“RISE UP!” College Access Initiative
The Challenge
On behalf of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning (IHL), we were tasked with developing a multi-year, multi-platform college access outreach initiative, emphasizing at-risk and underserved youth across the state. MWB was tapped to help design and implement the initiative from extensive web portal development to the marketing and promotion function.
The Solution
MWB developed the “Rise Up! Mississippi” brand, as an umbrella under which to house multiple college-access related marketing assets, including a web portal that featured interactive tools, including the first state-specific database-driven scholarship finder tool ever built.
College Discovered
To support the program, we developed a reality-TV style web series called “College Discovered,” which gave aspiring college students a glimpse of college life through the eyes of real Mississippi students. We cast a group of incoming college students, each with a unique backstory, going into different college situations. Some were transferring from community college. Others were traditional freshmen. Some came from challenging economic conditions.
College Discovered lasted for two seasons, and captured student experiences from all eight Mississippi public colleges and universities and the medical school at UMMC. Episodes were promoted with paid media schedule that was run as digital display and pre-roll.
The goal of virtually all marketing outreach was to drive usage of the website, and by this measure the program was extraordinarily successful. Registered users for the web portal topped 212,000 unique accounts by the campaign’s conclusion.