Charles Darwin University (CDU) is one of the countries longest service educational establishments and, as the main university for the Northern Territory, it has always found competing for both domestic and international student challenging, not for the quality of it’s product, but driven by its location.

We started working together a number of years ago and since that time have helped the business increase its student intake through careful and considered strategic design of communications and acquisition practises across a range of digital channels and for all aspects of the university.

In the same way that we always want to understand what we are designing for, regardless of if the challenge will resolve into a product or a practise, it was no different with CDU.

We started by visiting the campus to meet the stakeholders and students to understand and gather information. In order to know how to attract potential candidates we needed a deep understanding of how the current student body connected and valued their time at the university. We ran a number context sessions which gave us a better understanding of the people and systems we’d need to involve, incorporate and co-ordinate to ensure we created an effective start to driving digital acquisition.

We then dove into the data and through our proven CI framework we were able to surface the right insights quickly that helped build out the media and creative strategies we’d follow to quickly get to market and test and learn. With a complicated digital ecosystem comprised of over 20 different websites, effectively leveraging and channelling the right interest to the right channel and re-marketing was the net result of our strategic design process.