Elizabethtown College’s very own Office of Marketing and Communications (OMC) has been awarded two Educational Digital Marketing Awards in the 10th annual competition, held recently in early November.
The Educational Digital Marketing Awards competition includes schools and universities across the country, ranging from K-12 up to and including graduate schools. The competition recognizes excellence in digital marketing education and features awards in over 35 categories. This year’s competition included over 1,000 entries from colleges, universities and secondary schools. Contestants ranged from state-funded and public schools to Ivy-League universities. Entries were judged by a panel of education marketers, advertising creative directors and other marketing professionals. The panel awarded a total of 386 awards, with 201 institutions receiving gold awards, 115 receiving silver and the remaining 70 receiving bronze.
Etown received a gold award in the category of “Blogs.” Our submission was the “Elizabethtown College Summer SCARP Series,” which features the Summer Creative Arts and Research Program (SCARP). The entry describes the program as, “A non-credit experiential learning program designed to enhance professional skills and provide a competitive advantage to participating students in the pursuit of career opportunities and graduate studies.” An interactive page was created to showcase the student work through photos and articles, highlighting the SCARP students and their faculty mentors.
The second award—another gold—Etown received was in the category of “Social Media Campaign.” Our entry was entitled “#EtownMajorSpaces Social Media Campaign.” This was a social media campaign created utilizing a hashtag used by the College’s Instagram page, where posts consisted of photos of students in unique locations. The captions included quotes from students about how that activity has enhanced their educational experience. This campaign, which was designed for the purpose of providing an inside look at niche, often unseen areas of our campus, was executed during the 2021-2022 academic year.
Links to each of the winning entries can be found in the article about the awards posted by OMC.
According to the Etown website, OMC “promotes and shares the Elizabethtown College story across a wide variety of channels. OMC also works to shape the Etown Brand, messaging, and visual identity.”
One of the many contributions the office makes to the campus and students is the development of a weekly campus e-newsletter that is distributed to the members of the College campus community. The newsletter comes out every Monday and includes information and announcements sponsored by a college department or a pre-approved campus-affiliated organization. Entities throughout the campus can submit a campus news announcement on the OMC website, where it can be approved and published in the newsletter the following week.
In addition to the newsletter, OMC offers a range of digital marketing services to campus clients, ranging from planning, strategy and creation, to design, content and execution.
The office also oversees Etown News, which publishes timely news and features stories about the college and from various campus organizations and happenings. Etown News is a stand-alone, online news publication developed as an interactive way to tell the Etown story. New content is continually published to keep the page current and relevant.
The OMC website offers a variety of resources, including an origin story of the brand, as well as a digital toolkit and brand style guide that can be leveraged by other campus organizations and students. The digital toolkit is an interactive guide to the entire Elizabethtown brand and includes downloadable resources, such as logos, templates, color and typography guidelines.
The brand style guide is a comprehensive document that outlines every aspect of the Etown brand. The purpose of the style guide is to help anyone that is creating assets in the Etown brand to ensure consistency and maximize the effect of all communications, leverage the success of the existing brand and communicate with a unified voice. The brand style guide is continually updated to reflect the current evolution of the Etown brand.
