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Communications and Public Affairs

Campaign Spotlight: Degrees of Health

As the university’s central communications office, we are constantly helping to share and amplify the university’s impact, top programs and major successes. These often coalesce in a unified topic and messaging that we promote across media channels.

The Opportunity: Degrees of Health campaign

The University of South Carolina is one of the Southeast’s best and most comprehensive universities for the health sciences. With more than 14,000 students enrolled in over 100 degree programs, the health sciences were a natural fit to be recognized as the university’s first arena of distinction by the Office of the Provost. The Degrees of Health campaign was our opportunity to share our leadership in the health sciences with a wider audience, particularly within our state and region. These areas of study are critical to the future health and success of our communities, state, nation and world.

 

The Deliverables

  • military man with small boy

    15-Second Videos

    A series of 15-second spots informed viewers about our impact in sports science, biomedical engineering, exercise science, social work, nursing and medicine.

  • students practicing physical therapy

    Stories

    Our degrees of health story series highlighted the many ways the university impacts public health, from pharmacy students working with the state's Poison Control Center to tackling global health issues in developing countries.

  • man in a doctors coat

    degreesofhealth.com

    This website is a landing spot for anyone interested in finding out more about our health sciences offerings and impact after viewing one of our ads or videos. Thousands of visitors have visited the site.

 

The Approach

To meet our goal of increasing awareness of our outstanding health sciences offerings, we delivered key messages to our audiences with complete saturation over a condensed period of time.

We focused on high-frequency, statewide television, digital and social media outlets to carry out our strategy. The campaign’s online story series and social media push lasted 10 weeks, and television spots ran for three of those weeks. Our team collaborated with Chernoff Newman on this project.

Research showed that our audiences were somewhat aware of the University of South Carolina’s high-quality health sciences programs. We believed that this initial impression meant our audiences would be ready to hear more in-depth stories about the programs themselves, so we developed a series of personal stories showing how our leading health sciences programs impact individual lives and South Carolina as a whole. 

 

The Results

  • 470,000 impressions on Twitter
  • 18,521 degreesofhealth.com sessions
  • Three weeks of broadcast airtime during highly visible March Madness 2017