UMass Dartmouth
UMass Dartmouth has long been known as an affordable commuter college for students in eastern coastal Massachusetts. As a challenger school in the UMass system of universities, it has historically provided a path of upward social mobility to non-elite and first-generation students. Forge worked with UMass Dartmouth to improve esprit de corps, enrollment numbers, and student quality. How? By repositioning UMass Dartmouth as the uniquely valuable research university that it is. Forge developed a brand platform that captures the bold originality of the school and the rich opportunities per student within this uniquely beautiful coastal university.
Brand Platform
UMass Dartmouth’s brand promise has always been to provide a great educational value in higher education. Providing a greater value these days, however, means providing greater opportunities. Through our research we discovered that is exactly what UMass Dartmouth does. As a national public research university with a modestly-sized student body, it provides more research opportunities per student than many other colleges – from its renowned marine biology programs, to business, art, and astrophysics. The brand platform developed – the why of the brand – incorporating mission, values, promise, and positioning is captured in the theme "Extraordinary is what we do." It is a bold statement of purpose and an invitation to achievers that helps UMass Dartmouth amplify the extraordinary things – large and small – that its people do, and that it does as a university to support them.
Visual Identity
UMass Dartmouth’s unique brutalist architecture is core to the identity of UMass Dartmouth. Forge worked with UMassD to incorporate line art of the architecture as a backdrop to messaging design. It creates an immediate, unique identity in a world of collegiate marketing sameness. With the client team, Forge has leaned into student and faculty stories, highlighting their profiles in ways that potential students and faculty can relate to, and strive to emulate.
Brand Campaign
Forge built an integrated enrollment campaign targeted to New England and beyond. A combination of programmatic story-telling digital banners, billboards, and on-campus signage, intertwined in the messaging of UMassD’s social team, has created impressive results for the school and its students.
