The Higher Ed Marketing Report’s 28th Annual Educational Advertising Awards recently honoured Durham College’s Communications and Marketing department’s “What Matters to You?” campaign with the Gold award in the category of Newspaper Advertising/Series, Category 3: School with 5,000-9,999 students and a Merit award in the Social Media category for the same campaign.

These awards represent the largest educational awards competition in North America with nearly 3,000 entries received this year from more than 1,000 college, universities and secondary schools from across the United States, Canada and other foreign countries.

Launched on May 14, 2012, the campaign was a multi-platform recruitment tool designed and implemented to support programs seeing low enrolment numbers, focused on program clusters and a one-word component to identify these clusters that mattered to students. What Matters? was executed through a number of mediums: newspaper (local and national), bus ads, online, social media (Twitter and Facebook), posters, brochures, digital signage, radio, video (YouTube), movie theatre, microsite, Durham College website and email signatures.

From May to September, the campaign garnered 1,075 video views on YouTube; 16,671 page views; 398 visits through advertising to the microsite; and 430 unique submissions through the “What matters to you?” form, leading to an overall enrolment increase of 15.3 per cent – the highest enrolment growth in the province.

For more information about the Higher Ed Awards and winners, please visit their Awards page.