Hello positioning project blog readers! I had a lovely conversation with one of you at Commencement on Saturday (hi Betsy) and it reminded me that, well, it’s been a little busy lately and I owed you all an update on our great progress since my previous update last month. As the saying goes, the show must go on, and so has this project. We have been iterating on a whole series of elements, and I can give you a sample of items that have been decided and some on which we continue to work with SImpsonScarborough.

One note about timing, for those who are curious… we will be finalizing the guidelines for the new visual identity and strategic positioning work in August, which is because we need to pause and change gears next month to complete some very high priority printed materials for undergraduate admissions to launch with their fall recruitment season. There will be lots of training and individualized conversations to help you rollout all the new elements during the next academic year and beyond. We will not be flipping a light switch on this new work, but rolling out as needed elements for everyone’s use.

I do ask that as of Memorial Day, please contact my office if you plan to order anything in large quantities that has a current design so we can work with you.

Creative Concepts and Refreshed Identity Marks

Wordmark: So if you’ve heard me talk about this in person, what many people refer to as our college “logo” is really called a “wordmark” in design because it’s, well, made up of words. And our college wordmark, which was designed and adopted back around 2011, is well loved and evokes the stone architecture of the campus. So while SimpsonScarborough decided not to redesign the wordmark entirely for those reasons, it did need some minor updates. As you will see below, the word “college” on line two appears almost like an afterthought as compared to the “Bryn Mawr” first line. If you have ever tried to use this wordmark, especially in smaller sizes, that size difference renders the word “college” so faintly as to be nearly illegible. This was an important fix with the increasing need to communicate digitally on small screens (think cell phones) and in other formats.

So, after some iteration, we have landed on a revised wordmark. On the left here is the existing wordmark, and on the right is the selected wordmark. A small change, but one that will make its use a lot more flexible. For now, continue to use the existing wordmark, and when we are ready to start rolling out the new one, my office will definitely let you know.

Graphic Elements

So we are still working on finalizing a lot of the visual creative. We are hard at work revising the entire official color palette, so we will all have a fresh slate of colors to choose from when designing things. The key part here is that we are expanding it to include a large variety of colors from which you can choose. I think you’re going to really love it. More on that once it’s all final.

Another one of the aspects of this new visual identity that I really wanted to incorporate was an expanded set of graphic elements to enhance all the items our office designs on behalf of the college. Colors are lovely, but alone they only get you so far. How can we give specific posters, or postcards, or even the entire website a bit of its own personality while staying within an overall positioning identity so everything still feels… Bryn Mawr-ish?

I’m excited to show you four concepts from SimpsonScarborough that we will be carrying forward in this vein… lots more usage guidelines to come.

These new frame shapes we will use to insert photos, graphics, textures, or other elements, in between your usual squares and rectangles… inspired by our campus architecture…

Keeping in mind our general motif of light, these graphics will represent our lantern light from all directions…

A third element that will also be very useful also ties into our campus architecture… new patterns… someday we’ll do a small contest on what inspired some of these patterns, but we’re happy for new nominations if you spy something on campus that could work in the future!

And a fourth element are what we call Publisher’s Marks, which represent iconic elements of our campus. A few notes about this set: 1) The traditional BMC monogram many of you have seen before will be retired with the release of our new guidelines this summer. Our new monogram below will not entirely replace the old one, as this will be used differently (and sparingly.) 2) Did you know the college has an official flower? It’s the daisy. 3) The Lantern that we all know and love in an icon form 4) Taylor Hall’s bell tower. We’ll also happily take nominations of other iconic parts of our campus for future marks.

So how will these all work together? Here’s a few mock-up examples (and a small color palette preview!)

Excited yet??

What else

Other elements we have also been working on include some new directions for photography, typography (fonts), and a new tagline concept. I am also working with SimpsonScarborough on some new standard language that describes the college, as well as some content planning to bring some of the positioning concepts to life.

It’s not dull here in positioning land.

But alas, it’s time for another meeting, so I’ll have to update you more after the holiday weekend. Thanks as always for your continued interest in the project.

Our work continues on the creative identity front. In addition to the on-campus discussions held earlier in April with 60 participants, SimpsonScarborough completed their national external “pulse” work with 300 respondents to garner additional feedback from likely applicants and their families. So as described last update, we were testing two different creative directions that included visual direction ideas (fonts, colors, textures, and more) and also some verbal narrative to match.

Research questions included the following:

1. Which concept maximixes appeal, enhances recall, inspires action, and is most liked by audiences?
2. Which concept best expresses the positioning pillars (culture and values)?
3. Which concept appeals most to those considering a women’s college?
4. Which concept has the most distinct and ownable visuals? Most distinct and ownable voice?

The biggest finding from the external stakeholders was that both concepts were appealing to those already considering a women’s college. (Whew!) However, their concept called “First Edition” leads across all key metrics for external audiences—both those interested in a women’s college and those not— and more people said there was nothing they disliked. Both the messaging and design of First Edition have elements of great appeal, including its eye-catching colors, bright photography, and overall joyful and optimistic tone.

For internal audiences (students, faculty, staff, alumnae/i,) both concepts felt authentic. But they were drawn to the graphic elements and color in the visual expression of First Edition and the ownable language and energy of the verbal expression of the second concept, “Seeking Illumination,” in particular.

So as a result, we will be moving forward with the best of “First Edition” and adding in some of the verbal language and visual concepts from the second concept. And then further refine it all.

I get this is all abstract unless you participated in the on-campus conversations and have seen the conceptual work… but I will definitely share more details as we bring it all together.

As you know, this week we welcomed four representatives from SimpsonScarborough to present round two of our creative directions and identity marks. Their days were busy, speaking with senior staff members, representatives from various offices across campus, alumnae/i, undergraduate students, and graduate students. The discussions and feedback were fruitful as SimpsonScarborough prepares to test the two creative directions soon with a national audience of likely applicants and applicant families to see how they might resonate. A hearty thank you to all those who participated. We’ll be getting the results of all this testing and chatting later in April, and I will report back then.

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.

I hope you can join us next week!

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

That’s it for this week!

What a week here at Positioning Project Central!

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.

2/26 Faculty/ Staff presentation: 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm Guild Rm. 203 or Zoom

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.