LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO SCHOOL OF LAW

Strengthen partnerships by celebrating successes.

You have a strong university with an outstanding reputation. Your alumni are recognized as some of the best in the field. Your success and reputation and theirs are interdependent. So what can you do to strengthen this partnership and help them to succeed in a very competitive marketplace?

Overview

The Loyola University Chicago School of Law has a large body of successful alumni, many of them local, but they didn’t have a good vehicle to reach out to them on a regular basis. The alumni count on their alma mater to maintain high standards and look to the school as a resource for future employees. The school relies upon alumni to demonstrate the heights that can be reached with a degree from their institution and also to offer employment opportunities for new graduates.

So, at a time when many other higher-education institutions were discontinuing their alumni publications, Loyola Law decided to re-introduce theirs. It would be a bi-annual publication distributed to faculty, alumni and prospective students. Its purpose would be sharing news about the school, offering faculty and alumni an opportunity to highlight their successes – which were in turn the School’s own successes - and offering alumni an important opportunity for networking. It would also serve as a vehicle for recruiting and job-placement assistance, and for requesting financial contributions.

The Focus

The magazine needed to portray the energy and vibrancy of the School of Law and the people connected to the school – past, present and future. The content, focusing on “A Proud Heritage…An Ambitious Future,” would feature people associated with the School of Law, in addition to highlighting various programs and activities. So we developed a design that brought the people to life for the reader with large, close-up photography, and emphasized their personal remarks by featuring quotations as important design elements. Photos were also included for each person in the Faculty News section. This warmer, more intimate feeling was an intentional departure from the more conservative design of other University publications, to engage the readership.

The Response

The re-introduction of the magazine was 46-pages, and began with a Message from the Dean encouraging feedback and ideas. The intention was to reduce the number of pages in subsequent issues. However, the magazine received such overwhelmingly positive feedback from the Dean, faculty, students and alumni alike that it actually grew in size. Loyola Law has a wealth of information to share and, we learned, a keen audience to share it with. Alumni were eager to publish their news in the Hearsay section, and faculty wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to talk about their accomplishments in the Faculty News section.

Growing the Partnership

We have produced the magazine twice a year since the Spring of 2006, and we continue to hear positive feedback from Loyola. Building upon the success of the magazine, we went on to design The School of Law Annual Reports, several ads for Pre-Law magazines, the Viewbook, and a recent "First 100 Years" history book celebrating their Centennial.