Introduction
President Tom Traves spoke to 500 alumni, donors and friends on September 30 about some major changes at Â鶹´«Ã½. Highlights included explaining the university's recent integrated brand marketing initiative.
Earlier this week I heard the corporate head of a major hardware chain explain that their stores didn't sell nails, boards or new tile flooring. Rather, they sold dreams of beautiful homes. This made me think about Â鶹´«Ã½ from the perspective of our "customers". Traditionally, we talk about education and research. They think we provide the road to a better future, a future for themselves of rewarding careers and a future for our community of progress through research and innovation.
This speaks directly to the theme of our dinner tonight: Inspiration. Someone once said that education is not the filling of a pail, it's the lighting of a fire. For the past 18 months, we have been working inside the university to develop a marketing campaign and to articulate a clear brand image for Â鶹´«Ã½ that captures the way we help to light that fire.
Some people might wonder why we would engage in an activity that seems, at first blush, more suited to people who sell soap or soup. The truth is, however, that we operate in a very competitive world. Universities compete to attract students. We compete to hire the best professors. We compete with many others to rank high in government spending priorities. And, as most of you have experienced, we compete with many worthy causes for your philanthropic support. So, whether we like it or not, we're deeply involved in marketing. Our only choice is whether we choose to market by design or by default.
There are many definitions of branding out there, but I like the notion that through our brand we present our qualities and characteristics in ways that our students and stakeholders value.
To define, clarify and articulate our brand, we've spent a lot of time talking to our students, our alumni, government and opinion leaders. What you told us you valued about Â鶹´«Ã½ was the sheer scope of our academic program choices, the quality of our faculty, our supportive and collaborative campus learning environment, our meaningful research, our location in the dynamic Halifax community, and our historic reputation for outstanding graduates who truly light up the world.
When we translated these qualities into marketing language, into our brand identity, they boiled down to a single brand promise for every experience we offer: Opportunities That Inspire.
"Opportunities that inspire" is a very powerful idea. It cuts across all of our Faculties and all of our activities. It speaks to individual aspirations and our collective impact. It captures our unique role as Atlantic Canada's major comprehensive, research intensive, graduate and professional university. It also speaks directly to our highly successful undergraduate programs that attract a disproportionate share of the country's best students from all corners of Canada. These students who are starting out on their academic careers particularly look to us for the inspiration so necessary to find their true calling in life.
Powerful ideas need effective communication to fulfill their potential. That was the next stage of our branding exercise, to express our vision in a simple phrase. After looking at literally hundreds of combinations, we finally found the perfect choice: Inspiring Minds. "Inspiring Minds", two words that evoke a host of possible meanings. "Inspiring" is both an adjective and a verb. Our tag line therefore describes both our character and our mission. Used as an adjective, Inspiring Minds speaks to the quality and capacity of our faculty, students, programs and facilities. Used as a verb it captures the process of education and research itself, that moment when we light the fire, where we truly inspire personal growth and development.
As you can see from the visual images we've been showing this evening, we've also found attractive new ways to package our ideas in advertisements, recruitment brochures and on our web site.
Finally, there's another point to inspiring minds, namely our impact on and contribution to community needs through our education and research activities. It's not easy or straightforward to measure Â鶹´«Ã½'s impact, to trace the ways we inspire innovation and development. We can talk about our direct impact - say on the economy where we buy and sell hundreds of millions of dollars worth of goods and services each year - but our indirect impact is more complex and probably more important. For example, a recent poll indicated that 83 % of Nova Scotians felt completely satisfied or mostly satisfied with their personal use of our health care system. That health care is provided primarily by graduates of Â鶹´«Ã½'s Faculties of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Professions. These are Â鶹´«Ã½'s inspiring minds at work. I could go on at great length with other examples, but let me suggest just one other instance. The next time you attend a play at the Neptune Theatre, look at where the actors, directors and costume designers initially learned their craft, or if you attend the symphony, check out how many orchestra members teach at Â鶹´«Ã½. Our cultural impact may be indirect, but it is pervasive and profound.
It is still too early to assess the full results of this new initiative. I can report, however, that our enrolments are up again to a new record total. Moreover, as we've grown, we've kept our focus on quality as well. Over 97% of our freshmen class had an entering average greater than 75%. At the other end of the pipeline, the proportion of our students who graduated in a timely manner also rose to a new record. As I mentioned earlier, we're also competing to attract the best faculty members to work at Â鶹´«Ã½. This past year we successfully completed 60 searches for new faculty members. I think it is amazing that in 56 cases our first choice candidate accepted our offer to come here. Perhaps they've heard that Â鶹´«Ã½ repeatedly ranks among the best research milieus in the world. Certainly our research record is extraordinary. This past year the total of research grants and contracts earned by our faculty in highly competitive circumstances increased from $77 million to $92 million. Our administrative staff members also distinguished themselves, winning awards for service innovation and for our highly effective environmental management systems.
As you can see, inspiring minds is not just rhetoric at Â鶹´«Ã½. At the end of the day, however, we will be judged not by what we bring to the table but by what our graduates take away with them and what they do with it. In just a few minutes, we're going to introduce you to some Â鶹´«Ã½ graduates who truly deserve being called inspirational. World class Olympic athletes like Karen Furneaux did us proud this summer. Creative entrepreneurs like Tanya Shaw-Weeks leveraged her unique educational program in Costume Studies together with innovative R & D work in our Faculty of Engineering to launch an exciting new business opportunity. You'll also hear from Dani Oore, a fabulous sax player who is making a very strong impression on the contemporary jazz scene. Graduates like Karen, Tanya and Dani, and so many others that you may know and admire, embody all the values and the dreams that we hope we project through our new image. For those of us working at Â鶹´«Ã½, they're our inspiration.
Finally, let me take each one of you back to your first days at Â鶹´«Ã½. However many years ago that was, something very important happened. You connected to our university. Somebody or something in your Â鶹´«Ã½ experience inspired a lifetime allegiance to your fellow classmates and your alma mater. As a result, decades later, here you are this evening. I think that's pretty amazing and a genuine tribute to the faculty and staff with whom you worked many years ago. As I look ahead, I feel strongly that we owe it to our current students to inspire a similar attachment and to reproduce the lifelong loyalty to Â鶹´«Ã½ that you have shown so faithfully. That's our challenge today. That's also our hope for the future. Let me thank you for your example.