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Some of our most interesting projects have come to us by way of projects affiliated at universities. Whether it's a university center that has to generate its own revenue, a workforce development program affiliated with a community college, or a newly-launched program, we have experience breaking you out beyond campus to engage your target audience.

Here are some advantages that university centers and institutes have, and how they'd benefit from outreach marketing:

The latest, most exciting research is often happening at centers affiliated with colleges and universities. The most important way your marketing can be an asset is to look and feel as innovative as your work. This requires branding that appeals to your audience, and marketing language that sparks interest.

We recently had a community college center program director share with us that the branding and marketing materials helped set them apart at a funder interest meeting and get the funding needed to make their program sustainable.

Oftentimes, university centers doing social justice work eventually outgrow their college homes and want to spin off as their own organization. We can help with that transition, launching the new organization with branding that gains instant credibility.

The world of research and academics can have its own language. While effective for talking to other researchers, this can be a barrier to attracting clients outside of academia. We’re fascinated by the work that higher education centers do and genuinely enjoy working with subject area experts. We help you position your center to be accessible to clients in your target sectors, with outreach that is clear and compelling.

Having an office on campus can make you feel like you’re in a bubble. Generating revenue means getting out into the market and in front of prospects. We have a tested toolbox of strategies that can help you identify your best audience, understand their psychology and what motivates them to hire you, and puts your best image in front of them.

Branding is about positioning. In what field is your center a thought leader? Why should clients hire you? We can help create and refine branding collateral like logo identity, folders, presentation, and conference materials to let your audience know you’re worth engaging with.

When is it the right time to spin off your university-affiliated center into a new organization?

Outreach Marketing for University & Community College Academic Centers

Did you know that it takes 17 years from the development of new knowledge until it’s translated into popular practice?

That’s 17 years of missed opportunities in untold numbers of applications in scores of sectors.

Morris ZS, Wooding S, Grant J J R Soc Med. 2011 Dec; 104(12):510-20.

We’re on a mission to connect the most powerful, innovative expert ideas with the audiences that can use them faster, more effectively, and with less resistance to behavior change. Collaboratively with our client partners, we want knowledge to start benefiting our world now, instead of in another 17 years.

We’re constantly fascinated by the conversations we have with subject matter experts who are doing deep research and development on interventions and ideas that solve problems. In areas like public health, reproductive justice, education, economic development, and so many more, the amount of knowledge is rarely the problem. The challenge is convincing audiences to do the behaviors that will create the impact you want to see. 

That’s where the toolbox provided by smart creative marketing comes in.

“Specialists in domains such as health, environment, or altruism aren’t always conscious of the fact that they differ substantially from their knowledges in topical knowledge, values, priorities, and level of involvement, so they lack the perspective of the ‘average’ person.”

Atkin, Charles K., Freimuth, Vicki (2013). Guidelines for Formative Evaluation Research in Campaign Design. In Atkin, Charles K., Rice, Ronald E. Public Communication Campaigns. (2013). United Kingdom: SAGE Publications.

In our experience, subject matter experts basically know so much that it’s difficult to conceive of an audience that doesn’t understand. That’s a challenge if any part of your work is dedicated to changing the behavior of an audience. People bring a variety of experiences to their current thought processes, and often do things based more on their identities than they do because of facts. That means that messages have to be filtered through an identity to be relevant to your audience. Do you have different audiences? You may need different messages, customized to each.

Though your audience is likely not involved in the research leading to a campaign, thinking like your audience is a hugely important part of the process. It helps to expose hidden assumptions or blind spots.

“Arrange the conditions of policy contingencies so that it is fun, easy, and popular for people to make the right decision.”

Smith, Bill (2010). Behavioral economics and social marketing: new allies in the war on absent behavior. Social Marketing Quarterly. 16(2), 137-141.

Assuming a ‘rational actor’ is often more theory than reality. Emotions like affinity and anger can drive behavior in powerful ways. Even business and political leaders are not immune to leading emotion. But it does underscore that facts alone can’t drive positive change. That’s how a public interest campaign on reducing littering becomes 

To drive the real change that you know is needed, you have to speak to your audience’s emotions. Fire them up! The ingredients for that aren’t found in a lab—they come from the world of creative marketing. And marketing on its own without inspirational clients is rudderless. Blending the two is the perfect mixture that I’ve spent my career pursuing.

“Through the haze of time, it is difficult to understand that the proponents of public communications campaigns—whatever their backgrounds—did not conceptualize a time when informational expertise would be contested or indeed that well-meaning expert elites would be challenged.”

Dervin, Brenda, Foreman-Wernet, Lois. Sense-making methodology as an approach to understanding and designing for campaign audiences. In Atkin, Charles K., Rice, Ronald E. Public Communication Campaigns. (2013). United Kingdom: SAGE Publications.

We know that we’re in a challenging time for facts. Audiences’ trust has been tested like never before. If you are an academic center designing a new program, or selling consulting services to the private sector, why should they trust you? Credentials alone don’t cut it—especially if you’re suddenly thrust into talking to the public. Your brand is the interplay and relationship that’s built between you and how your audience feels when they think about you. These are the building blocks towards creating change and landing your message with your audience. If you’ve never considered that your center or program needs a brand, we urge you to think again — you do.

Investing in your brand is the step you can take to bring your center, research, and resulting programs into alignment with the needs of your audience. We call our process Alignment + Action and we’ve got it down to an artful science.

“Consider how those in the commercial marketing sector look at marketing budgets—it’s all about the return on investment.”

Kotler, P., Lee, N. R. (2011). Social Marketing: Influencing Behaviors for Good. India: SAGE Publications.

Our belief is that you’re not doing your work so that knowledge sits on a shelf somewhere—you want it out in the world making positive change. We do, too. We think constantly about those 17 years that knowledge was created but not implemented in real world settings for the public good.

We’ve designed our team and our operations to effectively interpret the spirit of subject matter expert material into social marketing and knowledge translation campaigns. In our conversations with philanthropic funders, they know how important capacity building is for change work. We’re always dismayed when we learn that grantees who have been funded often have unspent marketing line items, simply because they didn’t know where to start! We want your work to connect with your audiences.

Contact us at info@creativedistillery.com and tell us what ideas you want to put into practice.

View our portfolio of creative outreach marketing campaign, advertising, & brand work.

Advertising, Branding, and Graphic Design Projects

Knowledge + Creative Outreach Is Power

We’ve spent the early period of the COVID-19 pandemic adjusting our own workflows and even more time adjusting the crisis communications on behalf of our clients as well. It is a trying time, with some businesses—especially those serving consumers—unfortunately having to temporarily shut down. Please support your local businesses! Here are some ways we’re communicating through our clients during this adjustment period:

If people aren’t seeing you in their daily routine out of their homes right now, it’s all the more reason to stay on your customers’ radar. From our own experience working from home and social distancing, I am looking for ways to make my home environment more comfortable and treat myself in small ways — I know that your customers are too. 

If you have a closet of branded t-shirts, try to find a responsible way to give them away to your fans. Consider ways to incentivize customers to post about your brand on their social accounts. People are creating a LOT more social content from home, and activating your die-hard fans will create opportunities for touchpoints to keep you out there.

Brands are ultimately about trust: in quality, in a vibe, and in a connection. Your brand is a valuable asset right now, and something to focus on taking care of during this time. People will remain loyal to brands that they trust and stay in touch with while we’re all spending more time at home.

Now is a great time to check your scheduled posts, promotions, and other things to see if they are relevant. In our office, we call this putting on our “consumer” hat even as we are “makers.” That means paying attention to our own emotions about how we’re reacting to communications we’re receiving from others. Is this comforting me right now? Is it solving a legitimate problem for me? Is it providing me value? Filter your outgoing communications through this lens and only share things that are authentic and additive.

This has been a popular concept shared on social media, and for good reason. It puts cash into businesses’ hands now, allows them to support their employees, and you get to spend it when we can all move about more freely. If you are not set up to sell gift cards online, figure it out now! We’ve seen clients add some incentives to gift card pricing, which sweetens the deal for everyone, and I think this is a smart strategy.

In keeping with thinking like a consumer rather than a maker, it’s important to not exploit your customers, period. What do I think is exploitative? Anything that involves trickery, fear, scarcity, or plays towards negative emotions. 

That said, speaking to your audience's emotions is a good thing. I believe that the best branding and marketing isn't trying to trick anybody into anything, and genuine empathy is a part of that. Do you miss seeing your regular customers at your storefront? They probably miss seeing you, too. Can your brand provide a place for that kind of interaction?  

I think there's too much attention being put on political leadership "reopening" the economy. The truth is there's no magic switch to turn the economy on or off. It's driven by market forces of supply and demand. Even if the economy "reopens," shoppers' behavior will be forever altered by this situation. 

That means building the infrastructure needed to support a long-term investment in e-commerce, delivery, curbside service, in as many ways as you can get. Think of a requirement that someone walk through your door as a major source of friction, and what you can do to elminate that friction however you can.

If you host seminars, are you implementing online options? Are you shoring up your e-commerce, social selling, home delivery, or other convenience platforms? I believe that the best response to a challenging situation is creative generative energy, and we want to see everyone survive this time together.

We've started every morning off with a group video call. I think it's important to maintain structure. We're also doing a group video happy hour on Friday afternoons.

Beyond that, we've relied on cloud tools for a long time so there's not a ton of disruption from a work standpoint. We're fortunate on that front. We've seen a lot of various angles through our clients. Most of what we've talked about here has been from the local business and consumer-facing perspective. 

Nonprofits and organizations with non-consumer funding streams are shifting operations more from a communications and capacity standpoint - moving fundraisers online, redirecting where funds are allocated, things like that. This entire situation is a good lesson on the value of adaptation and agility, values we've long prized in our business.

If you’re a business or organization that needs help with crisis communications or adjusting brand strategy in light of coronavirus, let’s roll up our sleeves from a safe social distance and get to work.

Local Business Ideas for Adapting to Coronavirus

Branding isn’t just about how things look; there’s also a strategic component to how you’re presenting yourself. We’ve seen centers that have launched in higher education environments and over time have spun off into independent entities. When is the right time to go out on your own? Here are some things to consider:

’Playing it safe’ is holding back innovation

There’s not much worse than arriving at a creative solution and not being able to fully implement it. Higher education centers can access the latest research, thinking, and experimentation to develop confident, innovative solutions to problems. If you’ve developed new research or theories of social change that feel unsafe to a university’s alumni and donor base, that shouldn’t stop you from putting them into practice.

From purchasing procedures to website hosting to how you charge for your services, higher education bureaucracy can slow down your ability to do what you need to do. If you have a clear goal and the elements for success, bureaucracy should not be the thing that’s holding you back. The freedom to operate independently is one reason that entrepreneurs are able to make headway so quickly, and your own work may progress faster without all the red tape.

When you’re selling a solution, in many ways, it ceases to be about you. You want to demonstrate value and understanding through the language that your target audience uses. If you are offering evaluation services to public health nonprofits, for example, they aren’t necessarily interested in the nuances of evaluation itself; they want to know how the data will speed improvements for the population they’re serving. Looking and feeling like your audience—down to the name of your organization, product, or service—are all good reasons to rethink your brand position.

Academia and research create a culture of questioning that repeatedly and ruthlessly tests and verifies ideas. That’s important. However, sometimes you figure out a solution that’s ready to be implemented, and it’s time to shift into practice. Orienting confidently around a single solution to a problem requires a rework of brand strategy. When you’re ready to make the shift from exploring questions to proposing answers, you may be ready to spin off.

One word: sustainability. An education affiliation provides a valuable foundation for audience, exposure, and operations support. Without a solid plan to account for some of these realities, it’s probably not the right time yet. Of course, we can help you build the brand equity that makes the spinoff jump less scary.

Is spinning off your higher education center something you’re exploring? 

Get in touch with us to see how we can help. Email info@creativedistillery.com or call 601.326.2388.

View marketing work we've created for university centers.

Accomplish your Knowledge Translation (KT) goals more effectively with Creative Distillery. 

Research Impact Marketing for Subject Matter Experts

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Learn more about working with Creative Distillery

We help solve many different brand and marketing challenges at Creative Distillery, but there are some threads that weave throughout all of our work. One concept in particular comes up in almost every client meeting. It’s fundamental enough to be meaningful to businesses at any stage of development, but also broad enough to work on continuously.

If I’m being honest, the way I hear this concept in my head is “the best you that you can be.” It conjures up images of self-help seminars and my face on a book (which, admittedly, I wouldn’t hate.) For a branding firm working in 2018, we need to be a little more sophisticated. However, this simple concept does center my thoughts for clients during meetings.

Why be the best you that you can be? In my experience, it’s the only way that you’ll be able to follow through with the actions it takes to bring your vision into reality. Chasing what success looks like for other organizations will only work for so long, and you likely won’t have the capacity or the drive to gain momentum.

Our first job is to tease out the core of what you as an organization truly want, even if you haven’t previously articulated it to yourself or your customers. If there are internal forces that are pulling you in different directions, nothing we do on the marketing side will ultimately work because it won’t read as authentic to your audience. No matter the industry, today’s marketing currency is authenticity. Audiences demand it, and there is no substitute.

One of the things I find time and again is that organizations have values and challenges similar to those of individual people. If you’re familiar with personal development, the following ways to start thinking about alignment for your organization may sound familiar:

Have a clear vision for the outcome you want.

Match your internal mission statement to your public-facing mission statement.

Understand what unique value you’re bringing to the marketplace.

Understand your audience, and what might be preventing them from undertaking the change you envision.

As a creative firm, we identify challenges and make things (from social media ads to websites) to solve those challenges. There is a quote often attributed to Einstein that goes something like this:

"If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions."

If we’ve spent our first 55 minutes achieving alignment, we have a shared understanding of our goal and where we can move the needle to help achieve it. Before we try a solution, we identify all the obstacles that are preventing your audience from taking action and see where we can exert leverage to get a better outcome.

We’ve done a lot of work for public health campaigns in Mississippi, so I’m always attuned to that world. I recently heard a public health official commenting on radio about the challenges to getting Mississippians to be more active: walking and running instead of driving, for example. A traditional approach to this problem might advertising all the health benefits of physical activity and hoping that it’ll change behavior.

Ultimately, this approach is not going to move the needle because it’s out of alignment with the real obstacles for the audience to be more active. In certain parts of the state, there are dangers that make walking unsafe, such as streets with no sidewalks or lighting, or aggressive stray dogs. Residents in these areas don’t need a marketing campaign to convince them that walking is healthy; they need a process to develop solutions to these structural problems. Considering your business challenge as a symptom allows us to see the system as a whole and get to work on the root causes.

Before we take action, we figure out a strategic sequence that will unlock value for your business at each stage. For example, if your website isn’t optimized, we need to improve it before we start driving traffic to it. Everything you see in our 

 is intertwined with alignment so we know we are taking the correct and most valuable action. Only when alignment and action are in harmony will we generate the impact we want.

Introducing Alignment + Action

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