Unifying Higher Education Communications Across NH's Seven Community Colleges
Cookson and the Community College System of New Hampshire (CCSNH) began working together in 2016 to research, develop, and promote business partnership profiles for the system’s seven colleges. Our role has since grown: today we lead CCSNH’s marketing and communications planning, working alongside its other agency partners, and support PR and communications across the system office and all seven colleges.
What We Did
- PR & strategic communications
- Branding & design
- Annual report production
- Promise Program campaign
Public relations and communications
With seven colleges, a system office and a growing number of programs and partners all communicating on their own, CCSNH needed a shared direction. Working with their team and agency partners, we developed a unified marcom plan that aligns the system and its colleges around one campaign theme, with defined audiences, core messaging, and a shared annual calendar. It’s built as a living document that adapts as CCSNH’s leadership and strategic priorities evolve.
That plan guides our day-to-day work as communications advisors to the system office and all colleges. We develop feature stories about students, graduates, and employer partnerships, along with news releases and organic social content. We also produce Choose Community, an e-newsletter that keeps New Hampshire legislators informed about the colleges’ impact. And we support with op-eds and media interviews that raise the colleges’ visibility in the communities they serve.
Press Releases shared
Feature Stories Written
Op Eds Placed
Branding and design
Our design work with CCSNH has spanned multiple areas, including posters, flyers, icons, print and digital ads, annual reports, email marketing templates, display materials and infographics.
We have also taken a consulting role on branding and best practices, running team brainstorms and creating style guidelines for a variety of custom programmatic community college campaigns.
Annual report
Starting in 2018, we developed a model for a comprehensive and informative annual report and have been designing and producing it ever since. Over the years, the annual report content has taken shape in different forms with the overall goal of highlighting the great work of the colleges in both a print and digital format.
- Annual reports designed: 9
Promise Program
With the goal of connecting eligible NH students with financial support, we helped CCSNH launch the Promise Program. We worked on messaging and branding that aligned with the target audience and developed a comprehensive digital ad campaign that reached broad, diverse audiences across multiple platforms. Each channel served a specific purpose —some provided extensive brand visibility, and others delivered strong engagement and click-through activity. This approach ensured the Promise Program was widely seen and meaningfully engaged.
- 7 advertising platforms
- 7,847,706 impressions
- 3 total campaigns between 2023 - 2025
“Cookson has become an extension of our internal team, enabling us to develop, hone and amplify our message well beyond anything we could have done internally. Of particular note is their ability to work with stakeholders across our organization to capture and develop a wide variety of content and deliver it in a way that supports a central message.
Their design expertise has led to the creation of visually compelling pieces that include collateral and web. Account service is highly responsive, helpfully proactive, and undertaken with a well-honed understanding of our mission and needs. The team at Cookson has provided a very significant quantitative and qualitative value-add to our public relations efforts.”
Shannon Reid
Executive Director of Government Affairs and Communications, CCSNH
