St Aloysius’ College is a leading independent school based in Glasgow. 

In 2019, Maguires created the highly successful campaign, ‘The Start of Something Great’, to promote the school’s annual open day.

Over the next few years, the campaign was successfully retained, with the central ‘hero’ images being updated each year, with additional video and web content added into the marketing mix, to further strengthen the offering. 

For 2022’s campaign, the client was keen to evolve the campaign style, while still remaining true to what made the original campaign successful.

Maguires was also commissioned to capture a fresh bank of photography of school life for the in-house social media team. 

This saw us spend two days at the school, across several locations, capturing a wide variety of school activities. From this we were able to assemble a fresh collage style and an expanded range of ‘hero’ pupil shots, providing variety and diversity for the digital and outdoor campaigns.

Finally, this year we decided to create a small thank-you for our ‘heroes’. Each pupil’s family was sent individualised posters with their name adapted to be part of ‘The Start of Something Great’ strap-line.

St Aloysius’ College is a leading independent school based in Glasgow.

In 2019, Maguires created the highly successful ‘The Start of Something Great’ campaign to promote their annual open day (view the full case study here).

One year later, and with the world in the throes of a global pandemic, the likelihood of a traditional face-to-face open day was slim. Anticipating this, the school briefed us to explore an alternative solution which helped prospective parents and pupils learn about the school in advance of applying.

We knew that a virtual open day would clearly be a necessity. This would allow for direct communication between parents, staff members, and pupils – both current and prospective. To this end, we engaged our events partner (and client) Cameron to discuss the requirements for a live virtual event.

Our ambition was to bridge the gap between the experience of a physical event and that of a virtual one. This would allow prospective parents to tour through the campus at their leisure, getting a sense of the school environment and the beauty of the city centre location.

Our solution was a bespoke, informative and feature-rich microsite that would provide a range of multimedia content which could be explored in advance of the live virtual event. The main body of the microsite was a series of six films that would help to tell the story of St Aloysius in greater detail. Using a range of interviews with staff, pupils and parents, coupled with reportage footage of the campus, facilities and daily school life, the final films each focused on a different element and resulted in over 20 minutes of high-quality content for viewing.

Alongside this, we commissioned a bespoke 3D map of the campus, drone footage of the building exteriors and a 360-degree interactive tour which showcased the inside of the main school buildings.

Finally, the virtual tour website provided a prospectus download (also designed by Maguires) and an online application form for the open day.

The site acted as a vital companion to our digital advertising campaign, which pushed traffic to an online applications page. The virtual tour site was then served to interested applicants as well as being pushed out as part of a separate, targeted social media campaign.

The results for the 2 virtual open days (Senior School, and the Junior School) were hugely encouraging. Since the campaign commenced in November, there have been 26,851 link clicks to the microsite from social channels. Campaign content served on social channels has had a total reach of 65,551 with 28,995 video views by early December 2020.

Following a successful pitch, Maguires were appointed to produce a multi-channel creative campaign for leading independent school, St Aloysius’ College.

Our campaign was to focus on driving awareness of the school and increasing attendance at their upcoming open evening.

The school motto, Ad Majora Natus Sum – which translates as “I was born for greater things” – is the foundation upon which the school’s teaching philosophy is based. “Our young people not only have their academic potential ignited, but are also taught to look on the world with empathy, offering their talents and energies for the benefit of others”, states Headmaster Matthew Bartlett.

It’s clear that what makes St Aloysius’ College unique in a competitive sector is this ‘greater’ good, which became the heart of the campaign. We wanted to keep the existing ‘Great Things Happen in The Green Blazer’ as an overall brand strapline, but give this year’s campaign a more direct call-to-action, while remaining true to what makes the school special.

Our solution was to highlight that choosing to attend St Aloysius’ is ‘The Start of Something Great’, at whichever stage a pupil joins – from Kindergarten through to the Senior School. The use of the word ‘great’ gave us the ability to tie the campaign to the school’s traditions, while also promoting the many ‘great’ aspects of the school: the friendships, the opportunities, the facilities and, of course, the results.

The creative centred around an impactful collage style – bursting with activity, but with a singular ‘hero’ image at its core. This echoed the school’s ethos of “plac(ing) the formation of the whole person at the centre of all learning.”

All campaign photography was shot by Maguires, with the campaign film also being directed and edited by our in-house team. We developed the campaign creative across a multitude of assets, implementing them as part of a targeted online marketing strategy on Facebook and Instagram, with a bespoke canvas ad within Facebook that helped to streamline the sign-up process.

The campaign was highly successful, with a 52% increase on the previous year’s attendance figures.