Today marks my son’s graduation from eighth grade — which gives me roughly two more years of immunity before the tools of higher ed marketing get turned in our direction. At 14, everything seems possible and parents mostly refrain from worrying aloud about career direction or ambition. My son and his classmates still carry themselves […]
Anyone involved in higher education marketing and branding could learn something from the annual ritual known officially as the NFL Annual Player Selection Meeting, or more commonly, the Draft. In the early days of the league, the Draft played out in quiet seclusion, owners and general managers holed up in a New York hotel, ordering […]
Girl walks across campus. Not the kind of information that higher education marketing types rush back to their desks to share with the world. But as This American Life creator Ira Glass reminds us, sometimes the distance between information and story can be covered in one simple question: And then what happened? On the campus […]
We recently pinned home pages from 50 of the country’s top liberal arts college on a large work wall. Our motive? Learn something about story, content strategy and voice — favorite topics among Elliance creatives. Here is a confession — there’s nothing I avoid more than turning the art of writing on itself. Yes, I […]
I attended a higher education branding session at the AMA/Higher Education conference a few years back led by Purdue University’s chief marketing officer, Teri Thompson and Elizabeth Scarborough, CEO/Partner at the well-known quantitative research firm Simpson/Scarborough. Toward the end of the productive hour that covered Purdue’s extensive investment in market research, staff re-structuring and process […]
I read with great interest and empathy two stories this past Monday related to the burdensome cost of higher education — one setting the level of total student debt in the US at $867 billion last quarter; the other alerting us that campus food pantries are becoming commonplace as many students struggle to afford groceries. […]
Appeared in Enrollment Manager on 10/18/2010. What’s the difference between a college with an abundance of applications and one with an unacceptably high acceptance rate? Sometimes, it’s curiosity and nerve. Adversity — brought on by geographic isolation, shifting demographics, deep-pocketed for-profits and other Goliath competitors — can inspire a college and university to challenge assumptions […]