In 2020, a teacher reached out with an urgent problem: with the city in isolation, her Bronx school had no way to reach prospective families. Open houses were gone, school fairs were gone — and without applications, the school’s future was at risk.

Enrollment is a marketing problem: if families can’t visit the school, the school has to reach them where they are — online and in their own neighborhood. Design Land NYC rebuilt the school’s presence on both fronts at once. We designed and launched a new website, then ran Facebook and Instagram campaigns aimed at Bronx families. Working alongside the teachers, we designed and printed flyers and banners and placed them throughout the community — reaching the parents who weren’t going to find the school online.

The result: for 172 open ninth-grade seats, roughly 800 applications came in — more than four applicants for every seat, for a school that months earlier couldn’t reach families at all. The partnership didn’t end there: Design Land maintained the school’s website for six years and continues to design the school’s print collateral today — graduation programs, prom tickets, fair materials, flyers, and brochures.