Too often, a college or university approaches a brand development exercise unprepared for the journey ahead, and unable to fully realize the rewards at journey’s end. We offer a 5 point checklist to ensure a better experience and outcome at every step. 1. Know Your Motivation A strong, clear and authentic articulation of your brand can accomplish great things. It […]
I enjoyed a rare two-hour sit down recently with an entire marketing and communications team at a major university — and we never once talked about story. They, like many of you, spoke of feeling beleaguered by the demands of an unending news cycle, a tumbleweed website and the torture drip of “next in line” requests […]
There is an old saying here in Pittsburgh: you can’t get there from here, which refers to the difficulty in getting around due to all of the rivers and streams in the area. I don’t think it’s said to be discouraging, as much as it is said out of laziness — directions tend to be a […]
A gift. A donation. A lunch. A trip. Volunteering. An interview. They’re all grounds for a handwritten thank you note. To me, it’s a big priority. It’s an appreciation I got from my father. Looming is the memory of my brother and I sitting at the dining room table, pens in our aching hands, scribbling […]
Snapchat is big … I mean really big. In over the course of two years I have noticed my Facebook Newsfeed instead of being filled with spontaneous photos of my friends having fun to being filled with serious world news or invitations to sign up for events. My friends gradual decline in Facebook activity to […]
Two weeks ago, I received a call from the alumni office at my alma mater. A friendly and an upbeat voice greeted me. He was a freshman at the School of International Service. I thought to myself, “is this a donations call?” Slowly but surely the call evolved into a conversation reviving a sense of […]
Why, despite our best intentions and efforts, can we all make bad decisions? Social scientists point to the phenomenon of “cognitive bias” — a scholarly and polite way of saying that we should not so quickly and easily believe everything we initially perceive or think. The more complex the set of choices and decisions, the […]
Why relaunch the online Carnegie Mellon responsive university magazine when it was relaunched just two years ago? Two reasons: big data & branding.
Over the past four years, my personal life as a parent of two college-bound children and my professional life where I spend time in the higher education space have been on one long, yet fascinating, head-on collision. It’s been an eye-opening look at enrollment marketing from two divergent vantage points. In the battle for the […]
Inbound marketing, as defined on the Elliance Higher Education Inbound Marketing Flashcards website, is the continuous creation of relevant and high quality content, which helps to build strong, authentic connections with existing networks and helps to extend those networks through social sharing and conversations. In this definition lies the key to why inbound marketing is […]