OIT Article Summaries

Ensuring our undergraduate students are on a path to complete their education within four years is an essential component of CU’s strategy for helping them thrive academically. As part of this important effort to positively impact student success, it was essential to create an engaging message for students and their parents. Promoting this campaign for the CU Denver campus was a well-suited task for Bryan Less, manager, CU Productions.

Less created a video to promote and explain the “15 to Finish” plan that encourages students to take 15 credit hours during the fall and spring semester, or a combination of credits to include summer, to complete 30 credit hours per calendar year. Storytelling with video has become a key technique to meaningfully convey important messages like 15 to Finish and our strategies for student success.

“We needed a reliable, innovative and punctual team to complete the 15 to Finish video project,” said Julia Cummings, marketing director for CU Denver’s School of Education & Human Development. Cummings is also strategizing and marketing efforts around CU Denver’s summer enrollment campaign and CU Denver’s 15 to Finish campaign.

“We allocated approximately one month’s time to quickly move through the video process – from student tryouts, to storyboarding, to on-campus filming and editing. And, we needed to partner with people who understood how to accurately represent CU Denver’s students, culture and branding. Bryan’s passion for the project and subject matter was evident from the first meeting. He and his team filmed in a very professional manner and delivered the results in a timely fashion.”

Positively impacting student success means helping increase retention and completion rates and making sure that message reaches students and parents. “In an effort to improve student success, the provost funded the video to promote this most important message that we want our students to be successful and encourage the 15 to Finish strategy to help increase on-time graduation rates,” said Walter Sylvester, director of financial strategy, Administration and Finance.

According to studies, the power of video lies in conveying a compelling story in an interesting and powerful medium, thereby creating better message awareness and engagement. Video is also particularly useful in grabbing audience attention through social media. Less explains, “The importance of video in promoting messages in this environment has never been greater or in more demand. People are attracted to video because of its ability to engage an audience and reach a wide market.”

CU Productions offers full media production services leading clients through every phase of the process from concept development, content writing and project management ranging from video strategies to podcasts. Recent clients have included schools and departments from the CU Denver and Anschutz Medical Campus and health partners such as: the Colorado Department of Human Services Office of Behavioral Health, School of Medicine, School of Public Health and the Business School, to name a few.

Less majored in film production at the University of Iowa, has over 25 years’ experience in the field, and has been at the helm of CU Productions for more than 10 of those years. He is an Emmy winning producer, editor and videographer, and his work has been featured on HBO and other multiple media outlets.

Do you need assistance from CU Productions? Contact Bryan Less at: bryan.less@ucdenver.edu or 303.315.3609.

Office of Information Technology (OIT) members have been instrumental in helping move exciting initiatives forward and impacting success for the university. For an overview of the services offered by the Office of Information Technology, watch the CU Productions OIT overview video on our YouTube channel: CU Denver|Anschutz OIT.

This is the first article in the series OIT Services in the Spotlight.