Since the November campus visit of SimpsonScarborough, the team has been parsing the gathered insights and developing an in-depth online survey that will be emailed out to priority audiences later this month. The survey will be collecting attitudes and opinions about many related areas, including attributes about Bryn Mawr College, perceptions and benefits of women’s colleges more generally, and more about the educational goals and academic qualities for which our prospective students are searching. There are many more categories of inquiry, but I don’t want to steal our thunder! The data received from this survey will be the foundation of all the work that will follow. We have our hunches, but it’s important to make data-informed decisions in a project as important as this one. We don’t want to get further along to have the deliverables feel like they are describing either another college entirely or only specific aspects of our own.

Please respond if there’s anything I can answer about the project that feels confusing to you or that you are curious about.

Type to you next week,
Samara

This week we launched full speed into community engagement with a three-day campus visit by SimpsonScarborough, our Institutional Positioning Project partners. Four experts flew in to host 16 in-person and virtual meetings – and took a student-led campus tour. A huge THANK YOU to everyone who elected to take part in these initial individual and group sessions, including staff, faculty, students, alumnae/i, trustees, high school college counselors, college leadership, and others. Some additional groups will be met with virtually after the Thanksgiving holiday.

This week was all about initial impressions — the team solicited ideas and feedback around the what, how, and why for Bryn Mawr as an institution and learned more about how the individuals and groups within our community think and feel about the college. I purposely did not participate in these discussions (except one) so I can’t report out more detail except to say that in a debrief meeting this morning, the SimpsonScarborough team was buzzing with excellent early ideas about how we can stand out from our peers. I can’t wait to see what they come up with after the completion of this research phase.

There will be no update next week as the team will be heads down synthesizing their observations and thinking about the next big initiative, which will be an online survey sent next month to a much larger part of our community. The meetings this week were extremely helpful in testing out some concepts that can be further explored via the survey instrument. Happy Thanksgiving to all and I’ll type to you in December.

A big thank you to everyone who signed up to receive updates from the communications office about our new Institutional Positioning Project. Hello! This is Samara Sit, and I expect to be the primary voice of these weekly updates. We’ll make it clear if there is a guest blogger. My hope is to post updates each Friday when the project is active to keep you up to date on our progress and give you, our loyal followers, first opportunity when possible to engage with the project along the way. Please comment on each blog post or email me if you have any feedback about topics you would like me to address.

So, some of you have heard me speak about this project in a variety of meetings I’ve had around campus, and some of you don’t know anything about the project. I’ll start with what happened this week and then add in some high-level explanation about the project for those who want that.

This week, I sent out the launch communication to faculty and staff, and we launched phase one of the project, which is the “Discovery” phase (otherwise known as the research phase.) Behind the scenes, I launched a series of discussions with SimpsonScarborough (our partner firm) to start planning their campus visit November 15-17. There are lots of logistics to work out! While here, they will have individual meetings and focus groups with various stakeholders to better understand our community and their impressions of our reputation.

Would you like to participate? Good news – if you are a staff or faculty member, you can! Email us at communications@brynmawr.edu if you would like to join SimpsonScarborough for a 45-60 minute faculty/staff focus group: Noon-1pm, Campus Center 200 (lunch will be provided). We’ll get the word out more broadly early next week. Spots are limited. We’ll soon have an online survey where you can give lots of feedback too. We’ll have a student session that we’ll advertise to them directly also.

Other activities this week included discussions about the timing and content of those online surveys as well as some higher level chats about what sort of messaging we need to create for the college. After over a year of planning, I was excited to finally get going on the project!

I’ll drop some of the content of my recent presentations here in case it’s helpful…

So what is the project?

Institutional positioning is a strategic exercise we use to establish the reputation for an organization or product in a consumer’s mind. It helps define what we want people to think of when they think of Bryn Mawr College.

What do we do with institutional positioning?

It will give us guardrails and guidelines for discussing the college and depicting it visually. It will guide everything created to speak to external audiences (and also for internal communications too!)

How long will the project last?

Well, this particular academic year is only the beginning. The current part of the project has three phases: Discovery, Strategic Messaging, and Creative Development. It will end in May 2024. Then during the next fiscal/academic year starting next summer, we will use the output of those phases to bring the new positioning to life. What does that mean? That means we will adapt a whole new set of tools to every way we communicate and create new ways of communicating that will help elevate our reputation and spread the word to new people about the college. That work will continue indefinitely.

What will we get?

We’ll get lots of things! We’ll get both a new strategic positioning framework and a new visual identity. What are those? Well, the strategic framework will give us a way to talk about the college (so think about unique characteristics, values, personality, core themes, and more), and the visual identity gives us a way to depict it visually (so think colors, fonts, other design elements). The college has had some of this work done in the past, but never done all at the same time, so both elements inform each other and help unify the way all our offices talk about Bryn Mawr.

I think that’s it for now – but drop me a line if you have any questions.

We are getting ready to announce our next major project to the Bryn Mawr College community in November- stay tuned!