What is the Covenant College vision and journey all about? This question, although seemingly simple enough, is bound to get many different responses depending on who it is posed to. Members of the Bible department might say that the Covenant vision is to help students grow in their faith and become well-rounded theologians as they proceed into the world. Staff members in Student Development might say that Covenant’s goal is to help students learn how to build and live in lasting community with other believers and how to form lasting friendships.
This tangle of ideas and paths that make Covenant such a special community is what John Horton, the Director of Marketing and Communications, has been weaving into a strategic mission. He and others in the department have been trying to pull together all the different aspects and goals of Covenant College into one unified report. Through a lot of diligent and painstaking work, The Covenant Ascent was born. The Covenant Ascent is a marketing strategy to communicate Covenant’s mission clearly to prospective students looking into the school.
The Covenant Ascent’s mission is to help prospective students and current students alike to see the overall goal of the college. In the language of The Covenant Ascent, Covenant is designed to prepare students in professional development and spiritual growth, while still maintaining high standards of academic excellence. As they have been preparing The Covenant Ascent, Horton and his team have been distilling all the aspects of a Covenant experience into one shareable message.
As Horton prepared to take on this project he made a point of establishing relationships all around campus. When he was asked about The Covenant Ascent, he expressed the difficulty of explaining the Covenant College journey because different people on campus will all come up with different answers to the question. However, Horton is experienced in bringing different departments together to create a unified vision, as he did the same thing when he worked for Disney.
Believing that a huge part of Covenant’s process is taking a student and helping them transition to the professional world, Horton made it his mission to explain that process. He believes that The Covenant Ascent is our story—it encapsulates the entirety of our campus and our lives here.
Horton said that once his team pulled together all the pieces of Covenant’s mission, it looked remarkably simple. But getting to the point where Covenant’s story was summarized seamlessly was much more complicated than one might think.
When asked to summarize The Covenant Ascent in one sentence, Horton said, “I call it a rallying point for the entire campus to get behind. It's our vision; it's our story. We want to talk about academic excellence, spiritual formation, and professional development - out of those three, we haven't talked much about professional development in the past. But they all three work together to prepare you for the next life station. That's the story.”
Intent on solidifying our story and getting it out into the world, Covenant has been hiring new Marketing and Communications staff. Brittany Lloyd ’10 fulfills the role of the first Associate Director of Digital Marketing, and Lydia Bergler ’18 was hired soon after as the first Communication Specialist.
Horton sums up The Covenant Ascent well in the image of a triangle with the different stages of a Covenant journey stacked like a pyramid. He called the triangle “A rallying point, all built on community.” It takes the student through all the stages of life at Covenant, from the Integration of Faith & Learning and Discovery of the first year to the Capstone project of senior year ready to Launch the student into their Life and Career.
Ever since he arrived on campus in August 2019, Horton has been working to tell Covenant’s story clearly and succinctly. He saw the potential for a well-rounded mission statement to draw more attention to Covenant and all the incredible aspects of an education here. Here, however, it took a lot of hard work and communication between the departments to create a cohesive image that makes the story clear to the observer.
About this complicated process, Horton said, “If we don’t understand [our story], how can we share it with somebody else?”