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June 23, 2011. Last June, Ball State University released a study showing that of college students owning phones, 49 percent owned smartphones; the number had doubled since 2009. In the year since, many colleges and universities have launched mobile marketing initiatives or mobile apps for students and alumni. Among those efforts that have seen early gains: Piloting targeted mobile apps (during the weekend of its launch, the University of Virginia’s application saw downloads from several thousand users). Inviting prospective students to opt in to text messaging or “mobile updates.” Look to St. Mary’s University for a leading-edge example; while St. Mary’s has seen few students opt in, the university has seen a high yield rate among those who do. However, very few institutions have taken smartphones into account in their Web design, which presents a significant risk as a growing number of prospective students access college websites from mobile devices. In an interview with Academic Impressions this week, Bob Johnson, president of Bob Johnson Consulting LLC, advised that the most immediate and pressing mobile marketing investment to make is to create a mobile-friendly version or section of your website. He offers the following tips. The Mobile-Friendly Website According to a 2010 survey of 1,000 college-bound high […]

June 16, 2011. In a recent interview with Academic Impressions, Brad Ward, CEO of BlueFuego Inc., cited his organization’s research into the impact of university Facebook pages. After a 25-month study of nearly 400,000 Facebook updates across more than 1,200 university Facebook pages, Ward concluded that most institutions offer too much content via social media channels, leading to declines in engagement as their audiences begin to “tune them out.” Ward warns that quality is far more important than quantity, because institutions compete with family and friends for time and social media “space” — in short, for the attention of students and alumni on channels that are already overcrowded with content. It’s critical that marketing and communications and alumni relations offices invest more in listening to their audience’s social media preferences and preferred content. Effective listening can empower your office to offer highly targeted content — whether on your website, on your Facebook page, or via a mobile app. To learn more, we turned to Linda Thomas Brooks, president of Ingenuity Media, The Martin Group and past member of the board of directors for the Ohio State University Alumni Association. With considerable expertise in setting up effective social media listening posts, Brooks offers the […]

Historically, the pathway to the presidency in higher education has been through traditional academic ranks — tenured faculty or department chairs becoming a dean, and then later a provost. But as Academic Impressions president Amit Mrig notes, “the competencies required to ascend the academic hierarchy don’t necessarily match those required to lead increasingly complex organizations in an increasingly competitive marketplace.” Rather than increase reliance on the private sector as a source for future leaders, institutions may do well to take a cue from the private sector’s approach to leadership development. To prepare for a globalized economy where talent, ideas, customers, suppliers, and financing will come from different markets around the world, the best-managed corporations like General Electric, IBM, and PepsiCo are intentionally requiring emerging leaders to manage major projects or even run entire divisions in different parts of the organization — units that may be far outside their discipline or home town. This strategy of building horizontal career ladders not only builds cross-boundary collaborations and global connections, but gives these future leaders a systemic view of the organization. Horizontal Career Moves Versatile leaders develop transferable problem-solving and diagnostic skills that allow them to assess the strategic — not just the technical — […]

Once you have identified the skills that are essential in tomorrow’s higher ed leaders, you will need ways to identify the staff within your institution who demonstrate those skills — these are the people whose leadership development you want to invest in, and whom you want to entrust with greater responsibilities and opportunities to contribute meaningfully to your institution’s success. Larry Goldstein and Pat Sanaghan offer the following tips to guide you in identifying emerging or potential leaders at your institution. Avoid Comfortable Cloning “We tend to hire and promote people who remind us of ourselves, who think like us. The courageous and effective act is to choose people who have different background, different perspective. You learn through diversity, not through looking at yourself in the mirror all the time.” Pat Sanaghan, The Sanaghan Group The practicing of replicating the demographics (in terms of race, gender, and socioeconomic background) and the leadership philosophy of current leaders can be referred to as “comfortable cloning.” It’s comfortable, but ultimately not as effective as establishing a more diverse talent bench. “We need to look instead to people who are very different from us,” Sanaghan advises, “who can provide new, unexpected solutions to adaptive challenges.” A […]

  NOTE: For an updated and much deeper look at new leadership skills in higher education, based on years of intensive research, read this complimentary paper from Academic Impressions and Pat Sanaghan. To define the leadership skill set needed to meet adaptive challenges, we turned to Larry Goldstein, president of Campus Strategies LLC, and Pat Sanaghan, president of The Sanaghan Group. Having consulted for decades with institutional leadership teams, Goldstein and Sanaghan are uniquely positioned to comment on what makes academic leaders effective. Here is their take on five critical leadership skills needed to meet today’s — and especially tomorrow’s — challenges. 1. Leaders Need to be Systemic Thinkers The critical initiatives that will move your institution forward — whether improving student retention, reducing your carbon footprint, or raising money from alumni — will involve and affect multiple divisions within your institution. This makes it especially critical that not only your institution’s president but leaders within each division are able to recognize the impact of a given issue or a given effort on financial, academic, and programmatic decisions across the institution. Amit Mrig, president of Academic Impressions, notes those institutions that are most successful in responding to these common challenges are those that approach them […]

Once you have clarity on the leadership skill sets your institution is seeking — and a commitment to look beyond the “usual suspects” when identifying future leaders — the next challenges involve offering meaningful opportunities for your institution’s “stylistic invisibles” to become visible and providing an intentional and deliberate process for developing your high-potentials as future leaders. There are three critical steps in achieving these aims: Create a robust peer network of emerging leaders within your institution Adopt a “proving ground” approach by engaging emerging leaders in the real work of the institution Incentivize and reward “deep mentoring” at all levels of your organization Several institutions have taken steps in this direction, but much of the most innovative and effective work on in-house leadership development over the past decade has been done outside the walls of higher education. The corporate sector, particularly, has become increasingly alert to its aging workforce and the threat that a leadership crisis presents to an organization’s profit and sustainability. For this reason, we reached out not only to one of the leading higher ed experts — Tamara Freeman, director of talent management and HR strategy for the University of Notre Dame — but also to Kimberly (Kim) Eberbach, vice president of […]