PROJECT 4
Hussian’s Press Play
An out-of-the-box approach to culture build.
Challenge
Just a few years ago, Hussian College was a sleepy, single-campus commercial art institution on the East Coast. With its limited offerings of visual arts degrees, it had been steady and stable for nearly seventy-five years, and boasted a set of bought-in stakeholders that held tightly to the school’s often-demonstrated and well-communicated mission, vision, and values. A shift in ownership structure and the addition of a new CEO, however, brought forth a new business model bent on expansion. As a result of acquiring several schools across multiple states, Hussian College inherited a large, decentralized, and understandably skeptical roster of staff, faculty, and students. Shifting from a single campus model to a college-system and lacking experience with cross-campus communication, leadership faced the possibility that, for lack of a well defined culture, they may lose the individuals they would need most to keep their evolving business afloat and growing.
Objective
Having made attempts to communicate mission, vision, and values (the through-line to which all new stakeholders would be connected), as well as expected behaviors and norms via monthly emails and in-person interactions during periodic campus visits, the CEO was expressing frustration. Despite his best efforts, his emails were being read inconsistently and falling short in landing the way he’d hoped and in-person visits with each of the campuses proved too few and far between to make any significant cultural impact. He was failing to win over his team and encourage buy-in to the new organization and sought a new way to reach them… an out-of-the-box approach to culture build that would be dynamic, fluid, driven by the receiver, and ultimately both engaging and inspiring.
Result
Knowing that one of the newly acquired schools, the campus I was helping to run in Los Angeles as Associate Dean of Performing and Entertainment Arts, boasted degree programs in acting, dance, and film and digital content, gave the CEO and idea. Engage this uniquely creative asset in helping to solve the problem. That in mind, he reached out to me with a pitch. “What if we produce a television series through which we share out our values… our mission… define who we are and make clear who we aim to be as an organization down the road,” he asked, “and you produce it. When a new employee is added to our team, rather than asking them to read an email from me or come to a meeting in order to get to know us, we’ll just say PRESS PLAY and it’ll do the job of inspiring them to buy-in.” Livened, I jumped at the chance to give shape to the idea. I brainstormed a bit, pitched back a pair of concepts based on values he wished to communicste, put together a quick budget, and he approved, I rallied my creative team, and began work on producing the first two ‘episodes’ that would potentially seed a semi-monthly season. The videos were high-concept, emotional, starred Hussian College students and alumni, and were written to both educate and inspire. After their release, surveys were taken and Hussian employees across timezones made clear through their answers that the videos were indeed helping them to feel more positively about Hussian and, though still skeptical in some cases, they were experiencing heightened levels of curiosity, interest, and buy-in for the organization.