C A S E S T U D Y
Rosalind Franklin University
Rosalind Franklin University (RFU) is a graduate-only institution, focused on medical and health sciences with many niche programs and some with purposely small enrollment. Lee Concha, Senior Vice President for University Enhancement and Chief of Staff, leads an incredibly engaged and enthusiastic marketing team that wants to move toward marketing maturity. The collaborative team is invested in improving their brand health and audience awareness.
“Our collaboration with Campus Sonar has yielded high level insights, as well as valuable actionable data.”
— Lee Concha, Senior Vice President for University Enhancement and Chief of Staff
How We're Helping RFU
The focus of our partnership with RFU is on brand health and reputation, along with supporting the marketing team as they develop productive collaboration with other institutional units. The team has three goals:
- Build a brand health measurement structure, including institutional and industry benchmarks.
- Identify, assess, and improve brand awareness, perception, and alignment across the university—including news/media, influential individuals, general word-of-mouth.
- Build team capacity to incorporate marketing and social media best practices, industry benchmarks, and trends.
The senior vice president and associate vice president use our insights to report brand outcomes to the president, cabinet, and other campus leaders and use these to support their decision-making. The social media manager uses the insights, dashboard data, and strategy sessions to become a more strategic digital marketer.
RFU's Progress
The RFU team actively uses our combination of human expertise, strategy, and insights to maximize progress on their partnership goals.
Focused, goal-aligned insights and strategy sessions.
They applied the strategy sessions and actionable recommendations and used them to think proactively and strategically about their work. The team started capturing the conversations on forums and bringing them into the RFU community with engagement on social, leveraging the value from forums to inform messaging, and collaborate with admissions colleagues around insights and trends. They’ve also been successful in using the dashboard to inform individual and team reporting to share with leadership. RFU applies strategy and insights to owned content planning and creation, empowering them to engage with campus contributors more thoughtfully and give them insights on strategy.
Custom benchmarks position the campus within peers and competitors.
The team uses the health and science benchmarks to recognize and assess its performance. The benchmarks helped them identify new strategies for engagement, and they’re now outperforming competitors in this area.
Optimized owned engagement approaches.
Collaborated across campus to get individual and institutional accounts involved in their approach to admissions engagement. One notable engagement happened post-workshop when the social media manager engaged with a post from an admitted student to the Physician Assistant program. She engaged from the flagship account and reached out to a second-year PA student and leadership to comment, too. It was an opportunity for RFU to show off their warm and engaging environment as a way to make a big impact with such a small enrollment size.
“The dashboard is something I’ve come to really value, and the insights and our strategy meetings have been fantastic and spot-on. Your team has been wonderful.”
— Lisa Baer, Associate Vice President for Marketing and Communications
Why It's Working
Team members are active participants in our partnership and consistently communicate and collaborate with us on evolving RFU’s innovative and strategic expertise.
- They now have a systematic way to share actionable data with the various social media contributors who manage department or college-specific accounts.
- They’re successfully identifying and including storytelling opportunities from earned conversation to highlight in owned content.
- Their owned content celebrates the capstones of the student experience, from orientation to commencement, and they do an incredible job promoting commencement through owned channels, finding ways to celebrate students individually on this monumental achievement.
- Content consistently showcases the RFU community through their many achievements and accolades, which encourages conversation from others online and demonstrates how their community successfully supports students through their education and across the graduation stage.
The team is evolving strategic approaches to current and prospective student engagement.
- RFU’s core account engages positively with their audiences through responses and shares, and their engagement showcases the supportive community a student can find at their campus. The team is dedicated to interacting directly with their audiences and building community with them online.
- They’ve developed a social media monitoring and engagement strategy for the prospective student community to increase enrollment.
- They’ve captured valuable data through social listening to gauge sentiment around their six colleges and provide insights into potential issues that are used for cabinet-level decision-making.
- They’ve identified earned authors and influencers who are contributing to brand awareness in their conversation.
- Their faculty are featured for their expertise in national publications and celebrated for their contributions. The team seeks ways to reshare these mentions in owned content to illustrate how their research elevates their brand and reputation.
- Academic leaders champion RFU students and the campus in public conversations online. Their social strategy showcases these mentions in RFU’s owned content to continue encouraging public support online. They’re identifying opportunities to collaborate with these leaders and feature any upcoming involvement with RFU.