Nurturing the future in higher education
ReUp Education was doing genuinely important work — helping adult students who had stopped out of college find their way back, while simultaneously partnering with universities and, increasingly, state governments to reshape how higher education serves non-traditional learners. The mission was meaningful and the ambition was significant. The brand communicated neither. What existed was a legacy identity without warmth, humanity, or the kind of authority the company's future vision required. For a service built entirely around human potential, that disconnect was costing them.
Months of strategic discovery — leadership workshops, interviews across the organization, deep conversations with the students and advisors at the heart of the service, and a competitive analysis — revealed a story that was genuinely differentiated. Not just a service company, but a change agent operating at the intersection of individual lives and national policy. The challenge was building a brand that could speak with equal credibility to a returning adult learner, a university administrator, and an elected state official — three audiences with vastly different needs, motivations, and languages.
A creative refresh gave the existing logo more confidence and weight, paired with a bold, unconventional color palette designed to stand out in a sea of academic sameness. A new visual system, messaging suite, and voice framework gave the brand the range it needed to flex across every audience. The website was restructured and rebuilt to better guide each of those audiences toward conversion. For ReUp's growing ambitions in state-level partnerships — politically and economically complex territory — I worked directly with the CEO and head of partnerships to develop materials for those pursuits, both publicly on the site and privately in meetings with state officials. And as ReUp expanded into a more self-serve model for students alongside their traditional high-touch advisory service, we designed a learner app and ran campaigns to bring that new offering to life.
Hillary looked into the future and really hit the nail on the head, especially with our mission and vision. It's spot on for every conversation I have now with state leaders.
— Scott Lomas, Chief Strategy Officer, ReUp EducationReUp emerged with a brand that finally matched the scale of what they were trying to do — human enough for the students whose lives they were changing, credible enough for the government officials they needed at the table.