A Statewide Photoshoot Showcases
Successful Ivy Tech Alumni

Communicating a brand effectively through original photography takes careful planning and a critical, creative eye. Of course. And while we're always serious about what we set out to accomplish, if you've ever been on a photoshoot, you know that to get the perfect image, some humorous things can be be happening behind the camera. Well, our statewide photo shoot for Ivy Tech was no exception. It took us to steel mills, hospitals, corporate headquarters, schools and more. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

While awareness of Ivy Tech’s numerous, varied program offerings and relatively low tuition was widespread, audiences were stopping short of seeing the bigger impact of an Ivy Tech education on a person’s career or future education plans.

Research told us that spotlighting true stories of real-life Ivy Tech alumni enjoying successful post-graduate outcomes in their careers and lives would be a great way to establish the quality of an Ivy Tech education. Joining that narrative of impactful outcomes to the already-established cost story would show Ivy Tech’s programs and degrees as truly valuable, not simply affordable. These successful alumni outcomes became the key to making the case for Ivy Tech’s value in Hoosiers’ eyes.

But how would we find and tell these success stories? A plan emerged: each Ivy Tech campus nominated several recent graduates with great success stories. From those nominees, we selected alumni that, as a group, represented the widest variety of Ivy Tech students, programs, locations, and Indiana employers. This group would feature heavily in a campaign that included print, online, social, radio and TV ads, as well as billboards.

The central component of the campaign was a statewide photoshoot of the selected alumni, an ambitious project for which we hired producer Clare Libbing and one of the best commercial photographers in the state, Tod Martens. Over a four-week period in late Spring of 2022, we traveled to every corner of the state, photographing our grads. Over the whirlwind shoot, we conservatively logged over 2,300 miles (the equivalent of a drive from Indianapolis to Seattle), and shot 19 Ivy Tech graduates representing nearly all of Ivy Tech’s campuses. The alums were depicted in their current work environments, in a diverse array of industries that included:

• Plumbing & welding
• Education
• Finance
• Accounting
• Pharmaceutical Law
• Healthcare (Fun Fact: Ivy Tech graduates more Associate’s level nurses than any other institution in the county.)
• Steel manufacturing
• Architecture
• Interior Design
• Information Technology

By midsummer 2022, the fruits of this ambitious project were featured on billboards throughout the state, each grad’s billboard geographically targeted to the vicinity of the campus where they earned their degree. Additionally, the photography is being used on Ivy Tech’s revamped (by us) website, as well as in numerous other digital and nondigital promotional materials, all part of Williams Randall’s wider strategy for Ivy Tech Community College’s 2022 brand evolution.