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Hi Hampton,

We’ve hand-picked the following case studies to demonstrate our marketing and advertising practice for destinations. We are confident that our doctoral-level researchers, strategists, and creatives are more than capable to tease support Hampton as its Agency of Record.

ASK QUESTIONS, WE’RE HERE FOR IT 🙂

Sean Sutherland
Director of Marketing
81 Mosher Street, 3rd floor
Baltimore, Maryland 21217
443.615.7280
sean.sutherland@idfive.com

Welcome Hampton,

On this page, you’ll find the case studies we’ve selected especially for you. All of them showcase the talent, passion, and ingenuity we put into everything we do. Reach out if you have any questions!

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Defining the voice of a community pillar.

Aims Community College

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Aims Community College

Home Work Aims Community College

Refreshing a Community College Brand with Lofty Aims

Aims Community College shatters the common perception of “community college,” with multiple locations and state-of-the-art facilities—including commercial-grade flight simulators, maker spaces, and a new community welcome center, to name a few features. But it lacked a cohesive brand to support its vision as a “first choice” and recognized leader in student success.

The Strategy

With an initial scope of work to analyze the current Aims brand, idfive started in a familiar place: with research, consisting of:

a brand communications audit of Aims’ existing messaging architecture, brand assets, and marketing materials.
comparative analysis of three competing colleges’ brand attributes.
an AudienceScan to determine audience sentiment (actual and desired) using surveys, interviews, and a review of existing research.
a Brand Perception Workshop to engage internal stakeholders to shape brand attributes, platform, and messaging architecture.

The final deliverables included branding, a new tagline, a refreshed mascot, a viewbook, and a brand anthem video.

Branding

After presenting our findings to the president and her cabinet, our scope of work expanded to include developing a revised Aims Brand Guide. With a refreshed brand promise and platform (including supports), a revised logo, and reenergized voice and tone, the College wanted a tagline that could succinctly express the new brand’s position. Working collaboratively with the Aims MarComm team, we launched a research-based initiative to identify a new Aims tagline

— a process that started with brainstorming sessions and ended with surveys and focus groups with major campus stakeholders.

The winner—All In—is best described by our focus group participants: “Catchy, and easy to remember.” “it’s everything we are.” “It’s an allegory and delivers a broader message.” “It’s what the Aims community is.” “Put a stamp on it.”

Aims Red

Aims Black

Aims Slate

Evolution Blue

Corn Husk

Fountain

Design

Arty the Aardvark has come to represent comfort, familiarity, friendship, and kindness. For example, at Arty’s Pantry, students receive free food and basic supplies.

Since Arty isn’t your stereotypical college athletics cheerleader (Aims doesn’t have sports) the redesigned Arty needed to be more than just another pissed off mascot. He needed to be a positive, energetic personification of the institution and community.

Through a highly collaborative and iterative process, Arty emerged—he’s a little bit “dad bod,” a lot “can-do spirit,” and All In.

Viewbook

A refreshed college brand requires a bold, new recruitment publication. We wanted Aims’ new viewbook to connect with prospective students on an emotional level—a critical goal for the admissions team—while also communicating the College’s distinctions with bold visuals and user-focused content. The viewbook was also the first embodiment of the new brand guidelines we had developed for Aims, and aided in expanding on the brand’s look and feel.

To ensure the viewbook is compelling, a unique peek-a-boo cover was designed which opens to an exciting spread explaining what it means to be All In.

Video

For Aims Community College, creating a video that flips the script on who they are and what they offer was a critical next step in rallying a local and national audience of perspective and current students, staff, and the community. After partnering with idfive on an award-winning brand, “All In” tagline, mascot, and marketing materials, Aims possessed a more cohesive and effective messaging platform to articulate the Aims advantage.

With a 90-second montage of students in experiential learning environments at multiple locations and state-of-the-art facilities—including commercial-grade flight simulators, maker spaces, and a new community welcome center, idfive was able to help Aims shatter the common perception of “community college.” Our video production team helped Aims go “All In” and be recognized as a first choice option and leader in higher education.

Recruiting residents to Charm City.

A Baltimore City mailbox with an "I Heart City Life" bumper sticker attached to it

Live Baltimore

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Live Baltimore

Home Work Live Baltimore

Placing Customized Web Tools for Baltimore's Premiere Resident Recruitment Nonprofit

Live Baltimore, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to recruit and retain Baltimore City residents, needed a new website that could convince a wide range of potential renters and homebuyers why Baltimore is the right place for them to find a home and stay long-term.

It also needed to offer them the tools and resources to do so.

278

Neighborhoods in Baltimore

We cherish every chance we get to work for awesome clients with incredible missions such as these guys. Live Baltimore is an important hometown brand charged with showcasing how Baltimore City is a fantastic place to raise a family, work, and play. And our website does exactly that for them.

Andres Zapata

Founder

Strategy

How do you promote a “city of neighborhoods” and connect potential residents to the areas that best fit their needs, priorities, and preferences? idfive developed an interactive quiz that matches potential homebuyers and renters with the City’s neighborhoods according to major criteria such as:

Cost
Neighborhood “vibe”
Commuting distance to work

Site visitors have the option to set up My Personalized Moving Planner, an account that stores neighborhood recommendations, provides access to financial incentive programs, receive one-on-one consultations with Live Baltimore staff members, and connect with participating real estate agents who specialize in select neighborhoods.

Webpages for each neighborhood offer a glimpse of what it’s like to live there, with “At A Glance” information providing:

Estimated mortgage
Estimated rent
Median Home Purchase Price
Home types
Percentage of residents who own/rent

UX Design

A “Meet Your Neighbors” callout section provides links to community organizations and homeowners associations, and many neighborhood pages feature residents who share an insider’s look and who users can contact directly for more information — a uniquely personal touch.

The nonprofit’s homebuying resources are also easily accessible through user-tested navigation, as well as information about Baltimore city services; public and private schools (with map); major employers; colleges and universities; and homeowner incentive and loan programs.

Development

Our developers love a challenge. Here’s what they loved about the Live Baltimore redesign, by the numbers:

The site has integrations with at least 9 supporting services—Salesforce, Google Maps, Recaptcha, Walkscore, YouTube, Vimeo, Eventbrite, Google Translate, and Sendgrid.
The design includes 14 different content types, 12 with the capability of being saved to user profiles.
The three different maps share as much code as possible, but serve different functions and have different requirements.

The Result

An engaging, entertaining, and informative website that is as unique as the city it promotes.

Spreading facts on the vax.

A woman's arm with a band-aid and sticker that reads "I got my COVID-19 vaccine"

Chase Brexton Health Services

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Chase Brexton Health Services

Home Work Chase Brexton Health Services

Using Video Content to Make the COVID Vax Fun

Many folks are hesitant to be vaccinated for COVID because of fear, lack of information, misinformation, and historically-based mistrust. A long-time, trusted source of healthcare and wellness information in the community, Chase Brexton knew that it had to address these issues head-on with accurate, timely, and engaging information.

Strategy

idfive realized that there wasn’t any shortage of information about the benefits of being vaccinated. Unfortunately much of the information — especially promoted by government agencies and well-meaning groups of all kinds — was dry, unengaging, and generally unrelatable for many people, especially those in communities where English was not the primary language or in areas of generally low educational attainment. Even worse, “COVID fatigue” was causing many to ignore sources of accurate information, rumors, misinformation, and disinformation — often presented in sensationalistic formats designed to attract clicks on social media — and spreading fear and distrust among many.

We knew we needed to take a different approach. Collaborating with Chase Brexton we developed “Vaxy Nation,” a unique and irreverent cartoon character portraying a ringmaster of a fictional circus. By relying on an animated mascot we knew we could transcend many of the cultural barriers a human spokesperson might bring while also incorporating an irreverence and sense of humor that would encourage engagement and sharing of accurate information about the COVID vaccine and its importance.

Design

Our diverse audiences came from a wide variety of cultural and socio-economic backgrounds including native Spanish and English speakers. The Vaxy Nation character was designed to be disarmingly ambiguous and fun, with an aesthetic that worked across all audiences. Partnering with Unconquered, we created characters that combined a retro look with contemporary sass.

Storytelling

Obviously vaccination is a serious subject. But we also knew that people were pretty tired of the seemingly-endless stream of serious talk about COVID and admonitions to get vaccinated. So we took a different tack, using humor to dispel disinformation and disarm the cognitive resistance our audiences had developed after nearly two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conclusion

The campaign is extremely well-received by the media and is enjoying a lot of favorable online engagement. The industry has taken notice, too: in December of 2021 the campaign was honored with a Gold Award from the Healthcare Digital Marketing Awards, a nationwide awards program for digital healthcare communication.

Celebrating 200 years.

Colgate students hurry to their classes on a sunny day in early fall, the chapel visible in the background

Colgate University

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Colgate University

Home Work Colgate University

BUILDING A MODERN WEBSITE FOR AN HISTORICAL HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION

Colgate University, a prestigious private university in central New York, is globally recognized for offering an innovative curriculum and an experience dedicated to career outcomes, on a sprawling, bucolic, rustic campus. Showcasing the Colgate experience cohesively across several digital touchpoints was a rewarding opportunity that continues to evolve through our ongoing partnership.

“Finding the right partner may have been our most important step. We understood that we were not only seeking a partner to build our website but one who would also fill the role of the teacher as we learned a new hosting environment and CMS.”

Jason Kammerdiener

Web Manager, Colgate University

The Challenge

Colgate wanted to upgrade their CMS to a more modern, sustainable platform. With the help of idfive, this project underwent an intensive stakeholder discovery to determine the priorities, requirements, functionality, and architecture needed to support a bustling, evolving institution.

The Result

The result was a beautifully redesigned site built on the Drupal 8 CMS platform, with the flexibility to continue to grow. With more than 1,500 pages migrated by a hybrid team of Colgate staff and idfivers, the new site was positively received by the Colgate community immediately upon launch.

200

Years of history to share

“The idfive team really had fun with this project! Partnering with Colgate to tell a story that means so much to alumni, current students, faculty and the surrounding Hamilton, NY community was rewarding. The site enables visitors to relive a sense of pride and look forward to a Colgate’s dynamic future.”

Jake Tarbert

Associate VP

The Challenge

How do you tell the story of a venerable institution’s two-century legacy without getting lost in the past? How do we bring history to life while positioning a bold vision for the future? Taking both of these challenges to mind, idfive developed a content strategy based on historic artifacts, an interactive timeline, and an invitation for the community to share their own Colgate experiences.

The Result

With an enhanced design developed to embrace and celebrate this golden celebration, we launched a site that worked flawlessly across every platform and blended seamlessly into the architecture of the main Colgate website.

The Challenge

When the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 brought campus visits for prospective students to a halt, Colgate recognized that digitally showcasing the full Colgate experience – campus included – was paramount to encouraging students to commit. Colgate turned to idfive to translate their This is Colgate and Outcomes printed viewbooks into rich, engaging online experiences for prospective students and their families.

To keep these online Viewbooks sustainable year-over-year, we developed an information architecture and modular user experience that allowed content to be interchangeable and updatable as information about the University changed while retaining the flow and narrative of the Viewbooks’ print counterparts.

The Result

The site was then designed and developed to be CMS-agnostic, for maximum flexibility. The result was a collaborative content migration and a rapid launch to reach prospects during commitment season.

The Partnership Continues

In addition to major projects with our partners at Colgate, idfive serves as the University’s web and digital support partner. Building a lasting understanding of Colgate’s diverse digital landscape, we’re able to continue being nimble, responsive, and effective to meet the needs of this vibrant institution.

Giving voice to the liberal arts.

Three U-Dub students sit on a bench on campus

University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences

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University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences

Home Work University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences

The Challenge

In a world dominated by science, technology, engineering and mathematics, what is the role of the liberal arts? After all, if the “value” of a college education is the immediate return on investment, how can the liberal arts compete with highly-valued majors such as engineering or the applied sciences (eg. computer science)?

Strategy

Our Discover360 process also revealed that the University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences also suffered from a crisis of identity: at a university dominated by scientific research and technological innovation what was the role of the College in the entire UW web ecosystem? The answer came from the students we spoke to. What they cared about was what interested them. Out of this insight came the philosophy that drove our redesign efforts: “Let the Majors Speak for, and Define, The College.”

Design

If the majors were going to speak for the College, the design had to feature their essence: the students and their environments at the university. Our design concept put the people of the College first, highlighting their diversity and their activities while studying at one of the most beautiful institutions in the United States.

Development

At a time when many Colleges of Arts & Sciences/Liberal Arts were shying away from their liberal arts roots, the UW College of Arts and Sciences decided to prioritize their commitment to the liberal arts, emphasizing the liberal arts’ relevance to 21st-century work. We communicated this through interactive tools for prospective students to show that the liberal arts and sciences could lead directly to fulfilling careers.

Conclusion

Our redesign has helped the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington redefine what it means to study the liberal arts in the 21st century, emphasizing both the diversity of thought and the diversity of the student body of the College. Through the use of both stunning imagery and interactive tools that help visitors discover what the liberal arts can mean in the twenty-first century, the new website doesn’t just open up the College to a new generation of visitors but also helps recontextualize and more sharply define the College’s role as part of the greater University of Washington.

Constructing a new platform for local artists.

Maryland State Arts Council

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Maryland State Arts Council

Home Work Maryland State Arts Council

The Challenge

The Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) needed a brand new web platform to serve as a resource for Marylanders. Basically having an “Arts-one-stop-shop” for all their constituents; from arts and entertainment districts, to organizations and individual artists. Most notably they needed to directly grant artists access to highlight and sell their work.

See the MSAC website.

Research

idfive’s thorough Discover360 process uncovered the need to create a dynamic web application using a multitude of data sources, user roles, workflows, scenarios, and content types. We created streamlined experiences with the flexibility for integrated content like custom profile dashboards for organizations and artists, an interactive map of all arts in MD, etc.

Number of templates, including an arts registry.

Design

The site had to reflect the incredible diversity of the arts in Maryland with a visually arresting design and subtle, textural, illustrated backgrounds that touch on every genre of the arts. Infusing that with bold and modern design elements focusing on sensible layout of information made the site not only visually appealing, but practically enjoyable to explore.

Development

To create a seamlessly integrated web application, idfive’s development team engineered an elegant, joyful, and simple to use profile dashboard to allow artists across the state of MD to manage their content. They also custom-built several JS MVS applications that allow powerful browsing of art work in the directory.

1.8K

Profiles Migrated

To maintain the integrity of the content of thousands of profiles and their associated artwork, idfive migrated thousands of pieces of content from the previous CMS to a new one. That meant mapping and automating a migration of hundreds of fields from one platform to another.

Client Success

Undertaking a complex site like MSAC requires “structured flexibility” and a truly collaborative effort with the client team. Through wireframe, design, and development, the driving imperative was to create an impactful site that serves a wide range of constituents to promote the arts throughout Maryland.

There’s more where that came from. Explore our website, meet our team, and learn about idfive.

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