IWU Internship Fair 2012 Publicity

My on-campus job at Illinois Wesleyan for the past two years has been acting as Publicity Coordinator for the Hart Career Center. I am in charge of marketing, designing, and distributing all of the publicity for events that the Career Center holds for students. This position has allowed for me to create design work outside of the classroom and gain marketing experience. With all of the experience I have gained, it’s almost like having an on-campus internship! I have to juggle many different projects with different timelines and specifications all at once. So organization has been key to my success! My biggest task for this semester was to brand and publicize the on-campus Internship Fair that occurred this October. I began planning last April as a Junior when things were slow at the Career Center and I had time to plan ahead for this school year.

My first task was to come up with a theme. At first, I wasn’t sure what direction to take. Previous themes for the Internship Fair had included: “Building on Success” and “Your Next Chapter Awaits.” I wanted to make sure that my theme resonated with students but still related back to what the Internship Fair is about. The first thing I did was go on Google and search internship fair posters (I know, cheesy right? But you have to start somewhere…) Nothing really inspired me, so instead I tried brainstorming themes and looking up words related to having an internship. Some ideas I came up with were:

Jump Into Your Career

Dare to Dream

Key to Success

Unlock Your Future

All of them were very cliché, the exact opposite of what I wanted the Internship Fair’s theme to be. I wanted something unique and original. That’s when it hit me: Suit Up! Over the past year I had become obsessed with the TV show How I Met Your Motherand I knew it was a very popular show among college students (since it was my college friends who got me hooked on the show in the first place). Neil Patrick Harris’ character Barney Stinson always uses the phrase “Suit up!” so it would be recognizable to anyone who is even slightly familiar with the show. In addition, it’s an active phrase that would remind students to look sharp, because in the professional world appearances do matter.

So that was it. I had a theme: Suit up! Next, I had to figure out a logo design. I went through many different ideas…

  

And finally ended up with one that was the most clear and best reflected the event:

Next came designing the teasers for the event with facts about how beneficial having internship experience is:

Next came designing the poster:

Other forms of publicity were designed for the event such as postcards that were sent to all students, tabletents that were distributed around campus, and ads in the school newspaper in the two weeks leading up to the event.

In addition, a wall display was constructed for a high traffic area of campus which was up a week before the event:

All of the above publicity was typical for the Internship Fair and was exactly what had been done in years past. This year, however, with the theme having such a strong link to How I Met Your Mother, the Career Center purchased a life-size cardboard cutout of Barney Stinson.

I used him to my full advantage and took pictures of him around campus. These pictures were then uploaded to the Career Center’s Facebook page in the days leading up to the event, telling students that they would be able to see Barney at the Internship Fair. It was by far the most amount of activity the Career Center’s Facebook page has ever received. The first photo received 19 likes, 1 comment, and was shared 4 times. Those numbers may be small, but for such a small campus, even five likes on one post is a lot.

The publicity for the event exceeded everyone’s expectations and turnout for Suit Up! IWU Internship Fair 2012 was unprecedented. For a university with approximately 2100 students, the 239 students that came to the event was a remarkably high number. For some perspective, previous years numbers for the Internship Fair had been around 150 students.

What made this marketing campaign so successful was that it was completely integrated in design and the same message was being sent to students through a variety of media. It was a theme that students could relate to and enjoy, but still had a connection with the event itself. In fact, turnout was so high, that another university plans on using this theme for their Internship Fair as well. Basically, the event was legendary!

Here’s a link to an article about the success of the 2012 IWU Internship Fair: http://www.iwu.edu/news/2012/10-internship-fair.html

Thanks must also be given to Erica Messerschmidt, the other publicity coordinator at the Hart Career Center, for moral support and helping carry Barney while we took photos of him around campus.