Durham College wins gold at Paragon Awards

On March 21, the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations’ Paragon Awards recognized Durham College’s Communications and Marketing department with a Gold Award in the Successful Recruitment or Marketing Program category for the ‘After I graduate, I’m going to?’ campaign.

Launched in May 2013, the integrated marketing campaign was developed to support recruitment for programs seeing low enrolment numbers for September 2013. Focused on what a student might say if asked what they want to do after graduation in relation to their program choice, the goal was to connect prospective students with current students to help them see where their future might take them.

The department conducted a photo shoot with students and the images were used across all mediums to create a series of advertisements focused on different areas of interest including business, design, engineering, sustainability, graduate studies and more with written content based on the answer to the question “What do you want to do when you graduate?”

Dynamic and implemented on a budget of less than $40,000, the campaign was executed through a number of advertising platforms including newspaper and bus ads, online, social media (Twitter and Facebook), posters, brochures, digital signage, radio, video (YouTube), movie theatre (Cineplex Odeon), a microsite, the Durham College website and email signatures.

From May to September the microsite received close to 70,000 page views and the campaign garnered 809 video views on YouTube.

The only national competition of its kind that honours excellence exclusively among marketing and public relations professionals at two-year colleges, the Paragon Awards recognize outstanding achievement in communications at community and technical colleges.

This is the college’s second award for the same campaign; in January it received a Gold Award from the Educational Digital Marketing Awards, presented by the Higher Education Marketing Report,  for the ‘After I graduate, I’m going to? microsite.

For more information, please visit the Paragon Awards page.