Our Work: Community College System of NH

Communications Case Study: Community college communications and higher education communications

CLIENT: CCSNH

Cookson Communications and the Community College System of NH (CCSNH) began working together in 2016 to research, develop, and promote business partnership profiles for the seven colleges. We crafted more than 100 profiles of these collaborative partnerships, which have received hundreds of media pick-ups. Since then, our partnership continued to expand and evolve to encompass many aspects of their promotional work across the state.

What We Did
  • Public relations
  • Communications
  • Branding & design
  • Annual report production

Public relations AND communications

We created a template for capturing partnerships between businesses and CCSNH colleges often around custom training programs created by the colleges that helped an organization upskill current employees or train new workers. These stories have been very well-received and are showcased on the college websites, in posters around the colleges, in annual reports, and through social media.

We regularly provide overall communications advice and counsel to the colleges and the system office assisting with PR efforts including media releases, alumni profiles and the Choose Community e-newsletter geared to NH legislators. We have also developed and placed numerous op-eds for college presidents to help raise the profile of the work and role of the colleges within their communities.

0

media releases drafted and disseminated

DOZENS

of alumni profiles developed

~ 0

op-eds drafted and placed

Branding and design

Our design work with CCSNH has spanned multiple areas, including posters, flyers, icons, print and digital ads, annual reports, email marketing templates, and infographics. During the pandemic in 2020, we developed a suite of materials on COVID-19-related information for each of the seven community colleges.

We have also taken a consulting role on branding and best practices, running team brainstorms and creating style guidelines for a variety of custom programmatic community college campaigns.

Annual report

Starting in 2018, we developed a model for a comprehensive and informative annual report and have been designing and producing it annually since then. Over the years, the annual report content has taken shape in different forms with the overall goal of highlighting the great work of the colleges in both a print and digital format.

"Cookson Communications has become an extension of our internal team, enabling us to develop, hone and amplify our message well beyond anything we could have done internally. Of particular note is their ability to work with stakeholders across our organization to capture and develop a wide variety of content and deliver it in a way that supports a central message.

Their design expertise has led to the creation of visually compelling pieces that include collateral and web. Account service is highly responsive, helpfully proactive, and undertaken with a well-honed understanding of our mission and needs.

The team at Cookson Communications has provided a very significant quantitative and qualitative value-add to our public relations efforts."