Start Up Institute and New Marketing Institute meet again! After joining forces early in 2015, NMI worked closely with Start Up in the latter half of the year to better align potential recruitment opportunities, training and educational partner project goals.
NMI was in need of identifying and executing a mobile experience and promotional strategy for the ambitious learner. How could we utilize mobile—such a large component of everyday life—to continue our educational mission in an engaging manner? With education pivoting towards a less traditional classroom model, our NMI courses and content needed to provide learners with on-the-go available training that extended past the content taught in class and translate the material into mobile games to drive engagement.
Over the course of eight weeks, four students from Start Up institute joined us at our 4 World Trade Center headquarters to work on exactly that—a mobile content and promotional strategy for NMI. The students were in the office every Thursday brainstorming new and innovative ways to accomplish the task at hand. The team registered for multiple course offerings to truly understand the work of New Marketing Institute and worked tirelessly to ensure their focused tracks were represented in the final product—from sales and technical marketing to design and web development. The initial stages of development included conceptualizing a mobile app for NMI and correlating wireframes along with quality checking branding, researching trends and app functionality.
At the end of their program, the Start Up Institute team of four delivered their final product to NMI. The NMI Mobile App for the iPhone was presented and designed with games to enhance the learning experience for existing and prospective clients. The app opens up with a generic log-in page, and provides users the NMI story, class schedules and games tied to specific course material. The demo displayed a dating app-like functionality in which the user is prompted to swipe left or right as a means to identify the buy or sell side of advertising. Pending performance, the user can move on to new levels or will be suggested courses to help improve scores. While the user experience was quite impressive, the promotional strategy was just as well packaged, from email marketing language to app-like designed coasters for branded material during NMI events.
The work done in 2015 is only one portion of our larger continuing partnership with the organization as we begin 2016. We foresee many opportunities ahead in addition to inclusion in recruitment events and Start Up Institute’s Talent Expos throughout the year. How can we cater our offering to the modern on-the-go learner? How can we continue to market NMI to the external community as our brand grows? These are only some of the questions Start Up Institute will help us solve in 2016.