These days, the first visual impression someone has of a university is often the school’s logo in a social media icon or at the top of a webpage.

For Santa Clara, that first impression was of a Mission Church logo that was inconsistently used and was designed in 2002 before these digital features gained prominence. With this in mind, UMC decided this logo and Santa Clara’s broader visual identity were due for a refresh.

The refresh started with a collaboration with creative agency Jerry Kuyper Partners (JKP), who invited the Bronco community to share its thoughts about the logo to guide their redesign.

As part of their research, the JKP team visited Santa Clara to experience campus for themselves and imagine life as Broncos. Inspired by the warm evening sun peeking over the historic Mission Church and the joyful atmosphere of commencement, they sought to incorporate what students and faculty experience every day into their designs.

When Andy Currie, group creative director of Decoded Advertising, met with members of the Santa Clara community during campus visits hosted by UMC, one idea kept coming up over and over again.

“Everybody described Santa Clara as having this secret sauce,” Currie says, “and our task was to help put a finger on the ingredients.”

With the help of extensive surveys and focus groups performed by Whitman Insights (WINS), Currie learned that the value of a Santa Clara education wasn’t just the degree or the services provided, but the ethical footprint the university carved out in the world.

(Read more about the data behind this work)

“We found that what made Santa Clara special was having this enormous heart, caring about people as a community, and equipping them with the ability to think critically, to apply ethical standards," Currie says.

This insight was the inspiration for Santa Clara University’s new brand manifesto, “What the World Needs.” This manifesto—as read below by Professor Emeritus Francisco Jimenez—was written by Decoded as the foundation for the brand platform, reframing how the University tells its stories.

In surveys conducted by WINS, the manifesto elicited strong, positive emotions, and the words “value” and “pride” were frequently mentioned across audiences.

From the manifesto, UMC worked with Decoded to develop a brand platform that functions as a larger framework for messaging across Santa Clara to highlight the people it serves through the tangible real-world solutions Broncos provide.

“What the world needs is going to change from day to day, decade to decade,” Currie explains. “It’s a point of view that says we will continue to look for these opportunities and push. We’re going to put people out into the world who are going to do something about it.”

Many elements of the brand platform will look familiar. For example, the University’s mission of creating a more humane, just, and sustainable world serves as the “brand vision.” Santa Clara’s three C’s—competence, conscience, and compassion—also serve as brand pillars, with a fourth C of community added to reflect the strength of the connection the University’s students and alumni feel toward their Bronco family, a quality that research showed was important to Gen Z. Collectively, the brand vision, positioning, pillars, and personality will shape University messaging under this new brand platform.

With “What the World Needs” established as the University’s brand positioning, UMC, the Division of Enrollment Management, and Decoded developed a new, data-backed enrollment campaign called “Progress Needs People.” The campaign aligns Santa Clara’s institutional positioning “What the World Needs” with focus group-tested messaging geared to support undergraduate recruitment efforts.

The timing for a new enrollment campaign couldn’t be better, says Vice President for Enrollment Management Eva Blanco Masias. In recent years, higher education institutions across the U.S. have faced a host of challenges including fewer applicants, academic gaps and mental health struggles due to the pandemic, and a growing perception that college is too expensive or not worth it.

Addressing these higher ed challenges and speaking to the issues that matter most to prospective students, “Progress Needs People” is an enrollment campaign deeply connected with Santa Clara’s purpose-driven mission and strengths as an institution.

The campaign highlights several of Santa Clara’s strengths, such as its location within Silicon Valley, interdisciplinary offerings, and the Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation—the University's newest STEM facility and the largest on the West Coast. But, while Santa Clara has the classrooms, labs, and resources to shape competent leaders, the campus cannot reach its full potential without its people.

“Progress doesn’t need machines. It doesn’t need technical skill sets. Progress needs people who are going to bring conscience and heart to whatever they’re passionate about, whether it’s AI or machine learning,” says Currie.

This optimistic message resonated with prospective students across demographics, which Masias says is also crucial to supporting Santa Clara’s goal of recruiting more Hispanic, first-generation, and Pell Grant-eligible students.

Applying the findings from the WINS research, UMC has created a campaign that zeroes in on the pillar of “competence” through stories featuring young alumni who are creating solutions to real problems in the world. With that in mind, the first two stories in this campaign feature Sam Bertram ’16, M.S. ’18 and Mirelle Raza ’15 who are making a direct impact on food insecurity and law, respectively.

(Read more about the data behind this work)

By showing what success after Santa Clara looks like, Lokman and the rest of the team at UMC are excited to reach a wider audience and inspire the next generation of Bronco leaders.

“Our community is doing incredible things, so let’s showcase this—together,” says Lokman.

Data matters and it was at the heart of each step of this rebrand. These projects would not have been possible without the Bronco community, so it was important to show the critical role that students, faculty, staff, and alumni played in shaping these initiatives.

Partnering with Whitman Insights (WINS), UMC conducted a two-phase research process using both qualitative and quantitative methods. To put it simply, the goal of this research was to identify what Santa Clara does well and what information matters to the people who matter.

Phase one established baseline measures of reputation with key audiences, identifying the perceived strengths and weaknesses as well as Santa Clara’s place in the higher-ed landscape. UMC conducted 10 on-campus focus groups, 42 interviews with key stakeholders, and a survey with responses from 2,142 undergrad and grad students, faculty, staff, alumni, and prospective students and parents.

What did UMC learn?

First, Santa Clara starts from an excellent place. Both the Bronco community and prospective students and families hold SCU in high regard, with four areas emerging as key components:

• Jesuit Education: Jesuit principles remain the beating heart of SCU. These values guide how the University approaches education, from the teacher-scholar model to interdisciplinary curriculum. The Jesuit tradition is alive and well, indeed.
• Positive Impact: Santa Clara champions solutions for a world in need. Its stakeholders are proud of the institution’s unwillingness to sacrifice community and ethics for the sake of profits. Santa Clara is committed to making the right choices, no matter how hard.
• Location: Being based in California and having a beautiful campus creates an enjoyable, sunny experience, reflective of Broncos’ optimism. Plus, being in the heart of Silicon Valley presents huge opportunities for students and alumni.
• Lifelong Community: The Bronco community creates lifelong bonds; a byproduct of an 11:1 student-to-faculty ratio, no-wrong-door policies, supportive faculty, and a thriving student body that rallies together through sports, clubs, and causes.

Notably, most testing groups believed that Santa Clara is headed in the right direction—and at more than double the rates of their views of higher education overall.

With that good news, there were some areas for improvement. While the majority of the Santa Clara community and prospective students generally felt the school was increasingly diverse, there was room to highlight diversity in terms of sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, and disability.

With these and many other insights, Decoded developed a series of different brand positioning options—including the “What the World Needs” manifesto, power facts, and storytelling executions for awareness and enrollment campaigns.

In Phase 2, WINS and UMC tested these options across different audiences and demographics via surveys and focus groups. A total of 2,127 undergrad and grad students, faculty, staff, alumni, and prospective students and parents responded to these surveys.

In addition to refining the “What the World Needs” brand platform and concepts for an enrollment campaign, UMC learned that stories of competence and real-world impact by Santa Clara alumni scored highly across all audiences. Meanwhile, prospective students expressed some initial confusion about how Santa Clara’s values connected to a Jesuit education—an insight that provides an opportunity to bring Jesuit ideals to life through stories of alumni living out the University’s mission through their work.

Finally, a list of 33 facts about Santa Clara was tested to see which ones were viewed as the most or least impactful. The top-performing power facts—some of which are listed below—will be integral to strategically communicating the differentiators that matter.