Let’s All Increase Our Screenshotability

in Strategy

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]What’s the first thing most people do after being admitted into a university?

After a brief happy dance, many head straight to social media to share the moment with family and friends. It is, after all, a huge life event.

While the Office of Admissions has always encouraged social interaction surrounding the admit moment, this year we asked ourselves how we could make it easier to share their admit emails and announcements. That’s when we coined a new word: screenshotability.

Screenshotability

We aren’t going to win any awards for creativity for the new phrase, but that doesn’t make it any less important.

Students typically find out they are admitted to Colorado State University in one of two ways:

  1. Their application status page,
  2. An admit email message.

We see both of these announcements pop up on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter throughout the year, but historically they’ve been very tactical. Imagine a traditional admit letter turned into an email. Not very exciting.

2015 admission email
There’s a lot to take in here, but most of it is too small to read — let alone share on social media.

 

This year, we’re trying out a new strategy. We’ve separated the tactical messaging from the admit announcements to let the moment breathe a little bit. To put it simply, we let the big moment be big.

We made sure it would be readable no matter how small it appeared on a mobile device an we also pushed our social messaging straight to the top so that it would be top-of-mind.

While there is plenty more information in the email below, we're letting students enjoy the moment first. They're now Rams and that's what's important.
While there is plenty more information in the email below, we’re letting students enjoy the moment first. They’re Rams and that’s what’s important.

 

We know that this message will be shared thousands of times throughout the upcoming year no matter how it looks. Our hope is that, by paying attention to the details and thinking social first, it will have much more impact on every channel.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]