The brief was to take the annual graduating show online in a way that produced real reach and good word of mouth, and specifically to turn the students themselves into advocates for the institution.
I led the team on this account and the pitch that won it. I was close to the planning throughout, and the execution was done by people I had hired.
The usual approach is to ask students to share institutional content, which they do once, unenthusiastically, because it is the institution's message and not theirs. The insight we built on instead was about a feeling everyone recognises: the need to do one last thing that might make the difference, and the helplessness of the moment after the time runs out. Graduating students, with portfolios finished and futures undecided, are sitting exactly in that gap.
So rather than asking them to promote the show, we gave them something to do about their own outcome.
The mechanism
The graduating work went up as a public awards platform where the winners were decided by the public — votes, comments, likes and shares on individual student portfolios across a set of categories.
That single design choice does the work. A student sharing an institution's post is doing the institution a favour. A student sharing their own portfolio, in a contest they might win, is acting in their own interest, and they will reach further into their own network than any campaign would dare ask them to. The institution's reach becomes a by-product of the students' ambition, which is a far more reliable engine than goodwill.
The platform carried 218 projects across six categories from three campuses, and ran for a little over three weeks. Promotion was organic on the institution's own channels, plus direct mail to inform stakeholders.
What it returned
18,671 visitors arrived, all organically driven. The portfolios collected 11,007 votes, 974 comments and 5,544 likes. The exercise produced an email database of 12,662 unique addresses.
The engagement figures are the ones I would show a sceptic: an average visit of nine minutes and thirty-four seconds, 10.94 pages per visit, a bounce rate of 38.69 per cent and roughly 61 per cent new visitors. People were arriving from a friend's link, then looking at ten other students' work.
That last number is the proof the mechanism worked as designed. Had visitors looked at one portfolio and left, this would have been 218 students each delivering their own small audience — an address list and nothing more. Ten pages a visit means the audience a student brought was staying to look at the institution's output as a whole, which is the actual objective the brief asked for.
What I would do differently
I would have kept the platform open after the awards closed.
It ended with a winner, and a graduating show does that every year — but what it had built by then was a browsable, categorised, public archive of the institution's work with an audience already arriving through students' networks. Left standing and added to each year, that is an admissions asset that compounds: the most persuasive thing a prospective student can be shown is what people barely older than them made, and the alumni already have a reason to link to it. We built a campaign that expired on results day, when the same work would have built a permanent one.