How we helped a school reach their DEI goals

Learn how we helped a Pre-K to 12th grade day school in the Boston/Cambridge area grow their student body while improving their socioeconomic diversity.

THE CLIENT

Buckingham Browne & Nichols is a highly respected day school located in Cambridge, MA, offering a top-quality educational experience for students. They are committed to helping students uncover their individual talents and passions, providing a challenging and innovative curriculum that caters to a diverse range of backgrounds and interests. With three campuses and a wide range of co-curricular opportunities, students benefit from a supportive community that embodies the school’s motto: “Honor, Scholarship, Kindness.”

THE CHALLENGE
BB&N is regularly ranked among the top independent schools in the United States. Located literally in the shadow of Harvard – where many of their alumni go on to study – this in-demand school receives hundreds more applications than available spots each year. They also enjoy a strong endowment fund that creates financial opportunities for many families to be able to afford the school – but this is not always well-known outside of traditional private or independent school circles.

BB&N’s leaders saw an opportunity to reach even more students from even more families – and more under-represented backgrounds – and ensure they felt welcomed and included in their school community (and that they applied to BB&N in the first place). We would need to partner together to help elevate the perception that BB&N welcomes families from a wide range of backgrounds – and to reach these families in digital spaces.

We addressed these challenges head-on by creating a digital campaign that would reach and resonate with a diverse audience and help BB&N fulfill their commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).

THE STRATEGY
Our journey with BB&N began by conducting a measurement and insights project that was focused on their current website. Gathering this data helped us understand BB&N’s strengths and showed our team where there was further opportunity. We were also able to ensure the website would successfully collect all the data we wanted to see – and provide straightforward ways for the team at BB&N to keep an eye on how their marketing and admissions efforts were going. With this foundation in place, we started to work on the campaign strategy.

Through stakeholder interviews and research, we learned that prospective families are seeking a school that will help their child reach for the stars. No matter their background, they believe in the importance of investing in their child’s future – and they see BB&N as a school that helps turn dreams into realities. We wanted to create that same sense of boldness, strength, and determination in our campaign.

In order to be successful, we knew that our campaign would need to appeal to both traditional private or independent school families as well as families who currently had children in public school who would thrive in a school like BB&N (but may not know that, with financial support, it could be within reach for them).

THE EXECUTION

Our concept – Go Bold – creates a boundary-free environment for students to explore their passions, interests, and potential. Each ad employs bold, action-oriented headlines to motivate the audience to explore, contact, and apply to BB&N:
· GO BOLD
· START HERE
· NO LIMITS
· MAKE IT HAPPEN

Keeping BB&N’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion front and center, we used specific targeting and inclusive imagery to help every potential family see their child at BB&N. A picture is worth a thousand words – or in our case, a new enrollment from a family who might not have thought BB&N could be a part of their future. We flew out to Cambridge to conduct the photoshoot and came home with photos that echoed the sentiment – and the energy – of our campaign platform.

Working with a well-established and recognizable brand like BB&N, our campaign incorporated their existing brand colors to create instant recognition while using a bold photographic style that was unique to the campaign. This ensured our ad campaign felt fresh yet familiar.

Our digital team did research to uncover the best places to reach a diverse audience in the Boston/Cambridge area and we found these families using zip codes and other digital qualifiers. We wanted to send the message that these communities are seen and welcomed by the BB&N community. This helped us reshape the way people perceived BB&N and positioned them as a private school that wants to reach beyond affluent neighborhoods.

We executed this campaign through a range of digital and social channels – including Google Search, Google Display, Google Smart, Google Discovery, Google Video, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Bing Search, Amazon, and Spotify. Each targeted ad placement included tailored messaging for specific audiences – whether they were at the awareness, consideration, or conversion stage of their customer journey. Clicking these ads guided them to a dedicated landing page created for BB&N's fresh recruitment campaign.

The landing page we built for BB&N serves as a streamlined approach to effectively communicate the values of the school and equips families with everything they need to know before inquiring. It’s also a valuable source of data, allowing us to follow along with the customer from the point they click on our ad to when they enroll their child at BB&N. Having access to these metrics lets us know definitively how well our campaign performed.

THE RESULTS
This campaign has been live for one full enrolment season, and the results have been outstanding. As a direct and measurable result of this campaign, BB&N saw an almost 6% increase in applications that led to over a dozen mission-appropriate families that were admitted – an optimal mix of full-pay families and families receiving financial assistance. We welcome them all to BB&N and look forward to Year 2, where we’ll optimize the campaign based on data.

"Great news across the board, I'd say! The pool of Metric's inquiries really showcases many important sub-categories within our enrollment funnel – siblings, students from key CBO partners, students from our waitlist, full pay and students seeking aid, families from independent/feeder schools as well as local public school families, and legacy applicants are all represented."
- Jorge Delgado (Director of Enrollment Management)

"The Metric team has been great to work with, especially with regards to their impressive expertise and industry knowledge. In my position, I can mostly speak to the logistics side of our partnership in which they have been imminently available, accommodating, and responsive to our needs. And I should add 'patient' as we navigate through often unfamiliar territory in our new digital presence."
- Andrew Fletcher (Associate Director of Communications)

CONCLUSION
Discover the difference we’ve made at other Pre-K to grade 12 schools here or learn how we can help your school by contacting us today.