Two Very Different, but Very Successful Projects: Congratulations!
We’d like to congratulate the Fashion Institute of Technology and Northfield Mount Hermon on their success in the recent CASE Circle of Excellence Awards. As we posted yesterday, FIT took home the gold for best website. NMH took home the silver. These were the top awards in the category.
NMH also won a silver for best use of social media in student recruitment and marketing. [In the Best Use of Social Media category, the judges awarded two golds, two silvers.]
Both institutions were great clients and we’re proud to have contributed in some small way to their success.
Fashion Institute of Technology is an very urban, very industry-connected and career-focused school of fashion design and related fields in the heart of Manhattan. Northfield Mount Hermon is a boarding school in western Massachusetts that couples a rigorous education to a living experience that defies the New England boarding school stereotype. (Among other things, they have a farm.) (And for the love of God, please don’t make “Green Acres” references in front of Voltaire.) As different as FIT and NMH are, they came to mStoner with a similar challenge: to create a website that highlights culture and mission as a means of defining the institution’s brand and distinguishing it from its competitors.
For Fashion Institute of Technology, we achieved this website-as-brand-platform goal in a number of way, from subtle ideas like creating an “FIT & New York” page to highlight the important connections between the school in the city tactics as bold as “FIT is . . .,” a slideshow of striking duo-tone images that highlight the creativity and focus of FIT students and faculty. And a special “Fit for You” feature allows prospective students to see how their interests align with FIT programs and how those programs align with some of the most exciting careers in the fashion industry.
We began the Northfield Mount Hermon project just as the school was refining their mission statement, and we distilled the new mission into a branding theme—“Intelligence. Compassion. Purpose.”—that drove the development of a new identity system, website and enrollment publications. The new NMH site is anchored by a Flash feature that introduces students who embody the values of intelligence, compassion and purpose. The feature takes visitors to a branding page that develops the theme and links to more stories that support each of its pillars. A social media aggregator called “NMHbook” and a robust blog platform drive the branding theme home further—and earned the silver for social media.
Both the FIT and NMH sites have received great reviews from internal constituents and seen significant increases in page views and time-on-site.
But as happy as we are with the success FIT and NMH have had with their sites, we are equally pleased with the productive partnerships we were able to forge with both clients. Both projects were truly collaborative efforts, and we look forward to more great work with both institutions in the future.
Discuss this article
