Project Background

Grow Your Future is a student recruitment campaign to promote the career path of a Rural Practice Chartered Surveyor to a wider and more diverse audience than at present. The campaign has been spearheaded by Mr. Andrew Black, a Chartered Surveyor and Senior Lecturer at Harper Adams University, and supported by Higher Horizons+, a collaborative network of Universities and Colleges throughout the Midlands and North West, who work together to engage and support schools with free outreach activities as part of the National Collaborative Outreach Programme (NCOP). 

Our Strategy

Taking on-board the findings from our focus groups, interviews and questionnaires, the concept of Grow Your Future was born. This concept aims to inspire, motivate and demonstrate to young people that they do have what it takes to pursue a career in rural surveying. The choice of language and tone of voice is designed to empower teenagers by drawing attention to common qualities that they often take for granted, so they understand how desirable these qualities are for this high-achieving career. 

An online portal was created to collect case studies and supporting images from students, post-grads and professionals from their in-the-field experiences. Simultaneously, various video stories were shot and edited, giving short and snappy insights into student life, placements, project work, and career advice.

And a bespoke interactive game was created that allows you to assume and fully understand the role of a valuer, determining the present value of a number of farmyard assets.

All of this content was used to bolster the website design and development, which is the main hub for the whole campaign. Along with the case studies, video stories and interactive games, you can discover where to study Rural Land Management, explore the variety of projects throughout the UK on an interactive map and keep up to date with industry news and more. 

To help launch this campaign, a dedicated social media strategy was set up to increase awareness of the recruitment campaign on the relevant platforms, to engage with the target audience, to become a voice in the industry and to direct traffic to the website. 

Similarly, some core SEO goals were also established to sustain positive growth for organic traffic, develop a keyword targeting strategy and begin ranking for these terms in search results, as well as following all other best-practice to optimise the website.

And for the offline launch at the Field to Fork Festival at Harper Adams University, a selection of branded material were also printed, ranging from: lanyards, flyers, posters and banners, all to generate awareness amongst this potential next generation of Rural Practice Chartered Surveyors

Challenge

Our challenge was to create an interactive digital platform to promote this profession to NCOP’s target audience - young people in years 9 to 13, who live in areas where higher education participation is lower than expected given the GCSE results achieved by young people in that area. 

It was clear from the outset that our designs needed to be bright, bold and appealing; and supported by engaging interactive functionality, to help shine the light on this often ‘unknown’ profession, and to convey the length and breadth of this career path’s opportunities

Project Images

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