POLS Office Tour

Responsibilities: Art direction, design & animation, illustration, presentation structure, and story

As part of their pitch process, the team at Pearson would bring university representatives to their office in Orlando to allow everyone to get to know each other, and help walk clients through precisely what the Pearson Online Learning Services team could bring to their school. This included a guided walkthrough of the space, where leaders of different divisions would take turns talking to the university representatives, explaining their departments’ function and answering questions.

When I was hired at Pearson, my first assignment was to help them design and develop an entirely new approach to their office tour for potential & existing partners. I collaborated with people all over the organization, including business development executives, marketing leaders, enrollment and support teams, and everything in between, helping each leader structure their raw information into an engaging, streamlined visuals to aid their conversations with clients. I also collaborated with the business team and project manager to then take these seemingly disparate arms of the business and forge a singular, memorable experience by framing them as steps on a potential student’s journey — from consideration to enrollment, all the way through graduation.

Title slide

Shown on each screen as the tour approached, this could be customized with the names of the tour guides at each point.

Establishing the Problem

We open the deck with this set of slide animations, wherein we establish the pain points of both the potential student and the university. Each has a goal, but has different things that require their focus. Then we show how POLS can come in and help universities bridge that gap between them and reaching those potential online learners.

Showing our Work

Pearson is a data-driven company, and here we show that data in a 2-part transition slide, where we quickly list what we do as well as relating significant data points to those tasks.

Introducing our Hero

At the end of the marketing section of the deck, we discuss personas and how we target the right fit for the client’s school. This visual demonstrated that as the speaker went through, and then posed a question to segue one of our business development executives to step in and move the discussion along.

The Marketing Funnel

A key concept our team referred to throughout the deck is the marketing funnel, demonstrating the different steps a potential student may go through as they go from a low-intent lead to a high-intent lead, and then into the application process.

Our hero continues

To introduce our social targeting strategies, we used an animation of our potential student scrolling through Facebook, seeing a friend of her’s has gotten a promotion, and then coming across one of our ads, to demonstrate the consideration portion of the funnel. We also showed our student moving on from the ad without engaging, a common occurrence, opening the discussion to why this is not necessarily the end of the student’s journey.

The Recruitment Journey

Moving into the Recruitment portion of the presentation, this slide demonstrated the different stages of the POLS engagement strategy, samples of messaging, and some datapoints surrounding this. Using a stepped animation like this helps the speaker control the pace of their content, keeping their audience focused on the current point they’re making, without just dumping every piece on the slide at once, running the risk of splitting the audience’s focus.

Returning to the Funnel

This slide demonstrated the recurring theme of the marketing funnel. While many might not consider it relevant once our recruitment support staff has made contact with the student, experience has shown us that potential students can go backwards and forwards, and this demonstrated how we mitigated that.

Student Retention

With these slides, we go into the new considerations an enrolled student may have, detailing the internal and external factors, and how the Student Support team members could make a difference to support the student.

Ending the Story

In closing the deck, we return to an animation showing our student-now-graduate back on their phone, sharing their achievements. We close the animation with another graphic related to how we opened, showing Pearson as the support for both the university and the student.

View PDF of Full Deck

I also led the way in how to technically achieve a seamless presentation experience — we had mounted television monitors in multiple spaces, and they had previously had a person camped nearby to control the deck as the tour came through. In lieu of this, I suggested we switch to Apple’s Keynote software to build the deck in, as it would allow our presenters to use a phone or tablet to control the deck directly, refer to their presentation notes in an unobtrusive manner, and even make quick edits on the fly. I also built all the animation natively inside Keynote, using a mix of click and automatic transitions and build effects. This kept the deck flexible, because it allowed us to adjust the timing of animation for different tours, in anticipation of how different clients may want to stop and dive deeper into different portions of the presentation.