Educating the educators that E=UC

Overview

AT&T Education deliver infrastructure and communication services to learning institutions across the US. The digital dependence in education has accelerated significantly in the last few years, but the buying and influencing teams contain a range of deans, educators and administrators that operate outside of IT. Similarly, IT resources are often sparce and lack in the expertise and sophistication of enterprise organisations – or even fast-growth start-ups.

AT&T recognised that while it’s important to deliver product and service messages to education purchasing teams, it was crucial to take the discussion to higher-level decision makers to ensure they understood the relationship between collaboration and Unified Communication (UC) technologies and improved academic learning.

This programme commenced pre-pandemic but acted as a solid foundation for conversations and industry debate around resilient, digital foundations of academic institutions in the run-up to, during and after COVID. The topics of internet access, cybersecurity, mobility and collaboration (all enabled by Unified Communications/UC) accelerated massively overnight.

Client

AT&T

What we delivered?

The Rubicon Agency was tasked with developing a programme that would raise brand profile in the higher, further and K12 educational environments by communicating the potential applications and benefits of UC for faculty, administrators and students.

The Rubicon Agency developed a communication programme for non-technologists that positioned AT&T Education as ‘the’ thought leader for Unified Communication in the sector. There was a separate stream of communication to IT teams and technical professionals.

Our programme focused on establishing the relationship between ubiquitous Unified Communication and accelerated learning, taking the discussion above the traditional operational and financial arguments. Around a core thought and tagline “e = UC” (education =Unified Communication), we created a strong link between highly available, secure, inclusive collaboration and on-demand services – and improved learning experiences.

The multi-year effort covered video marketing, sales enablement tools, organic social content, infographic series, eBooks and industry briefings identifying the direct link between collaboration technologies and learning. All were created for non-technical audiences.

What did the campaign achieve?

The programme created a great, zeitgeist construct for AT&T Education to have conversations across their portfolio of networking, security, communications, mobility and professional services solutions.

This proved to be game-changing. Until that time, sales teams would have low-level, point product conversations with IT teams. Aligned with solution-selling change management motions, the programme enabled the business to have more elevated conversations around bigger deal sizes and with accelerated decisions.