Ogilvy Australia

Client: Online Education Services
Product: Swinburne Online
Title: The Six Word Scholarship
Media: Social Media
Country: Australia
Date Of Campaign: 24 May 2019 to 27 June 2019

Background: Situation: Swinburne Online is a university completely dedicated to making quality education more accessible to all people. However, traditional university scholarship applications still require wordy submissions of essays, personal statements, references and evidence of extracurricular achievements. An old-school, unnecessary lengthy and complicated process. Brief: In the modern world of social media and short attention spans, great communicators must be able to communicate succinctly. With this in mind, we wanted to simplify the scholarship application process by focussing only on what really matters. We needed to find an innovative solution to an age-old problem. Objectives: Swinburne Online wants to provide a completely different approach to higher learning. It was time to re-invent the scholarship application process and position our university as a category innovator in Australia and the world. And this way, create more engagement with our target audience and ultimately generate an increase in leads and course enrolments.

Idea: It is claimed that in the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway won a wager against other writers by crafting an entire story in just six words: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”And ever since, the six-word story has been used as a demonstration of writing skill, the ultimate test of creativity, imagination and ingenuity taught in writing courses all around the world. When it comes to writing challenges, the six-word story has been proven against the test of time.That’s why we’ve created a scholarship with a difference, an application without the essays: The Six Word Scholarship.We researched scholarships at other academic institutions and realised their unnecessarily complicated entry requirements were keeping people from the education they really wanted.Swinburne Online wanted to allow every potential student to demonstrate their academic ability with an application process that was simple to enter, but difficult to win.

Results: The ‘Six Word Scholarship’ exceeded all expectations, becoming the most successful social media campaign Swinburne Online has ever produced.With a total budget under $10,000 AUD, we achieved: • 1,822 total applications for the Six Word Scholarship• + 397,000 impressions• 80x above average organic social media engagement• 8.6x total reach above average campaign• 134% increase in course brochure downloads• 223% increase in web traffic during the campaign period• 49x conversion rate above most recent campaign• 2x paid enrolment applications during campaign period• One winner earned their place at Swinburne Online with their original story:“So, one for the honeymoon suite?” • Our winner was Kerry Parker, a 45 years old single mother from Burleigh Waters in Queensland, who said:'I've always wanted to return to study and winning The Six Word Scholarship made me think ‘I can’t wait to do this!’