I saw Spielberg’s movie “Lincoln” over Thanksgiving weekend. Wonderful screenplay by Tony Kushner and amazing acting by Daniel Day Lewis, Sally Fields and Tommy Lee Jones. I was struck by the parallels between Lincoln’s strategies for consensus building and the branding work we do for Christian colleges. To me, Lincoln was brilliant at holding tension […]
Entrepreneurs are famous for creating companies from the depths of their souls. Business from the inside out if you will. But symbols take on a power of their own when they resonate with deeper mythological forces in the collective experience of humanity. And that is what happened in our case. The beginning of my love […]
Coming to the US as an international student is a big decision. It’s a decision that foreign students rarely make on their own; the decision typically involves parents, grandparents, extended families, teachers and school counselors. Instead of asking what website features should be built to facilitate this important decision, let’s try to answer the underlying […]
Popular digital strategies for recruiting international students include multilingual websites, active participation in indigenous social media portals, and international SEO. Since everyone is talking about them, I decided to go on a hunt for some unusual ones. Here are a few interesting ones I uncovered: 1. International Scholarship Contests. We ran one to promote Carnegie […]
Social media is increasingly important in creating brand awareness, generating inquiries and at improving yield (the percentage of accepted applicants who choose to signal their intention to enroll by paying a deposit). Recruiting international students from emerging economies is vastly different from recruiting students from US & Europe in four important ways. First, they are […]
After running Elliance for more than 15 years, I have created a list of characteristics that represent our best clients. They are: Goal Oriented They are ambitious and in pursuit of well-defined business goals and objectives. Open Communicators They clearly and generously communicate. They frame situations. Respectful They cherish a relationship of mutual respect, yet […]
With over 700,000 international students heading to the US in 2012, the race is on to attract the brightest and most financially well-off students. Instead of relying on expensive international recruiting agents who demand portions of college revenues, here is how we are recommending colleges and universities recruit international students: 1. Build language specific or […]
The hunt for revenues continues for colleges. With strained budgets and weakened endowments, colleges are in perpetual hunt for sources of alternative revenues. For the last two decades, it was all about expanding their product lines by offering graduate programs, certificates, degree completion, corporate training, and online programs. Now, with drums of riches beating in […]
Marketing of Christian colleges is a nuanced art. It requires a sensitive touch and storytelling that answers two big questions. The first one is a burning question that haunts all of us at some deeper level: how do we reconcile Scriptures/faith with modernity? The second question is an institutional one: how can we define our […]
In the era of declining college applications, how does a college gain an outsized share of a shrinking market? Here are 10 strategies that visionary college presidents and their teams are continually deploying to fortify and turnaround their institutions: 1. Invest in Branding. Babson has positioned itself as THE college for entrepreneurship, American University as […]