First Place CASE: LFGSM’s Key Market Initiative Campaign
Lake Forest Graduate School of Management (LFGSM) and CBD recently received top honors from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), District V, in its most prestigious “best practice” category for higher education communications and marketing.
For LFGSM, highly-targeted translates to highly effective. In late spring, we launched Key Market Initiative (KMI), a campaign focused on a tightly defined geographic area producing a higher-than-average number of enrollment inquiries. Integrated media drove our campaign’s performance; strategic innovative placement “made it seem like LFGSM was everywhere,” according to a prospective student.
“In the end, we saw a doubling of the number of inquiries we typically receive from those target zip codes during the spring,” said Kate Colbert, Director of Marketing at LFGSM. “The KMI project helped us demonstrate that once you know where your best customers live and work, ‘reach’ is no longer the issue. We focused on frequency of messaging and the results speak for themselves.” Understanding the media consumption to behavioral characteristics of the Lake Forest MBA prospect was key in defining the appropriate media channels and localized messaging clearly resonated within the targeted community. Once residents realized that there was a premier MBA program “in their own back yard,” they quickly moved from awareness to active engagement.
Be a retention hero
When you objectively look at your institution through the filters of a new student’s perspective, you will see enormous opportunities to better engage students and enhance their experience by anticipating their communication, information, and resource needs. That’s the subject of our recently published whitepaper Retention and Beyond: Building Stronger Relationships with High-Touch Communications.
This new resource gives you an insider’s look into a planning approach that any institution can apply, and a series of best practices to guide efficient execution of a retention communication program that can:
- Ensure consistent experiences
- Anticipate specific needs
- Optimize staff time, resources, and perceived value
- Prove effectiveness and return on investment
Plus, you’ll get a thought provoking forecast of how higher education must continue to evolve to meet generational needs. Download our new whitepaper here.
Midwest states innovating to boost degree completion
The AP reported yesterday that twelve Midwest states are trying to decide if they will offer multistate college-credit exchange to make college completion easier for residents who have some higher education credits. The Midwestern Higher Education Compact has an innovative idea that may allow colleges across these states to compete for the students. Apparently, the group isn’t yet sure about the demand for this exchange, or how it may be structured, but their goal is to try to head off a huge deficit in degreed workers in the near future.
Their effort does dovetail nicely with the fact that we’re on the waning edge of Gen Y entering college. Higher educators will have to turn more attention to degree completers in order to fill classes.
I’m intrigued. If colleges customize offers to individual students based on their completed credits and work experience, and offer them a low cost, fast completion program, what do they do to their value perception…for both students and employers?
Where Are All the Presidents?
There was an interesting buzz circulating at this year’s AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education. A question really. “Why aren’t there more college and university presidents here?”
It’s a legitimate question. Every year, the Symposium does a great job of attracting at least one president of an institution who understands that brand management is a core leadership function. That individual often recounts his or her involvement in defining the institution’s position in the marketplace, identifying differentiating attributes and articulating the value propositions that support it.
This year was no different. Theodore Long, President of Elizabethtown College conducted an inspired presentation illustrating its rigorous brand development process, recounting the hurdles they overcame to gain consensus among myriad constituents and defining outcomes that transcended marketing by defining a new strategic direction for the entire college.
Many marketers in attendance want more presentations just like this one. Not solely for themselves, however, but for the benefit of their own presidents. They all know that the most successful institutions embrace marketing from the top down. When marketing is supported at the highest level, it will produce amazing results.
I heard many higher education marketers pledge to keep pushing upward, vowing to make marketing an important initiative at the highest levels of their institutions. The conviction of these resolved individuals made me believe I’d be sitting next to a lot more college presidents at next year’s Symposium, perhaps as a result of a few personal invitations.
A Higher Calling for Higher Education
U.S. institutions of higher learning have always been credited with incubating and launching initiatives and movements that support America’s highest ideals. At the 2009 AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education currently convening in Boston, Bill Taliver of Matale Line promoted a pathway to success that encouraged institutions to raise their level of engagement in promoting America’s values.
Putting an end to what he calls a “a crisis of wisdom,” Taliver tasked colleges and universities with taking a more active role in “affirming the human potential.” To accomplish this, he urged institutions to market their unique view of the world: first by aligning a school’s brand with a singular moral initiative and then relentlessly focusing only on those prospective students who embrace similar values.
While this go-to-market approach may require a school to sacrifice segments of its large prospect database, it often results in brand clarity that leads to increased relevance. The goal is to transform a student’s thoughts from “this is an important school for me to look at” to “this is the only place for me.”
The convergence of social and traditional media is perfectly timed to help institutions leverage these new marketing opportunities. Articulating values and finding like-minded individuals to engage in a conversation has never been more accessible. Plus, it enhances your ability to build more intimate relationships with prospective students, one that’s based on a dialog of mutual values. It’s not only a powerful recruitment tool, but may also be an exciting first step toward building a better America.
What we heard at the HighEdWeb Summit `09
We’ve just returned from the annual HighEdWeb conference in Milwaukee. You may have caught the online buzz around the conference as both ‘harsh tagging’ and ‘tweckling’ became new verbs thanks to a rather unfortunate key note speaker. Key take away from that experience is that you need to really analyze your audience and figure out a way to incorporate your audience’s social tendencies. Two of the best blogs on the topic are found on Dave’s Whiteboard and another is The Great Keynote Revolt of 2009. That said, this conference is a tremendous grassroots gathering organized by a board of volunteers from a broad range of colleges and universities. About 400 people attended, the vast majority of whom work in an academic setting, supporting and building a broad range of online tools, applications and sites.
