Category: Blog

Branding Your Community College

August 2011. As more community colleges compete for a limited pool of students — and for the students most likely to complete degrees — a growing number of two-year institutions are looking into branding efforts. However, given the constraints on the marketing budget of a community college, most institutions have faced significant obstacles in launching a new or updated brand. We turned this week to Mike Barzacchini, the director of marketing services for Harper College, who offers the following practical tips for branding your two-year institution — on a budget. You Don’t Need a Huge Budget “Look at your brand as an asset you invest in, just like any other intellectual asset. Too often we default to “We don’t have the budget” or “We don’t have the time,” but it doesn’t take a big budget to communicate how your college is different. It doesn’t take a big budget to achieve consistency, discipline, and relevance in your marketing messages.” Mike Barzacchini, Harper College The secret to branding on a budget, Barzacchini suggests, is that “you don’t have to make a whole new logo, a tagline, an entire marketing campaign. Make your brand visible and practical, and apply it in the communications you already do. Tell […]

Moving Your Marketing Office from News Bureau to Strategic Partner

August 2011. Institutional marketing departments are increasingly asked to be all things to all people and are frequently under-resourced and under-staffed. In order to be effective and meet the competing demands of various campus constituents, department heads need to think creatively and strategically about structure, staffing models, and resource allocation. We turned this week to Elizabeth Scarborough, CEO of SimpsonScarborough, for her advice on leading an effective marketing department. She frames the challenge in terms of moving from operating simply as a service provider to operating as a communications strategy partner. “Ten years ago,” Scarborough notes, “most marketing departments were thought of as a news bureau or as the internal Kinko’s. Now, offices are beginning to shift from operating like a print shop to operating like a strategic marketing innovation center.” Scarborough offers these four recommendations for marketing and communications departments in higher education: Stop taking orders for publications, and instead work with other offices to address their marketing challenges in more strategic ways Set strategic goals and measures for your marketing operation Ensure that the marketing office owns the functional responsibility for the website Staff your office with “marketing strategists” Stop Taking Print Orders “On many campuses,” Scarborough notes, “marketing […]

Lessons Learned from Piloting the iPad: Part 2

August 2011. A growing number of colleges and universities have launched pilot projects to test how the iPad might be used to produce a positive impact on student learning and engagement. Pepperdine University has just completed the first two terms of its three-term iPad Research Initiative (consisting of classroom observations, surveys, and focus groups), looking at how students are actually using the iPad in class when given the opportunity, and what opportunities exist for faculty to use the tool to improve teaching and learning. For the preliminary findings from the first term, check Part 1 of this article (January 2011). To gather their lessons learned from the second term of the research study, we returned this week for a second interview with Dana Hoover, assistant CIO for communications and planning for IT, and Hong Kha, project manager for pedagogy development and special projects. Hoover and Kha offer their advice for: Selecting the right faculty for piloting iPad adoption Providing instructional design and guidance Inviting faculty to bring a vision to the table Incentivizing student usage of the tool Selecting Faculty Hoover suggests that the most important criterion in selecting faculty for your pilot project is the faculty members’ willingness to change. “Don’t introduce any new technology if […]

Do Your Living-Learning Communities Offer a Comprehensive Immersion Experience?

August 4, 2011. Living-learning communities offer high potential for boosting the academic success and the education of the whole student, but they also present your campus with unique challenges because of the coordination they require between academic affairs and student services at your institution. The National Study of Living-Learning Programs (NSLLP) has begun documenting how living-learning programs influence the academic, social, and developmental outcomes for college students, as well as what characteristics are shared by those programs that show the greatest impact. This week, we interviewed two chief researchers from the NSLLP — Aaron Brower, vice provost for teaching and learning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Karen Inkelas, associate professor and director for the Center for Advanced Study of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education at the University of Virginia. Brower and Inkelas suggest that while many institutions have organized living-learning programs, few offer a truly integrated, comprehensive, and immersive learning experience for the students. Here is their advice. Intentionality is Key “Depending on the goals you have set for the program, you really have to do the hard work (and the fun work) of thinking through how those goals play out in every interaction within the residential learning community.” […]

Encouraging the Success of Online Students

July 28, 2011. The past decade has seen a plethora of research studies attempting to document the impact of online learning on measures of academic success and student persistence. The studies often produce widely divergent results, in part because institutions vary dramatically in the level of support and preparation they offer to both students and faculty. To inquire into best practices for preparing both faculty and students for online courses, we turned to two online learning veterans to learn more: Kristen Betts, director of the Center for Online Learning at Armstrong Atlantic State University, and Mark Parker, interim assistant dean and collegiate associate professor for communication, arts, and humanities at the University of Maryland University College (UMUC). Betts and Parker suggest that the most critical steps in encouraging the academic success and persistence of your online students involve setting and managing faculty and student expectations around workload and interaction within the online course. Here are some examples. Managing Expectations for Students Betts and Parker advise institutions to be more proactive in setting expectations both: When marketing online programs to students (while promoting the flexibility of an online program, it’s important to also set expectations around the program’s rigor and the quality of student work that is […]

What Engagement-Focused Fundraising Looks Like

July 28, 2011. According to a national survey of higher education alumni conducted by the Collaborative Innovation Network for Engagement and Giving and presented to the Annual Giving Directors Consortium (April 2010), only 52 percent of alumni at those institutions with the highest alumni participation rates believe their alma mater keeps them closely connected and values its alumni relationships. At the same time, institutions are trying to meet fundraising goals by calling on fewer and fewer donors. Now is the time for your institution to stop this unsustainable advancement strategy. We turned this week to Jim Langley, president of Langley Innovations, for his advice on how institutions need to rethink their strategy for engaging future donors. A Diagnosis: How Institutions and Alumni Misconnect “The underlying malady,” Langley remarks, “is a loss of emotional engagement with the institution. Alumni remain appreciative of their degree and of their time at the institution, but feel emotionally detached from the alma mater after graduation.” This disaffection can take different forms for different generations of alumni: Young alumni are likely to have graduated with a significant load of student debt and are now facing the challenges of building a career amid a sluggish economic recovery; when […]

Getting Started With Advancement Staff Metrics

July 28, 2011. As advancement shops in higher education struggle with a slow economic recovery, it is increasingly important to build staff metrics that encourage effective work. Tracking meaningful metrics beyond dollars raised can empower you to: Reward high performers, making it easier to retain your best officers Identify training needs Incentivize cross-boundary work toward shared goals For advice on taking fundraising metrics beyond dollars raised, we turned this week to Rick Dupree, assistant dean of development and alumni relations for the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University, and D. Scott Peters, director of annual giving at the University of Richmond. A Culture of Incentives “A good metrics system means that development officers know what’s expected, they know what will happen if they meet and exceed goals. It takes away the guessing game. Development officers are entrepreneurs at heart — they have egos, they’re creative, they want to do excellent work and be recognized for it.” Rick Dupree, Indiana U Dupree adds that the 100-point metrics program he put in place a decade ago at Indiana University allowed him to do “two atypical things” — offer bonuses and terminate low performers. He assigned points for achieving specific goals. “If a staff […]

Preparing First-Generation Students for Academic Success

Given the lower retention rates of first-generation students, more colleges and universities are devoting attention to how best to aid the success and persistence of this cohort. To learn more about how higher ed institutions can respond to the issue, we turned this week to Thom Golden, senior associate director of admissions at Vanderbilt University (@Doctor_Thom on Twitter). This week, Golden draws attention to the types of bridge programming that higher ed institutions can put in place to help first-gen students enter college better prepared to persist and succeed. Defining the Problem “In enrolling and retaining first-generation students, aspiration isn’t the issue,” Golden notes. He directs attention to findings from several studies from past years: According to the Ad Council’s 2006 study College access: Results from a survey of low-income teens and parents, 91 percent of low-income high school students said they believed that they would complete a college degree According to a 2006 US Department of Education study, The Toolbox Revisited, only 45 percent of Hispanic students attend a high school that offers calculus, and only 59 percent of white students do Outreach to high schools and to high school students, Golden suggests, must focus less on planting seeds of […]

Improving Completion Rates for Online Students

(An earlier version of this article ran in April 2010.) With the percentage of students who are taking online courses rising rapidly (a 17% increase in 2009 alone), improving completion rates for online students (many of whom are returning, adult learners) will likely become a key priority for higher education. In an interview with Academic Impressions, Ken Udas, CEO of UMassOnline, offers his advice on how academic leaders can promote higher completion rates as their institutions strive to meet a growing demand among adult learners for online and distance education. Where You Can Make the Most Difference Udas suggests that there are two areas where relatively small investments in online student retention can see significant returns: Encouraging Course Completion First, Udas suggests, identify your “warning signals,” your indicators that a student engaged in online coursework may be at a higher risk of not completing the course; then set up a process for immediate response to those signals. Warning signals for online learners might include: For example, suppose that your online calculus course has a 40% completion rate each semester. Once you know this, you can respond by making tutoring services available, whether face-to-face or in the form a virtual math lab. […]

A Sustainable Approach to Sustainability

Whether driven by a desire for social impact, or the harsh economic realities of unsustainable utilities expenditures, or by political and market demand, more colleges and universities are taking the trend to become more environmentally sustainable seriously. More than 650 institutional presidents have pledged carbon neutrality as signatories to the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (APUCC), and hundreds of institutions now employ sustainability coordinators. Yet many sustainability initiatives have yet to see meaningful gains. In fact, at the majority of colleges and universities, sustainability efforts remain limited to disparate, one-off programs, from trayless dining to student-directed recycling programs to “green” capital projects and energy efficiency measures. To move beyond one-off programs, it’s critical to identify how efforts toward a sustainable campus add benefits beyond just cost savings and social impact. Defining the value proposition for sustainability at your campus and mapping the impact of sustainability on a wide array of campus priorities (e.g., student recruitment and retention, stakeholder relations and fundraising, etc.) will empower an institution to more effectively target campus-wide or system-wide investment in sustainable initiatives, and to better engage broader campus constituencies and build alliances beyond the “usual choir.” “The question to address now is: How do you get […]