on the job: guilford college
In 2018, I traveled to North Carolina to do some work with Guilford College. Their marketing agency contacted me about updating their image catalog. We worked together to come up with a plan, I made the trip down, and over a few days we produced some great work together.
End of story, right?
Not at all. Because the thing about marketing photos is that they get stale pretty quickly — especially in higher ed. Students graduate, administrations change, and so do fashion trends and campuses. Marketing images — for universities or other industries — need to stay fresh. If not, then the prospective students you spend all of your money trying to recruit will notice. They’ll clock the photos that keep getting reused and that very well could be turning them off instead of tuning them in.
Guilford College gets that. The partnership we have built over the years is the perfect example of how a university can — and should — operate when it comes to their marketing photos. We have worked together multiple times since that first shoot in 2018. I have been back to Greensboro for a few more campus photo shoots. They have also sent me to Boston and Washington D.C. to photograph some young alumni.
The goal is to keep things fresh, so we have collaborated on a shoot plan to get the most out of each visit. The more strategic we can be when we plan our shoot days, the better and more useful the resulting images will be. In a perfect world, we would collaborate once a semester to refresh their image catalog but that’s not always in everyone’s timeline or budget. So if we can’t get back each semester, we try our best to make sure if the last shoot was in the spring/summer then the next will be in the fall/winter so that the images will have an extended shelf life.
The biggest takeaway from my time with Guilford is that bringing me in on the planning phase has resulted in less uncertainty for them and much more targeted and successful shoot days.
If you’re reading this and thinking about updating your university marketing image catalog, reach out! Let’s talk.
