Work
New York School of Interior Design

Refining recruitment to attract the right students

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Arts and culture
Education

New York School of Interior Design has nationally-recognized programs, dedicated faculty, and excellent resources—but they needed a smart marketing strategy to recruit the best possible students.

Moving beyond advertising.

Though New York School of Interior Design’s promotional materials and collateral were sophisticated, they lacked the cohesive marketing plan and strategy to reach and engage the people most likely to benefit from their programs.

Own your focus—and lead the pack.

Big Duck’s work began with research to understand the mindsets and motivations of the School’s best students. Along the way, we uncovered New York School of Interior Design’s key strength: professional skills-building. With this insight in mind, we helped the School shift the way they were approaching prospective students, developing key audience mindsets to drive their recruitment communications: Career Finders and Career Changers.

Students find what they’re looking for

The Big Duck team crafted a messaging platform with a flexible structure to tell the School’s full story and speak to the needs and goals of their audiences. We also established guidelines for design elements that ensured staff had the tools to streamline their visual vocabulary and create marketing materials with a consistent look and feel. Finally, we developed a campaign that directly connected to the mindsets of their strongest student prospects, and partnered with a media company who placed the ads in targeted outlets.

NYSID audience profiles
Developing audience mindsets transformed how the School was marketing to prospective students.
NYSID brand guide
Design staff use the brand guide to ensure they’re maintaining consistency in typography, textures, color palette, and imagery.
NYSID's multi-channel recruitment campaign
We built the School’s new brand and strategic messaging into a multi-channel recruitment campaign.

Smart recruitment, strong results

Using the Career Finder and Career Changer mindsets as a strategic foundation, we developed a recruitment campaign—Turn your creativity into a career—to motivate the School’s best student prospects to apply. Years later, these mindsets continue to serve as a guiding strategy for all of the school’s marketing.

As a result

New York School of Interior Design has consistently outperformed industry categories in their media conversions since they put these mindsets, brand, and campaign into action. Their in-house communications team is more clearly aligned, focused, and able to attract and recruit top-tier students than ever before.

 

Big Duck dug into our past enrollment data and surfaced insights that transformed our recruitment strategies. Growing enrollment used to feel like an uphill climb, but now that our marketing machine is up and running, we’re exceeding our enrollment goals—and our students are just amazing.

— David Sprouls, President, New York School of Interior Design

Let’s tune up your recruitment machine. Contact Big Duck.