Van Buren continues university collaborations with rebranding project

1 month ago

VAN BUREN, Maine – Van Buren will soon work with students at Georgetown University on a rebranding effort as part of its continued collaboration with higher education students on municipal projects. 

The town recently capped off a successful collaboration with Clemson University in which they created a brochure highlighting how the town offers power at a rate that is nearly half of the state average.

The town’s collaborations began last year when Scott Schmidt, a professor at Drexel, Georgetown and Clemson universities, learned of the Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design (CIRD) program — an initiative of the National Endowment of the Arts — and then discovered Van Buren, which was one of 17 communities that received grants through the program in 2023.

From there, Schmidt reached out to Van Buren Town Manager Luke Dyer, and the town soon began working with Drexel students on a 10-week project that involved the creation of about a dozen unique art pieces that will sit on granite posts along the town’s historic pathway, which connects to parks and a boat landing, and runs along the St. John River and Violette Stream.

The collaboration with Clemson began later in the year, when Dyer met with U.S. Sen. Angus King and mentioned Van Buren’s low electricity rates. The senator suggested that the town work on a plan to promote this unique feature.

Dyer, during a Jan. 8 Town Council meeting, said that the brochure project is complete and that a project on rebranding will start with the Georgetown students in the next few days.

He said on Thursday that they will also be working with Schmidt on this project, and that he is working with several Georgetown grad students on their capstone projects. For this project, they will be working with a student who is also employed by the college and creates their branded material. 

“Anything you see in social media that is from Georgetown has a unique look that is designed to create recognition,” Dyer said. “We want all our social media to have the same ‘memorable’ look so that anything we post will be immediately recognizable as being from the town of Van Buren.”

He said they will also help to update and redesign the town’s logo, which will be incorporated with its messaging.

The town’s collaborations with these universities have been done at no cost, as it provides the graduate students with real-world experience to put on their resumes. Dyer said during the meeting that while it is difficult to guess exactly how much all of these projects would have cost without the collaboration, the rebranding likely would have totaled $125,000.

“There’s no funding for that anywhere,” he said. “So we’re pretty fortunate to have graduate students working on these for us. We certainly wouldn’t have found the money to do this.”