Duke University is an institution with over 100 years of history, 40,000 employees and several hundred thousand alumni. As such, we’re sitting on countless stories that at first glance appear mundane. Buildings constructed. Students graduated. Employees hired. No big deal.
But that’s not true. These stories matter to our community, our employees, our students, our alumni and our prospective students.
Inspired by pop culture and the popularity of comic book hero origin stories, Duke Origins – a new YouTube series launched in 2019 – is meant to shine a spotlight on the stories around campus that are either overlooked or hidden from view: The hours of planning and thought that went into the new dorm on campus, the man behind the scenes who cares for the Duke Chapel organs, the people who brought jazz to campus, the history of our school colors and mascot.
Designed specifically for YouTube, this series also fits into our larger strategy for the most popular video-sharing platform on the internet.
Many higher ed institutions and brands use YouTube to house their video content in order to embed it in other places, like on their website. YouTube works great for that, but we have decided to start approaching YouTube as its own social media channel, creating content specifically designed to take advantage of its unique functionality. As part of our strategy we have launched three new YouTube series: Extra Credit, Why Do You Study That?, and Duke Origins. The key features of these series are their eye-catching format, branded thumbnails, end screens, and calls to action. Our goal in producing serialized content is to give viewers an idea of what to expect and attract more channel subscribers.
Normally when we put a video up on social media, it makes the most sense to direct-upload the file to whatever channel we’re going to use. The channel algorithms highly favor direct uploads because it keeps people on that platform rather than sending them somewhere else. But with our YouTube-first strategy, we have had to develop new ways of sharing our content. For Twitter and Instagram, we are running preview videos, formatted specifically for the platform they are posted to and using a link to the full YouTube video.
Duke Origins is specifically meant to reach the Duke community, which includes current and prospective students, employees, and alumni. Origin stories are meant to reveal how a character became who they are. Likewise, we want our audience to feel more connected to the people and places that define Duke University.
The two episodes of Origins published so far have gotten more than double our typical engagement, gained subscribers, and reached a diverse audience. After four days on YouTube, the pilot episode reached 3,093 views compared to our typical performance of 700 views during that time period. Since implementing our YouTube strategy as a whole, the average percentage of video viewed has gone up from 18.3% to 23.4%, our subscribers have increased steadily, and we have doubled our unique views.
Some of the comments we have received on YouTube are below:
“This is incredible. Wish we could see more!”
“So interesting. Nicely done!”
“What a wonderful video. Duke is a great educational institution principally because its senior staff personnel are so expert and dedicated.”
