The Challenge:

Like other medical schools across the country, COVID-19 forced the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA to get creative in how it recruited top talent into its undergraduate and graduate medical education programs. 

The challenge posed to the team - craft a virtual recruitment campaign that tells the larger story of the experience at UCLA. In the absence of in-person visits, breathe life into the digital realm that we present to our recruits. Build this from the ground up, working around any COVID restrictions, and let’s do it in 1-2 months.

The Solution:

Our goal was to provide a digital experience that - as closely as possible - replicated the feeling of getting an onsite tour, meeting potential peers and mentors, and helped to solidify the emotional draw that potential trainees feel when they are able to experience all this in person. This multi-channel approach spanned 37 videos, 2 websites, and a month-long social media campaign across all branded channels.

 
 

My Role:

I was one of 4 leaders, all orchestrating and providing ‘boots on the ground’ work to help bring this experience to life.

With such a quick turnaround, at a time when LA was in pandemic surge preparation and all of California seemed to be on fire, the implementation of this effort was a blend of internal and external cross-team collaborations.

Tools Used:

Teamwork, communication, UX research, content strategy methodologies, servant leadership, and an agile mindset.

 
 

Discovery & Design

Competitive analysis

To assess where we currently stood in the market, the team researched medical schools nationwide to pinpoint how other top-10 medical universities were adapting to COVID-19 restrictions.

Initial Wireframes

We saw white space in our category and asked ourselves a simple question: How can we empower prospective medical students to know that by coming to UCLA, they’ll have found their people and the purpose that will propel them through their lives?

 
 
 

Sitemaps and Stakeholders

The leadership team identified the appropriate stakeholders across the organization. We wanted to make sure that we not only had the right folks at the table from the beginning but that we were hitting on the correct stories to tell without wasting precious time. We pulled out the fact-based UX research we had on our user groups, set our creative writers to developing emotion-drenched storylines, and began crafting strategies hand-in-hand with our core groups.

 

Content Strategy

Video content:

Our collaborative teams developed 37 videos targeted to specific areas of interest for prospective trainees. Our production teams crowdsourced content and created a tiered approach to tap into institutional knowledge from internal teams. We created aerial campus tour videos and welcome videos from the Dean and Vice Dean for Education to articulate the ethos and excitement of what it means to be a student at UCLA.

  • Hero videos – top-level content spanning the entire school; aerial campus tour and welcomes from the Dean and Vice Dean for Education.

  • Program-specific videos – overviews, information, and tours of 24 programs.

  • Crowdsourced videos – virtual housing tours, student life, leadership and mentorship opportunities, clinical experiences - the feeling of UCLA from the folks already here.

  • All including a strong focus on the medical school’s commitment to equity and diversity inclusion for physicians, trainees, staff, and patients.

Web development:

  • One entry point, bifurcating into two websites targeting distinct audiences.

  • Live chat feature for prospective medical students.

  • Illustrative moments, content strategy, and storytelling tactics crafted with data-driven, UX research foundations.

 

Social Media:

  • Month-long campaign across LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

  • Social media aggregation pulls UCLA community (earned) and branded (owned) moments from social to the websites.

  • Videos from the campaign, reimagined for various social channels.

 

Key Learnings and Results

  • Through data, flexibility, and creativity, we embraced the constraints posed to us COVID-19.

  • We offered a live-chat feature on our website that made it easy for prospective trainees to connect directly with students and faculty. This feature alone drove a 30% conversion in the first month of the campaign.

  • Ultimately, through articulating our organizational “why” and making it easy for students to self-select why UCLA was the right choice for them, we successfully grew the total number of 2021 admission submissions by 38%.