The drive behind the Driven to Discover student campaign

Guest blogger: Drew Swain, U Relations marketing coordinator, manages the University's overall brand and assists in the development of the yearly Driven to Discover campaigns. Swain says the focus of this phase of the campaign is on students, and gives some insight at how that came about, and what's coming next.

Here's Drew:

You've seen professors explain mind control. Professors growing hearts. Professors teaching classes from the Arctic. Professors even lecturing on what makes Superman faster than bullets. So what about the students? Where do they fit into the University's mission to discover?

That's the focus of the new iteration Driven to Discover, the Driven to Discover Student Campaign, which was just released. You might have already seen some of the TV spots.

The inception of the campaign was really a confluence of factors. We wanted to take an uncharted path to further the Driven to Discover brand and one of President Kaler's incoming initiatives centered on students. Meanwhile, the U of M Foundation was starting its new scholarship drive. It was a natural fit to make students the campaign's "heroes."

As higher education communications pros, when you look at Discover Student, you should notice its unique approach. While student related campaigns of other schools are direct recruiting tools, we're telling our audiences how the student experience at the U is unbeatable. There's nowhere else in the state and most of the region where students can be paired up with elite faculty like Andy Van de Ven, one of the world's top minds in managing innovation. Nowhere they have such an array of opportunities to discover their passion and profession through partnerships like the Guthrie BFA Program. And nowhere they can be exposed to such distinct student-related experiences (hello, Sheep, Goat, and Lama Club).

The next step in the student campaign will make it even more focused on students, when it asks them to directly participate in a scholarship video contest. Students will be asked to submit 30-second videos of themselves explaining what they have discovered at the U. Winners will be chosen based on "Likes" on the U's Facebook page, so stay tuned in mid-December when voting begins!