How to make creative collaboration work for university teams and external partners

Loughborough Business School has global ambitions. It’s already one of the UK’s top-ranking business schools, with an enviable list of accolades and accreditations. Now, amongst stiff competition, it aims to build on this to stand out on the world stage, and become a magnet for a much wider audience of postgraduate students and industry partners.?

This was the context for the creative collaboration between the Loughborough University creatives and Firehaus.

"Collaborating with Firehaus brought a wealth of expertise and changed the creative dynamic of the team on this project. Working with others brought new ideas to the table and made the Loughborough Business School branding even more exciting. Identifying where external partners can add value to projects is so worthwhile and for us, the Firehaus team quickly became part of ours". Paul Atkins, Design Team Leader

Strategy Phase

Right at the start of the rebrand project we set up a multi-disciplinary Rocketship Team. This brought together a diverse range of voices from across the School and acted as the lightning rod during the various stages of research, positioning, ideas and articulations. It became an invaluable platform for engagement, challenge, counter-challenge and progress.

This level of collaboration built relationships and understanding. And it consequently set a precedent that continued into the creative process.

Creative Phase

The first step is an important one and it’s worth giving some thought to so you start on the right foot.

For this project, we had a creative brief that had been defined in the Strategy Phase. The positioning, purpose, mission and vision for the Business School had been clearly defined and this was summed up in the Brand Idea –?Progress With Purpose.

Once the Loughborough and Firehaus creatives had digested the brief individually we started by sharing inspiration – work from any and every sector (notably, very little from HE-world). Design, typography, film, colour-grading, copywriting, you name it we shared it. Work that we liked and thought may have some bearing on where this project could go.

This played an important role not only in the creative inspiration per se but in a shared understanding and ambition for the project. Effectively we built mutual respect, working out how we would communicate and collaborate without ever having to have the land-grab conversation because our roles and responsibilities naturally found their place. All rather grown up.

Ali Freer, Head of Brand said “Creative relationships don’t happen instantly, they usually build over time. But the beauty of this project demonstrates that it doesn’t have to take long when people play nicely.

Progress with Purpose had its internal launch in Spring 2023 and it was great to celebrate the design, copy, film and photography we’d collaborated to produce. But there’s more to come!

Five practical suggestions to improve creative collaboration.

• Always have a written brief –?understood and approved by the SLT
• Use an inspiration-sharing session – as a starting point to build relationships, shared understanding, motivations and ambitions
• Start with the big idea (for the brand or a campaign) –?the details will come later
• Decide who is de facto Creative Director for the project – someone will have to act as the overall creative lead
• Present outputs as a team – and take the pushbacks and plaudits as a team

In-house teams can’t do it all, but we can bolster our capacity and harness our collective talents to produce some really powerful stuff. It really does work both ways".

"Firehaus have celebrated our in-house creativity and has been a fabulous advocate with internal stakeholders. We’ve learnt from them and scratched our heads with them and ultimately, we’ve developed a relationship built on trust and mutual respect.” Ali Freer