6 Universities, One New Brand / Cardinal Education

Kelsh Wilson teamed up with the University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, and four other partner universities to brand a major distance learning collaborative. The project presented our creative team with fascinating challenges and yielded valuable lessons.

Kelsh Wilson recently had the privilege of completing an ambitious new branding exercise for an exceptional organization. Now known as Cardinal Education, it is a consortium of six public universities in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and for 30 years, it has been a pioneer in distance learning. (Long before the internet, students gathered at regional “receiver sites” to join classes through a special broadcast network.)  

The organization provides a singularly successful model of a higher ed consortium that really works and in fact, keeps growing. Current members include George Mason, Old Dominion, U.Va., Virginia Commonwealth, Virginia State, and Virginia Tech. It is also a partnership that has faced some unusual challenges when it comes to branding, for instance:

• A complicated name and an outdated logo. Until the rebrand, the consortium was officially known as the Commonwealth Graduate Engineering Partnership, but went by the nickname CGEP (that’s “C-Jep,” not “C-G-E-P”).

• An unusually wide array of key audiences. Not only prospective students, but also the employers who often fund their degrees, state policy makers, and “internal” stakeholders—faculty and administrators on all six partner campuses whose buy-in is essential.

• A vast competitive landscape. Spanning not only the consortium’s original Virginia service area, but now, anywhere and everywhere the internet reaches.

Kelsh Wilson’s solution started with a new name and logo for the program. These were important both because of problems inherent in the old name and logo, and also to signal a fresh start. (In the world of distance learning, it turns out that being the oldest isn’t always best.)

A thorough creative exploration yielded the new name “Cardinal Education.” Easy to pronounce and remember, “Cardinal” also happens to signify “first” (as in a cardinal rule). The name is also a tip of the hat to Virginia’s state bird.

The bold new logo—a sort of badge of learning—features a classic Greek column and rays of progress radiating outward.

In addition to these core brand elements, the Brand Guide that Kelsh Wilson developed also features a set of key messages, starting with the theme The Power of Six. (All the consortium’s competitive advantages, from the breadth of course offerings to the chance for faster degree completion, trace back to the fact that the program offers the best of six member schools, not just a single institution.) Other components of the guide range from tips on tone and voice to a standard boilerplate description of the consortium, along with guidelines on logo usage.

One key lesson this project yielded was that the more complex the client, their audience, and the creative challenge, the more important to find a simple solution. Developing a multi-tiered messaging strategy for Cardinal that addressed audiences at different stages of engagement would have been entirely possible—but a disservice to the partners on the six consortium campuses charged with telling a single story about their program. Here simpler is clearly better.

The second lesson is in the value of process. The goal of a project like this is not simply to produce solid creative work, but also solid consensus around it. And the only way to work with representatives of six consortium partners toward this kind of consensus is step-by-step, by moving methodically from discovery, to creative exploration, to sharing and revising work based on feedback. It’s inclusive, iterative, and patient.  

Only by proceeding in this methodical manner can you keep everyone on the same page and bring new-comers up to speed. Importantly, this lesson applies whether you are communicating on behalf of a consortium of multiple partners or an organization that’s complex in an entirely different way, for instance, a national advocacy group with regional chapters or a comprehensive research university with a couple dozen schools and units.

In fact, you could say that no matter the organization, following a disciplined process is the cardinal rule of brand development.