Mental Health Matters was a long-running joint campaign across three departments within Student Affairs at Emerson College. 2026 was the second year that I had been involved. Building on learning from 2025’s event, this campaign drew from existing imagery and protocols as described in Emerson College’s Brand Guide. Content was designed by me, and edited and approved by a small committee of the team leading the event.

We structured a campaign for Mental Health Matters based on data from 2025 that showed a strong interest from the student community, but a reluctance to engage with events that were considered high cognitive load. Therefore, all text and image campaign material had a soft, playful tone, and centered Emerson’s mascot, Griff.

The focus on community building as a source of mental health linked in activities such as Craft and Relax, a scavenger hunt (called ‘Griff’s Roar Run’) and Puppy Yoga.

This campaign showed strong results in awareness and sentiment, as well as continuing to create a solid, recognizable visual language for this flagship event. Improvements in pre-testing and documentation could be made.

Tools used to create this material included Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, and Canva. Analysis included data from Mailchimp and Meta Business Suite, as well as observational data gathering at events, and post-event sentiment analysis. General improvements were noted in both attendance across all events (up 6%) and in recall of campaigns (up 15% on 2025 according to survey data).

Part of my role as the Communications Specialist for Student Affairs was developing a slide deck for three-monthly divisional meetings. Observing and discussing these meetings candidly with colleagues, I noticed that there was a lack of affiliation with the purpose of these meetings — generally, staff were unable to see themselves in these meetings.

After extensive discussion with the Senior Leadership Team, I piloted a three minute looped video at the beginning of the May 2025 meeting, highlighting achievements, milestones and other ‘good news’ from the twelve departments within Student Affairs.

These videos entailed collection and collation of information through email, design of the videos themselves, and analysis of the results. After some initial issues with the accessibility of the medium, these videos became well-regarded moments for the Student Affairs teams to celebrate each others achievements. These videos had a demonstrable effect on sentiment regarding the divisional meeting, improving positive regard by 12% from 2025 to 2026 according to survey data.

ZineLab was an experimental gallery space, run through the Massey University Library at the Wellington Campus. Part-exhibition, part-workshop, part-low sensory space, this event ran for three days during Orientation 2020 (February 19-21)

Utilizing motion to attract attention as students and other community members walked into the library space, the physical impression that this space made was joyful and relaxing, a quiet space away from the events and new pressures of the first week at college.

#Theorygram was a campaign to introduce theoretical concepts useful to artists and designers studying at Massey University’s Toi Rawhauranga/College of Creative Arts in the Creative Media Production. Initially focused only on students enrolled in a paper taught by Birgit Bachler during the summer semester of 2017-18, this campaign ultimately ran for three years under my management.

A multi-year campaign focused primarily on education and improving perception among undergraduate students, #theorygram began as a very DIY-looking project, utilizing hand-lettering and soft pink and orange gradients. However, as the project sought to harness the authority of the Library and stronger links with the university more broadly, we changed the design to better fit new outcomes.

Campaigns, Strategy & Documentation

This change to the design of the campaign was mostly successful, seeing organic growth of over 200% in a twelve month period. Interactions with library staff also increased in both volume and in positive sentiment, as did the amount of loans of works featured in the program.

This pre-policy document was created to support community members at Emerson College’s Boston campus in performing as Griff, the school mascot.

The tone of this document had to be carefully written to empower and support performers, while also helping them to understand the power that they held as a school mascot. Mascots are a large part of the reputation of any college, and so it’s important for performers to understand and accept their role in upholding positive brand associations.

While this document remained incomplete at the time of my departure from Emerson, I performed all substantial research, writing and design for this guide.