This Thursday marks the kickoff of Welcome Week at Northwestern Michigan College (NMC), and as students and community members return to campus for the fall 2025 semester, they’ll be greeted by some new sights.

For the first time in as long as anyone at the college can remember, NMC has undertaken a brand refresh, with a redesigned logo and a new green-and-blue color palette soon to be rolled out in the form of signage and decor across all five campuses. The revamped brand will also be reflected on new admissions materials and NMC apparel, on the NMC website, and more. It’s all the result of a $100,000 grant and a two-year “data-rich” brand redesign process.

“I think it is somewhere near a ‘forever’ kind of thing,” NMC President Nick Nissley tells The Ticker when asked how long it’s been since NMC undertook something similar to this brand revamp. “I’m not certain when exactly our original iconic pine tree logo was created, but it has definitely persisted through decades. And while there have been some tweaks to our branding over the years, we've never thoughtfully or formally done a brand refresh until now.”

According to Nissley, it was the nexus of multiple factors that prompted NMC to re-examine its branding strategy. Those factors include the college’s forthcoming 75th anniversary, an in-progress capital campaign that promises to be the biggest in NMC’s history, and recent strategic planning and campus master planning processes.

“Those things really led us to say, ‘Should we also be considering brand strategy?’” Nissley says. “One thing that's been really clear to us is that higher ed is changing. And not only is it changing, it's changing fast. We’re having to deal with things like fewer students in northern Michigan, given the demographic challenges of our area. We’re dealing with the fact that fewer students are going to college, period. There's more competition, there's shifting student expectations. All of those things got our attention and convinced us that we really needed to be more thoughtful around brand and branding.”

Those conversations prompted Diana Fairbanks, NMC’s associate vice president of strategic communications and change initiatives, to look for resources that could assist in executing a 360-degree brand reinvention. The search led to the Lumina Foundation, an independent, private foundation based in Indianapolis and described on its website as “the largest philanthropy in the United States focused solely on increasing the proportion of adults in the U.S. with education and training beyond high school.” The organization offers grants from its $1.5 billion endowment to engage other higher ed players in the goal of ensuring that 75 percent of Americans have a college degree, workforce certificate, or other post-secondary credential by 2040.

“Diana saw that they were offering $100,000 to help support colleges – particularly community colleges – who were wanting to do brand strategy work,” Nissley says of the Lumina Foundation. “As I recall, we made a first pass at [the grant] and we were unsuccessful. But Diana went back to them to said, ‘Hey, would you be willing to give us some feedback? What could we do better?’ And as she had the opportunity to talk more with them, they said, ‘Well, if we did put money forward towards you, how would you use it?’”

Keeping the lines of communication open with the Lumina Foundation proved fruitful: In June 2023, the organization awarded NMC a $100,000 grant to move forward with its brand refresh. The funds, Nissley says, afforded the college the ability to engage a broad array of voices in the process, including current and prospective students, faculty and staff, alumni, donors, community and business partners, and local high school counselors and staff. All told, nearly 700 people contributed input via surveys or direct interviews.

“It was a data-rich strategy,” Nissley says of the brand reinvention. “It wasn’t just me and Diana sitting in a room and saying, ‘OK, here’s what we’re going to do.’ We really tried to capture voices from all of our stakeholder groups, and that allowed us to get some really rich quantitative and qualitative data.”

Per Nissley, the feedback showed that NMC’s biggest branding weakness was “the inconsistent visibility” of “distinctive programs” like marine technology, aviation, the Great Lakes Maritime Academy, and the Great Lakes Culinary Institute.

“The suggestion was, ‘How can you better leverage those standout programs? You've got a missed opportunity here in terms of increasing awareness and really having consistency in terms of your visibility.’” Nissley says. “We realized we had a fragmented visual identity. There was a different logo for culinary, for aviation, for water studies. And when you've got limited time for eyeballs that are competing for all these other educational opportunities, we have to be much more focused and we have to do something to further unify NMC’s voice.”

The new NMC logo keeps the classic green pine tree but adds blue design elements that resemble waves. While Nissley thinks the old logo was a perfect encapsulation of NMC’s wooded main campus, he sees the new design as a better reflection of the institution as a whole.

“I think it illustrates that we've got the new Freshwater Research Innovation Center, we've got marine tech, we've got maritime, we've got the Great Lakes Water Studies Institute,” Nissley says of the logo. “It communicates water being central to who we are as a college.”

The new logo and color scheme are already being rolled out across NMC’s five campuses –the main Front Street Campus, the Great Lakes Campus on Front Street, the Boardman Lake Campus, the Aero Park Campus, and Rogers Observatory out on Birmley Road – in the form of signage and other design elements. Also included in the first phase of the brand implementation are revamped Welcome Week materials, new NMC apparel and logo gear at the NMC bookstore, and refreshed admissions materials.

According to a press release, future phases of the implementation “will extend the brand to academic division and department levels, with priorities shaped by NMC’s new strategic plan, now in development for 2026-29.”