Curtin is Western Australia’s biggest university, with over 40,000 students. With a strong brand built upon the platform of innovation, the challenge was making Curtin’s proposition of innovation more relevant and appealing to Year 12 students.
As such, Longtail and The Brand Agency were charged with the brief of helping Curtin recruit more high school leavers to its undergraduate courses. From our joint research, we learned that the pressures around exams and choosing a university are many, and as such students are overwhelmed. What Year 12s desperately needed was help to navigate their choices and opportunities; to gain a sense of control; to empower them to make the right choice.
We started a conversation and changed the way Curtin University talks to prospective students.
In order to engage this group we needed an innovative solution that was relevant to the student and spanned the length of their Year 12 life. As such, The Box© was born.
The Box© consisted of a sleek, 8GB USB thumb drive in the shape of a credit card that provided the student with access to an online portal with a whole world of tools to get through year 12. Students were encouraged to ‘fit their whole life’ in the box – using it to store music, pictures and files relating to their studies.
The Box© Online was the student’s home on the web with sense of community for school leaving university entrants. The Box© Online acted as a start page and enabled students to aggregate their online world through customisable modules.
For Curtin, The Box© was a channel for ongoing communication with students that was direct, 100% targeted and had minimal ongoing costs. It was marketed directly through schools, with 80% pre-registering before launch.
Working with restricted timeframes based on the scale of the project, this case study shows our ability to deliver an innovative technical solution to target a very niche audience.
