Building a New Marketing Department and Media Library

A case study on growing an in-house marketing team and the use of at scale media to meet the need.

Background:

Oblate School of Theology is a Catholic graduate school providing theological education for the church's mission and ministry in the world. The Oblates have been serving those in need for 120 years or since 1894 and are truly a mission-oriented organization. That said they had a need to digitize and modernize to keep up with the current demands of education today and wanted a media partner to help them do just that. Oblate chose to take the route of using our agency to create a media library to support their current efforts since marketing personnel were in short supply and current staff needed support.‍

Challenges & Objectives:‍

Despite their rich history, Oblate explained that they were still not well known to their local area and beyond and were looking to increase their market presence and enrollment figures. Unfortunately, marketing the institution was a relatively new function in the institution despite being essential in today’s economy. 

However, Oblate showed a pioneering spirit by not permitting their current circumstance to dictate their future circumstance and decided to find a media partner that could help fill in the gaps. They had a talented Coordinator of Marketing and felt his role in commissioning campaigns was strong, however, the one individual was asking for assistance and certainly strained attempting to adequately support the marketing of 10 Degree programs, 13 Graduate Programs, and 4 Institutes - a total of 23 separate programs and 4 Institutes of learning all with different marketing needs. Oblate rose to the occasion and that’s where our services at Mastic came in to help.

Our role in an annual contract was to support the current efforts of their Marketing Coordinator by generating high value digital assets in quantity and quality that was suitable for an esteemed institution of higher education. This level of media production at scale would not have been possible from one person and Mr. John Marden, the Coordinator of Marketing shared with us this quote for our use in appreciation for our services. We are grateful for his kind words:‍

"One of great things about Mastic is that they are not only Catholic-owned, but they are mission-oriented and specifically work with religious institutions to provide a wide array of services from web development and web design to search engine optimization and videography – you really could not find a better company that mixes the faith, the latest marketing and web innovations, enthusiasm and high-quality professional service to provide this kind of service to specifically Catholic institutions. Mastic is truly a blessing, which is why we at OST have contracted them for a variety of services. I can recommend Mastic with every confidence in their professionalism, technical ability, genuine concern for the needs of the client organization, and their obedience to the faith." - John Marden, Marketing & Digital Communications

Media Samples:

The Proposed Solution:

- Our service therefore generated 36 projects, 300 media tasks, one year of work, and many media events later Mastic built Oblate a comprehensive media library of over 1 Terabytes (TB) of professionally designed and created media in 4K and 6K resolutions.

- Our service also provided a beautiful new redesign for the OSTNews which is distributed to 11,000 individuals across San Antonio who form part of the strong community that this institution serves.

- All in all the copious high quality media produced was later used by their Marketing Coordinator to advance their mission for a net 30% higher ROI.

Future Plans:

Oblate School of Theology plans to continue using their new marketing dollars to expand their department and hire more in-house personnel who can use the media we created for them on their behalf. The role of one coordinator for marketing the entirety of the school and all 23 programs (Graduate, Post-Graduate, Doctoral, etc) was still the primary need to be addressed post-service.

We agreed this still needed to be the focus post-contract and advised them via a competent exit strategy that also left them with beautiful credible media they could use until they could enhance their marketing department with more personnel. We congratulate them on their success with their newly created media as we amicably completed our contract together.

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