CalTeach—a program designed to produce professional teachers with rigorous STEM backgrounds—asked Molly Duggan Associates to create a new brand identity. The brand needed to attract student recruits while capturing the attention and imagination of both students and faculty on campus. Based on recommendations from several other university clients Molly Duggan Associates had worked with, the CalTeach team had high expectations for a fresh and comprehensive identity and campaign plan — and they needed it delivered in 3 months.
Molly Duggan Associates took a novel approach to the CalTeach branding project repositioning how K-12 teachers are perceived. Often, the most brilliant students are encouraged to go into research or other fields rather than teaching. By creating the “Bold Community of Scholars Igniting Discovery” campaign, Molly Duggan Associates aligned teaching with the qualities that great teachers embody — scholarship and discovery — reshaping perceptions of K-12 teaching professionals and helping to attract the best and the brightest students to the teaching profession.
From the first planning meetings to delivery 3 months later, Molly Duggan Associates conducted stakeholder interviews, performed strategic analysis, developed a comprehensive brand identity and guidelines, created collateral materials, and delivered a long-range campaign roadmap to help the CalTeach staff deploy successive waves of attention-grabbing activities. The roadmap included strategies ranging from e-mail blasts, to postcards and banners, to t-shirts and other specialty items, to social media strategies and established a coherent and easy-to-execute campaign to highlight CalTeach’s core message: becoming a teacher means changing the world. Working within the Brand Guidelines, Molly Duggan Associates created materials that reflect the campus standards while uniquely representing the CalTeach identity and brand essence.
The market challenge for CalTeach is twofold: to reach target audiences consisting of STEM faculty and students and to overcome the stigma attached to the K-12 teaching profession. The campaign aims to help students—and their faculty mentor —realize the importance of careers in primary and secondary education to maintain a healthy society. The phased campaign designed by Molly Duggan Associates begins with the primary challenge of raising CalTeach’s profile and proceeds from there to instill the idea that teachers can be among the most significant change agents in the modern world.
Client Summary
The mission of CalTeach is to elevate the concept of teaching as a professional career, and works to recruit, train, and retain tomorrow’s math and science teachers for urban schools. Teachers with the greatest respect for the learning process realize that they must challenge and expand their minds to do so for their students. CalTeach seeks to inspire professionals committed to learning as well as to teaching, who are dedicated to the proposition that education is the key to human progress.
