Curiosity Series

Print and Publication Design / Digital Design / Marketing Campaign

I helped create a three-tiered event structure which led to better management and cohesive marketing for more than 300 events hosted by the College of Creative Arts each year. This structure became known as the Curiosity Series, Discovery Series, and Emerging Artist Series.

The Curiosity Series is a sampling of 26 of our most widely appealing events that is marketed to the general public. The Discovery Series includes the remaining majority of the College’s recitals, lectures and group events marketed to arts enthusiasts and those who are aware of the College’s programming. The Emerging Artist Series includes our student and studio recitals and was created to enhance the student experience. The entire structure doubles as recruitment marketing to prospective students. The College continues to iterate on this project each year.

The Problem: All events (big and small) were marketed with the same tactics which was confusing to our stakeholders and audiences and challenging to manage for our small marketing and production staff. Ticket sales were low in some areas while different Schools were overspending on separate advertising initiatives. Client expectations were also high given the number of constraints.

The Task: An audience at the College of Creative Arts is important for the student experience, revenue, and cultivating a donor base.

Considering our ultimate goals of recruitment and development, how can we create a better event experience for these existing users? How can we cultivate a more engaged audience within the university and Morgantown community?

The Solution: Each separate event tier or Series was marketed to separate audiences using different tactics. WVU students are both a stakeholder and an audience. Prospective WVU students are always an audience to consider as well, not only for ticket sales but for our separate recruitment goals.

The Curiosity Series is marketed to the broadest audience using the largest budget for advertising and promotion. We used the WVU brand to create a sub-brand for the Series materials. This Series was marketed using a printed booklet sent to donors and alumni, billboards, paid advertising, promoted social media ads, a planned social media content strategy, landing pages on the College website, better utilization of the University calendar, digital signage around campus, email marketing to donors and patrons that signed up for our email list, and press releases written for each Curiosity event.

We marketed the Discovery Series in our normal roster of CCA and University communications, including our weekly HTML events email and university email newsletters. These communications go to audiences that are already aware of the CCA and know that we have a hefty slate of events. We also encouraged relationship-building between faculty and community members and local schools.

The Emerging Artist Series is marketed very lightly and to very specific groups, including those that are particularly interested in student produced work. We relied on a landing page on the College website to host an automatically updating room-reservation roster that listed all recitals.

Outcomes: Curiosity events had a “visible” rise in attendance. Most of our feedback initially was anecdotally from our production and dean’s office staff present at each event. Social media engagement for each event went up and traffic on our Series landing pages rose after the initial roll out and continued to experience spikes after planned communications were posted.

Internally, the Event Series structure has boosted morale of the stakeholders. Many events are now scheduled a year in advance, alleviating other pain points the College was experiencing and allowing our recruitment team to plan tours around events and for our development team to plan to bring out-of-town donors and alumni to events.

The student experience has been enhanced with masterclasses and special workshops planned around the guest Curiosity lecturers and performers.

My Role:
Art direction
Planning and organization
Sketching and ideation
Content design, content editing
Typography and typesetting
Illustration
Photography, Photo editing and manipulation
Print and publication design (Booklet, programs, program covers, print advertisements)
Digital design (Info-station screens, billboards, social media graphics)
Marketing strategy

My team:
Director of Production and Facilities (Organization, Planning, Concept)
Communications Specialist (Organization, Planning, Marketing, Social Media, Ideation, Content)
Dean (Approval, Organization)
School Directors and Art Museum Director (Approval, Organization)
Faculty (Content, Images)
WVU Photography
University Relations Design (Approval, Branding)