborough. There’s a fair amount of observations and data to weigh to not only decide what to describe, but also how to describe it. (Case in point: try writing one sentence that describes Bryn Mawr College in a way that would appeal to the youngest prospective student to our oldest alumnae. Not an easy task!) But this is why you hire experts. Check out some of their virtual collaborations via Miro that they shared:
I’ll say in closing that if you were hoping to discover more specifics about the deliverables in this phase, do stay tuned. As there are larger opportunities to review deliverables, I will absolutely share those with you here. But as you can imagine, sharing all the iterations of this work in this space with no context is likely not as helpful as we might like it to be. For those on campus, we will have some feedback opportunities soon, and for any Trustees following along, our External Relations committee will be diving in with me at least once if not twice later this month and more thereafter. It’s important we get this Platform right as the rest of the project will rest on it. You’ll see how as we move forward.
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.
Greetings, Communications blog subscribers (all 77 of you), and happy new year!
It’s been a few weeks since my last update, so let me first say that I hope everyone had a lovely and restorative winter break. I had a great vacation and feel rested and ready for whatever spring semester brings.
When last I sent an update in early December, we were still putting the finishing touches on the SimpsonScarborough audiences survey that by now everyone has seen and filled out… At least, I hope you filled it out… Don’t worry; it was totally anonymous, so I’ll never know if you did or not. Thank you to the hundreds who did take the time. Our response rate for each audience meets the criteria we were hoping for, so we can keep moving forward. Different variations of the survey were sent to the following audiences: faculty, staff, current students, alumnae/i, prospective students, and prospective student parents/guardians. Our alumnae/I win for the fastest goal response total reached! We also recently hosted a great focus group of current parents.
SimpsonScarborough is now culling through the responses and analyzing all the data, and that will be ongoing through the week of January 22nd. This means I will not be sending an update next week. However, after they are finished with the analysis, we’ll get a readback of their top observations and suggestions based on the data, so the January 26th update might be an interesting one!
After that, we begin the project’s second phase with the iteration of the positioning and values messaging/language we will adopt to describe the College to our priority audiences. It’s an important part to get right, as other creative work will be based on that foundational language. We’ll begin offering feedback for that work in early February and continue co-creating with SimpsonScarborough until the end of February. And yes, there will be opportunities for some of you to give feedback on the language later next month during the next campus visit of our SimpsonScarborough project leads.
SimpsonScarborough is also hard at work on several other aspects of the project behind the scenes, but I thought it would be easier to follow the project elements in this format as we interact with them rather than when they are created. There’s lots more to come this spring! Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for your continued interest in our positioning project.
We have had another truly fascinating week of survey preparation with SimpsonScarborough and we have completed a final survey design. This means that we are a go for our survey launch next week. Other activity this week included a terrific discussion between SimpsonScarborough and our archivist, Allison Mills, about all things Bryn Mawr history.
I have learned a lot about survey design in the past few weeks. It’s definitely an art and a science! I can tell that the teams at SimpsonScarborough have been hard at work developing the best ways to approach surveying our key audiences to better understand the emotion behind how everyone affiliates with Bryn Mawr College. It’s not enough detail to just find out how people feel about the college (although we are asking about that)… we also want to know why individuals feel the way that they do. So, much of the survey will dive into what attributes and characteristics people use to describe both themselves and the institution. And we’ll be diving deeply into what makes our college unique and special.
Watch your inboxes for the survey invitation email next week, and please Fill It Out as soon as you have time around holiday obligations. It is designed to take 10-15 minutes. We need a healthy percentage of people to participate to ensure the best data, so thank you in advance for taking the time. Special thanks to Director of Assessment, Learning Spaces, and Special Projects Dave Consiglio for all his thoughtful guidance on the survey instrument.
This will be the final update of December since after the survey launches, the SimpsonScarborough team will go heads down on analyzing the incoming data. So please enjoy your holiday break/vacations and I’ll type to you in 2024.
