All Things Words

For the third instalment in our ‘HE Copy We Love’ series, we’re focusing on a short film produced by one of our own clients, UCL.    It's fair to say, UCL Faculty of Medical Sciences have knocked it out of the park with this one. In a sector where video content is too often undermined by a lack of ambition, this short film deliberately subverts your expectations of a science explainer vid, and brings the camaraderie and frustrations of cutting edge research to life. (Link to our breakdown in the comments) Are there any other brilliant HE marketing campaigns you’d like to see highlighted? Get in touch, either on LinkedIn or at allthingswords.co.uk.   

Helping reinvent the flagship publication of the world's number one institution for architecture and the built environment? Don't mind if we do. With over 20,000 views in 12 months, and an average read time of 20 minutes, we're pretty chuffed with the way this one's gone - and so is Liz Griffith, The Bartlett's Head of Marketing and Communications. There's a link in the comments if you'd like to read the full case study.

Ever noticed how copywriters have a tendency to create a business name to hide behind? (No shame, we've all done it.) 'Megacorp Copywriting & Publishing, Inc.' is usually just Mark in his pyjamas, tapping at a laptop. What you get with All Things Words, however...is a little bit more than that. Six times more, actually. We're a whole volleyball team's worth of writers, so when you turn us loose on your copy or brand project, we're bringing a bit more to the table than Mark. (No offence, Mark.)

Sooo... we're about 500 comms into our copy and content partnership with UCL now. We’ve worked for more than 13 different teams, turning out everything from high-impact research storytelling to queer walking tour scripts. But it still feels like a ‘pinch me’ moment, every time we reflect that there’s multiple ATW writers in any given month creating content for one of the greatest (and largest) universities in the world. Landing UCL as a client was a big story for us. So big, we couldn’t do it justice with a bog-standard ‘client problem/what we did/results’ style case study. There’s been way too many twists and turns, lightbulb moments and fascinating projects to just boil it down like that. So instead, we’ve interviewed three of our closest collaborators at UCL – three women who each play a different, vital role in spreading the word about the game changing, world-altering activities of Britain’s brightest boffins. We’re honestly grateful for every chance we get to talk to these three, and the insights they share about communication, science, education and marketing. We hope you enjoy reading what they’ve got to say, too (big chunks of this case study are lifted directly from those chats). Because no matter how big the ideas are, or how knowledgeable the audience is, the best communications always feel like a conversation between two people. (the link's in the comments)

‘Interdisciplinary’ is fast becoming the HE equivalent of ‘innovative’, or ‘blue-sky thinking’, or ‘AI-driven’ (ugh) This is how genuinely useful words get put out to pasture. Some overworked HE marketer hits Ctrl+V one too many times, and it’s over. Just another tired old buzzword that’s losing its buzz. Which is a real problem if your course is genuinely interdisciplinary. Because education (and society) needs to combine expertise from a lot of different disciplines, if we’re going to stand a chance of tackling the profound challenges facing our communities and our planet. Gráinne Sharkey and the marketing team at one of the UK’s most exciting new HE institutions, LIS: The London Interdisciplinary School, have opted for a refreshing, straight-talking approach to this dilemma. In the second instalment of our ‘HE Copy We Love’ series, we’re breaking down the LIS website as a shining example of how good copy and web design can help unis reclaim overused and abused terminology. Have a gander at the link in the comments below, and we’ll explain exactly how LIS have fished ‘interdisciplinary’ out of the generic soup of wordy nothingness that gets served up on far too many HE websites. Oh, and if you’ve got any recommends for stand-out HE marketing examples you’d like us to feature, drop us a comment and we’ll have a nosey. 

It's the time of year for a 'Ho Ho Ho' - but we're still thinking about 'HE, HE, HE' (here's why):

What does good HE copy look like?    To answer that question, All Things Words are launching a regular series, ‘HE Copy We Love’, celebrating and showcasing the very best in HE copywriting and marketing.     These are the pieces we share between ourselves, the pieces that have us whistling with envy, muttering ‘damn, I wish WE’D come up with that’. In this series, we’re getting forensic, putting these mini-masterpieces on the bench to find out what makes them click.    For our first entry, we’d like to share Nottingham Trent University's ‘Researchers Revealed’. We’re not alone in recognising its brilliance – Hannah Hopkins, HE storyteller and Undergraduate Marketing Officer at Nottingham Trent, was rightly awarded Content Marketer of the Year 2023 at the Higher Education Content Marketing Awards for this work.    You can read our breakdown of ‘Researchers Revealed’ - a candid, funny and moving campaign that spotlights the humans behind the academic excellence – by following the link in the comments below.    If there are any other brilliant HE marketing campaigns you think we should highlight, drop us a comment below, too. 

If you haven’t heard of All Things Words – or want to know a bit more about us – this post is for you.     In short:   We’re a specialist HE comms and content agency.   Which means we spend ALL of our time tapping away for universities (and a handful of other education clients).     We write about courses.   We write about research.   We help unis tell better stories.    Because we believe HE is jam-packed with value.   But unis often find it hard to articulate that.    That’s where we come in.     Where we’ve come from:  The agency started out as a small copy business, run by specialist HE copywriter Jo Marshall. Nowadays, there are six writers onboard, who all have bags of experience writing for HE.   Here's what we can offer (that just one writer on their own couldn’t):   🎓 More capacity ->Because there’s a whole gang of us now, we can help more universities shout about the brilliant things they have to offer   🎓 More specialists -> We can also bring in just the right writer for each job – whether that’s a dab hand with brands, a great interviewer and research storyteller, or an expert jargon-buster – we’ll get the right person on it  🎓 More happy clients -> Since we’ve grown, we’re now working with more and more unis, including some really big ones.    Here’s what some of them have to say about us: “It has been a real pleasure to work with Jo and her team on a variety of university brand and marketing projects over the years. Whether it’s been articulating our brand positioning and values, writing our tone of voice guidelines or describing the strengths of our courses, the writing they come back with always demonstrates a deep understanding of our audiences, our brand and the HE sector.”  Sarah Amphlett, University of Bath    “We’ve had much higher engagement than in the previous annual editions of The Bartlett Review. The average read time is really high as well. Our top performing story of the year has got a 22-minute average read time, which is just phenomenal.      “All Things Words have been able to bring out the people behind the stories – who they are, their perspectives. They’ve brought them to the fore, so we can hear their tone of voice. Hearing directly from them makes it more engaging.”     Liz Griffith, UCL The Bartlett (UCL’s Faculty of the Built Environment) “Before working with All Things Words, I would say our copy was very factual and to the point. But after working with Jo and her team, we now have more inspirational and emotive copy that reflects the new identity we wanted for the business school. Jo and her writers felt like an extension of our team. We learnt new skills by working together and they also freed us up to focus on other things. If you’re looking for a copywriter, my advice would be to contact Jo immediately.”   Naomi Wilson, University of Loughborough Got a HE copy problem or project? Need some help? Connect with us here or at allthingswords.co.uk and let’s talk it through.  

Client meetings don’t usually include Thai cuisine, worm labs and a 192-year-old skeleton. But most client meetings aren’t with Julia W. from UCL. As the UCL Faculty of Life Sciences' Head of Marketing and Communications, Julia’s boundless curiosity and fierce enthusiasm for mind-bending scientific research is infectious.  All Things Words founder Jo and our regular writer Dan enjoyed a long lunch with Julia at Rosa’s Thai, deep in the heart of Bloomsbury. After we’d eaten, Julia showed us round the hallowed halls of UCL’s Wilkins building and quad, shared some fascinating inside stories, and introduced us to the remains of philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Part-taxidermy, part-waxwork, the Bentham ‘auto-icon’ is now kept in a glass cabinet, which makes it much harder to steal his head (used to be a regular thing, apparently). Anyone else having this much fun in client meetings?