Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
Make it Memorable Case Study
How marketing to prospective students enabled further engagement goals
To grow engagement and enrollment with a new generation of students, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology trusted Blueline to communicate its past, present, and future through video.
Creating an all-encompassing campaign required dozens of interviews with faculty, staff, and alumni, and working towards this broad goal together over time required both wide and specific messaging for different groups. As this process continued, each subsequent campaign was made more emotionally and organizationally impactful by building on previously-captured interviews and footage.
Through a number of marketing and enrollment initiatives including our important work, Rose-Hulman reached record enrollment in 2024. In three of the last four years, they have welcomed a class of over 600 students, and only the fourth time in the last 150-year history.
Here's the story of how our relationship has grown from first contact to era-defining communication.
Client Quote
"In the competitive higher ed landscape, videos and storytelling are powerful tools that bring the unique culture and values of institutions like Rose-Hulman to life. Blueline helps us create videos that allow us to connect with prospective students and the community by transforming our story into a personal and memorable experience."
-Santhana Naidu
Vice President for Communication and Marketing
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
2020
Laying the Foundation
With world events changing up the collegiate recruiting landscape, Rose-Hulman's new marketing team was looking for a quick project that could help the institute appeal to a new generation of students.
Working within community health guidelines, Blueline captured interviews and b-roll with nearly a dozen students to create a campus experience video.
Building a Library
So many projects turn into a 3 minute video and then everything else gets left on the cutting room floor. With Rose-Hulman we began our relationship by discussing how whatever we captured would be used for future videos. Little did we know that building this Library would allow us to move quickly AND deliver powerful videos covering a wide range of topics.
early
2021
Feature Focus
After a successful rollout of the general campus experience video, Rose-Hulman re-engaged with Blueline to focus more specifically on one aspect of campus - the Innovation Centers and the KEEN engineering framework they implemented. We utilized a blend of remote alumni interviews, onsite footage, and custom animation to bring the series (and the novel educational framework it highlighted) to life.
With production taking place in January, our previous production made it possible to show outdoor footage from a more photogenic part of the year.
Footage Library
12
Student Interviews
2
Days of footage capture
1
Delivered video
Footage Library Running Total
22
Student Interviews
3
Alumni Interviews
2
Faculty/Staff Interviews
3
Days of footage
6
Delivered videos
Homecoming
2021
Building on History
With the power of alumni voices evident from the KEEN series, Rose-Hulman wanted a video that could encourage similar engagement from all alumni at events and fundraisers.
Using Homecoming as a natural assembly of alumni on campus, we captured interviews and additional footage in October 2021. The two videos directly resulting from this capture included this piece which focuses on the positive impact of financial gifts, and the Alumni Impact video (still in use today) which we're told continues to bring tears to the eyes of stereotypically-stoic engineers.
Footage Library Running Total
23
Student Interviews
11
Alumni Interviews
3
Faculty/Staff Interviews
4
Days of footage
8
Delivered videos
2022
A Full Campaign
After successful engagements highlighting students, educational style, and alumni, Rose-Hulman came to us seeking a full video campaign. This campaign would ideally demonstrate the unity of Rose-Hulman to potential students while continuing to garner alumni support.
With only a few months to gather all necessary footage, our team got to work cataloguing existing interviews, allowing new content capture to focus on specific needs. We ultimately decided to prioritize visuals of student life with audio-only interviews, leveraging past projects to supplement general campus footage.
The resulting campaign, "Together, We Are Rose-Hulman" focuses on the individual passion and interests of students combining to create an amazing undergraduate engineering education. Centered around a banner video, this campaign included shorter cuts for targeted recruitment, a 30-second broadcast version, 15- and 6-second social media cuts, and vertical counterparts to most deliverables.
Footage Library Running Total
23
Student Interviews
11
Alumni Interviews
3
Faculty/Staff Interviews
10
Days of footage
16
Delivered videos
2023
Topical Depth
With the general marketing campaign up and running, Rose-Hulman asked us to capture more interviews with students and faculty, with the intent of creating more story-driven content to run concurrently with the campaign.
After ingesting interviews into our cataloguing system, we identified two major themes that naturally arose as students and faculty described their passion for Rose-Hulman: Academics and Curiosity.
Using the library of footage in combination with some additional strategic filming, we produced these two pieces which highlight the two sides of what makes Rose-Hulman the #1 undergraduate engineering program in the nation.
In addition to these banner topic videos, we used the plethora of amazing interview content to produce over a dozen bite-sized videos perfect for saturating the feed of potential recruits.
Footage Library Running Total
32
Student Interviews
11
Alumni Interviews
12
Faculty/Staff Interviews
15
Days of footage
30
Delivered videos
The Future
When we look to the future with Rose Hulman we are able to search for any topic within our video library from past interviews and give recommendations on whether we need to film more footage or if we have enough from our existing library to focus our efforts on better storytelling which leads to better results for Rose-Hulman. We recently used our library to create videos for the 150th year celebration and are looking forward to what we cover next.