If you haven't seen the coverage in Inside Higher Ed or through other sources, you really should pay attention to the Higher Education Opportunity Act.  

I always encourage our clients to set up open forums for us on campus so that faculty, staff, and students can come and hear about our research findings on an institution's brand. We contend that brand strategy development cannot take place in the marketing office behind closed doors. You want your brand to be embraced by your entire community....and reinforced over time by them. So giving your internal constituents an opportunity to hear about your research, react to it, and provide feedback on the direction for your brand is sort of a no-brainer.

And, sometimes it can have an even bigger impact than you might think. Case in point at Loyola College in Maryland. We conducted four open forums on campus last week.  Three were for faculty and staff and one was specifically for students. About 100 faculty and staff members and 30 students participated. Among them was Lizzie McQuillan, a writer for the school newspaper, who following the open forum asked if she could interview me for an article.

The article came out yesterday and it's just terrific. The open forums went a long way toward advancing buy-in for the brand strategy....and the article takes it one step further.  A great example of how to get your campus on that proverbial "same page!"

 

Not sure if everyone saw the horrible news, but there was a shooting on a campus in Finland today that left 10 people dead including the gunman.  I'm going to follow the story, because I am curious to see how the shooting will be covered by the local media and I am curious to see how the college leadership will portray forward movement.  You might want to watch the story, too.

Only 8 weeks until the AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education and registrations are running 18% ahead of last year!  The Symposium will be held at the Chicago Marriot Downtown, November 16-19. Don't wait......register here now!   

Four of my SimpsonScarborough colleauges and I attended a fantastic event in Washington, DC on Tuesday night.  TCU and CSIS hosted a Q&A with Bob Schieffer, world-renowned journalist and author of the new book, America. He was absolutely delightful and had some great stories to tell. One was about the day JFK was assasinated.  Watch the video on the CSIS Web site.

The event was sponsored by our friend Larry Lauer and attended by a virtual who's who of high-ed professionals in DC including John Lippincott, President of CASE, and Terry Flannery, VP at American University. What a pleasure to join such a distinguished group of people to hear from a great American.  

It must be time for me to post an entry in which I talk about topics in the news that can be used to quickly test crisis plans during cabinet meetings, because in the past three days I've receive a couple of emails pointing out some perfect examples of "what where they thinking?"

Those of you who know me personally get to hear me talk on and on about my daughter, Savannah Leigh.  Welcome, everyone else, to my favorite topic!!  After I visit each college or university I ask myself, "would I let Savannah Leigh attend this school?"  If I'm not sure, then I know the institution needs some TLC devoted to its actions, its marketing or both.

We have a new team member at SimpsonScarborough, Patt Nitikarn, and he has completely won me over in the two weeks I have known him. Patt is a great addition to our team. He is hilarious, smart, eager to learn, and he is... well... a "he". We needed some testosterone in our DC office!

During his interview we bonded over a mutual apprecation for Harry Potter (no, that is not why he got the job, but it definitely helped!). He told me that he went to high school in a castle that reminded him of Hogwarts... I thought he was just jerking me around, but today he showed me this picture. Are you as jealous as I am? I can almost hear the roar of a Quidditch game in the background:).

--Meredith Simpson

What the reception area of the new SimpsonScarborough office looked like when I was there last Friday.   

This is the verbatim text from a college Web site under a header that says, "What is it that sets [name of university] apart?" (Name changed to protect the guilty!)

"Simply put, it is our tradition of academic excellence, our distinctive liberal arts curriculum, the individual attention we give our students and our welcoming and engaged community.

 

We pride ourselves on having students with multiple talents and interests, faculty with a passion for teaching and scholarship, caring staff members who take great pride in what they do, and successful alumni across the nation and around the world.

 

In the finest tradition of the liberal arts, we appeal to those who are intellectually passionate, creative, and curious about life. We encourage excellence and we support our students' pursuit of multiple interests in ways that are most meaningful to them."

 

Umm......raise your hand if this describes your institution?  Raise your other hand if you have something like this on your Web site. Both hands in the air?  If I were there, I would tickle you under the arms. And, that would be the only thing we could laugh about.  

For those of you out there who are trying to tap into the teen mentality, you should sign up for the Ypulse daily update. Using teen-centric references can be effective but dicey. All of your credibility will go right out the window if you try to make a funny reference to The Hills but get LC and Lo mixed up. Ypulse will keep you up to date. But be careful `cause it will also make you feel old.....as "the hills." 

I'm headed over to the U.K. next month to do a talk at GMAC's European Programme. So, I'm reading everything I can get my hands on about what Europe's colleges and universities are doing in the fields of branding and integrated marketing. I actually found this old but interesting blog posting on BizDeansTalk. Two years ago, Santiago Iniguez, the Dean at Empresa Business School, was suggesting two options for addressing the branding of  Europe's business schools; 1) promote "Europe" as the brand, or 2) promote the best brands within Europe and let the remaining boats rise with the tide. An eternal question. I get the sense the kind of organization that would be required to go with option 1 has not occurred. But with the changes hitting Europe in the next two years, who knows?  Schools might find it most useful to join forces and differentiatie Europe from the U.S. and Australia, the current leaders in business school imports.

I was talking with a friend today about why research on prospective graduate students is so difficult and costly. Clearly there is a great need among marketers of graduate programs to understand what motivates their primary target audience. And, Deans often want to know what NEW programs should be offered to fill a niche. Gathering this type of information is complicated because there is no dominant and high quality sample source; it's very difficult to secure a representative sample of people who want to earn a graduate degree in psychology, for example. Where would you buy that list? 

Unlike the undergraduate level, where the names and contact information of high school seniors are readily available through a variety of sources, records of adults who are considering graduate school are difficult to come by. If you want to survey the general population of adults interested in a particular program, you have to buy a list and screen to find the people you want, e.g. adults who are seriously considering going back to school to earn a DNP in the next three years. You can often buy lists that zero in on your target audience but there is still typically a great deal of screening involved, and here's where the costly part comes in.

Let's say you find a reasonable list source for adults who could possibly be interested in your MS in Civil Engineering. Before you can survey them, you'll have to screen to make sure they are *really* a prospective student of your program. If 80% of the folks you screen meet your criteria and qualify to participate in your study, you are doing great. But, if only 20% do, you are going to pay a LOT more for your study and it may even be too costly for you to conduct.

Sorry, I am not offering any great and wise solutions here. Just pointing out the problem and venting a bit with those of you out there who share my pain. Research with prospective graduate students is not impossible, and some programs are easier than others. But, generally speaking it's rather costly, time consuming, and a lot of error is involved. Not my favorite combination.