Objective: Through sharing a story of an alumnus’ powerful impact on a landmark trial, our objective was to build trust and credibility with our audience to ultimately drive brand affinity and increased engagements across our channels. Our objective reflected our company’s core vision of creating a dynamic global community of lifelong learners who improve the world.
Goals: The team identified this as an incredible and timely opportunity to elevate Walden University and Adtalem Global Education brands nationally. Our primary goal was to raise awareness of the impact our institutions have in building meaningful and successful careers. Our secondary goal was to raise awareness of the wide breadth of degree programs that Adtalem’s institutions offer.
Strategy: Adtalem is continually looking for ways to tell our story and highlight the ways our graduates are bringing positive change to the world. Through the development of our strategic roadmap, we recognized the opportunity to increase awareness of Adtalem Global Education’s brand and demonstrate our impact through the unique careers our graduates create for themselves. In early 2024, we identified a story that optimized upon the intersection of a cultural phenomenon and a remarkable alumnus journey.
Through social and media monitoring, we recognized a buzzing conversation around the Alex Murdaugh trial featuring a prominent Walden University alumnus: Dr. Kenneth Lee Kinsey, PhD Criminal Justice ’19. The conversation was prompted by the Netflix documentary, Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal, where Kinsey was selected as an expert witness in the trial. The story gripped the nation, leveraging the interest of the 57% of Americans who consume true crime content. Tapping into the cultural obsession with true crime and our brand mission of empowering graduates to make inspiring societal contributions, the team developed a holistic strategy to tell Kinsey’s story.
To authentically capture his story, they sat down with Kinsey in his town of Orangeburg, SC to discuss his professional journey, the Murdaugh trial and Walden’s impact on his life. Leaning into the success of the source of the conversation, the team paralleled its visual-narrative documentary style as the lead storytelling element. Through this approach, we weaved a compelling narrative through a personal interview with expert insights, authentic brand messaging, and b-roll footage. To ensure maximum awareness of the video and to drive impressions, we created a communications cascade to distribute the story across key channels to reach new and current audiences.
Evaluation and Results: This campaign exceeded expectations as it successfully drove website traffic, earned triple the average viewership of branded content on YouTube, and elevated the Adtalem Global Education brand. A few key highlights:
Awareness Outcome: The campaign drove over 1,317,330 impressions across Adtalem’s social media platforms, with 607K stemming from YouTube organically. To date, the documentary has received 477K video views on social media through organic and paid advertising efforts. Kinsey’s story is our most successful YouTube video to date by viewership.
Owned Channel Engagement Outcome: The feature article of the Kinsey story garnered the second most page views in our newsroom for 2024 at 2,099 page views.
Web Traffic Outcome: Walden University’s website saw an increase of 14K in website traffic and a sizable surge of 3.8K searches for “programs” on its website following the launch of the documentary. On the Adtalem umbrella site, we saw a 7% spike in website traffic and 225 new searches for “Walden University” in the month following the documentary’s premiere.
