Northfield Mount Hermon

Northfield Mount Hermon: Bringing Character to Life

We all know the boarding school stereotype. Stiff collars. Stern masters. A culture of academic competitiveness and social conformity. Northfield Mount Hermon defies that stereotype.

NMH has no dress code. Students and teachers address each other by their first names. A work program makes upkeep of the school a shared student responsibility. And a true passion for arts, athletics, and service makes the educational experience more holistic. It’s a distinctly egalitarian, character-driven—and very American—take on the traditional boarding school model.

We used that insight as the basis for a message platform and tagline that drove the development of a new website and enrollment publications. We combined photography and illustration to capture the personality and diversity of NMH students, and we used first-person stories to highlight their ambition and achievement. We refined the NMH logo and edited the existing enrollment video into YouTube-sized segments.

To take advantage of the energy NMH was already pouring into Facebook and Flickr, we also created NMHbook, one of the first social media aggregators to appear on an education website. The result is a suite of communications that integrate print, web, and social media to tell stories of typical boarding school achievement in an atypical boarding school environment.