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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Keep getting Captcha failing? These are reasons why...

We know it’s very annoying when you can’t place your order because the Captcha verification keeps failing. Unfortunately we must use it to stop fake orders and spam bots from ruining the site. However, some innocent people get caught in the crosshairs, and it sounds like that may have happened to you.

The most common reason reCAPTCHA doesn’t work is that Google finds your IP address suspicious. Why? We don’t know, but Google does. However, there are other causes that you can control, including outdated web browsers, faulty browser extensions, banned VPN servers, and more. Check out the list:

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And these are just to name a few. And while we would like to be able to fix this problem from our end, we can’t… these are related to your computer and your IP address.

The best way to start is to update your browser, and disable any extensions you may have installed. Or, try a different browser.

If you are working from a corporate network, chances are you are behind a VPN or proxy server, and Google will deem this suspicious, because spammers work behind VPNs and proxy servers. The best thing in this case that you can try is to connect to a network outside your workplace and place your order then. 

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