Generation Study Abroad
The Institute of International Education's campaign to double the number of U.S. students who study abroad by the end of the decade.
Video animation by Big Yellow Taxi. Script and Direction by Atif Toor, Barbara Taff, Nikki Davis and Nikki Lebenson Angulo
The Context
IIE has long administered some of the most important U.S. study abroad programs in the United States (Fulbright, Gilman, Boren). And we collect the most comprehensive data on U.S.study abroad - which showed us terribly low numbers of U.S. students were going overseas, while rapidly increasing students from other countries were coming to study in U.S. AS IIE approached its 100th anniversary, we decided that this was the time to invest in an initiative to change those numbers.
The Problem
We successfully got over 600 universities, organizations and governments to commit more than $185 million in scholarships and support study abroad - but we needed to begin actually engaging students and individuals with the cause of the campaign. How could we connect with study abroad alumni who don’t know about IIE or about Generation Study Abroad and engage them as advocates for Generation Study Abroad?
The Solution
We partnered with the New York Times in Education to create a video contest, asking study abroad alumni to share their study abroad stories with a focus on impact and encouraging others to study abroad. This tied into the larger #GenerationStudyAbroad hashtag campaign, which has been tweeted 234,000 times, used on Instagram 2,300 times and reached more than 36 million people on social media. The winners would receive a cash prize, and their videos would be shown at the IIE Summit on Generation Study Abroad in October of 2015 as part of the launch of the student campaign.
The Team
• The Generation Study Abroad Program Team: Wagaye Johannes, Nikki Davis, Sarah Franco (J.K. Watson Intern)
• Technical set-up, social media and marketing: Nikki Lebenson Angulo, Janitza Medina (CUNY Lehman College student)
The Execution
IIE has a very small communications teams and a limited budget for producing multimedia. I worked with our existing digital asset management system to craft a low-cost, low effort, secure way to collect video entries. We then partnered with Janitza Medina, a CUNY Lehman college student and J.K.Watson intern who had worked with us to create a Generation Study Abroad video with IIE staff, to make a fun, different (IIE can be pretty formal as an organization) promotional video for the contest, which we promoted on Facebook and YouTube. It remains our second most watched YouTube video ever.
The contest ran for two months and we received over 115 eligible submissions. The two winning videos were chosen by a panel of judges, including staff from the New York Times.
The Results
Ten runners up were also chosen and, for the month before the winners were shared, we did an episodic release of each video, giving individuals and the organizations/schools that helped them study abroad shout outs online. These got great retweets was a way to engage people in #GenerationStudyAbroad. Below is one example from Stephanie Gentle - she retweeted it, the programs she studied abroad on (who are commitment partners) retweeted it and it was a great way to show off impact while thanking some of the people and organizations that make study abroad possible.
The two winning videos were released at the IIE Summit on Generation Study Abroad. We saw a huge spike in the use of the #GenerationStudyAbroad hashtag, and the videos were some of the most engaging contents (as in, according to analytics, they engaged more people) than almost any other previous posts from the campaign.
The contest added over 100 stories and over 5 hours of alumni footage that we can now use in future productions to illustrate impact. Producing high quality video about exchange is a huge challenge for IIE, and this contest helped is overcome the obstacle of cost.