Campus Sonar Connection: When We Can't Connect

Project Stories

Campus Sonar Connection: When We Can’t Connect

Here at Magellan, we love celebrating the exceptional work of our clients. We especially love it when a client, like Campus Sonar, shares their project story in their own, unedited words. Campus Sonar is a social listening agency offering social media conversation research, audience analysis, and actionable insights for colleges and universities.

As a startup agency specifically focused on higher ed, our connection to the community is the backbone of our existence and what drives the work we do. Most years, conferences give us the chance to physically connect with that community. We meet folks in our booth, grab coffee, get hugs and chats at presentations, have dinner, catch a karaoke show, or cheers each other over a box of donuts.

We connect. But the pandemic changed everything.

Knowing it will be a while before we’ll be able to have the same kind of physical connection again, we wanted to find a way to let our community know we appreciate them, beyond the barriers outside of our control. And we needed to be able to do that nimbly, from our homes, when the moment strikes.

There was a point a handful of months into the pandemic where various members of our team (Sonarians, as we call them) sent postcards to everyone else. All within a week, with no pre-planning. It was kind of magical, and an indicator that we were missing our connection, and reaching out. So postcards seemed like an obvious choice! Even better, add some stickers because 1) who doesn’t like stickers and 2) we hope they’ll offer an extended reminder of our thoughts and appreciation.

For some context on the design, we hired Visual Designer Gillian Drier in 2020 and she’s since been updating our visual brand. We wanted to use the postcard design as an opportunity to showcase the direction we’re moving in, and with that we want to start creating brand recognition with a strong, clean design of original illustrations that communicates who we are and what we love to do.

For the stickers, we wanted to offer a little bit of everything.

Show who we are: A campus flag represents our main audience, colleges and universities.
Show what we do: Social listening.
Show what we like: Donuts. It may have started with Steve’s favorite pastime of eating and photographing donuts, but they’ve also become a part of how we connect (folks who’ve visited our booth at conferences get this). And come on, who doesn’t love donuts?
And be fun! We wanted to create something fun and high energy people will enjoy.

It’s great hearing the details of how this project came together from idea to execution. We really love the way that Campus Sonar brought together the why, the what, and the how to create a deliciously fun and engaging sticker sheet that featured a wide variety of stickers to connect authentically with their audiences. Stickers for the win!

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