Build a More Strategic Higher Ed Budget: Advice From Three RHB Experts
It’s budget-building season and questions abound. Three RHB team members, Dr. Amanda Sale, senior enrollment management consultant, Ken Anselment, vice president for enrollment management, and Dr. Rob Zinkan, vice president for marketing leadership, draw on their extensive higher education experience to provide some helpful tips as you make the difficult decisions that will set the course for your organization in the coming year.
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Dr. Amanda Sale, senior enrollment management consultant
“If I had a million dollars, well I’d buy you a green dress.”
As we are in the height of budget season, I’m reminded of an experience I had as a new leader during my time on campus. We were approached with a potential funding opportunity from the President’s Office to host a new initiative, but there were several caveats: the runway to create a proposal and plan was short (four weeks), the funding wasn’t finalized (it could be up to $100,000 but also as low as $25,000 ), and because it wasn’t official, the planning had to be confidential.
We were so excited about the potential for this new project that my team began singing “If I had a million dollars,” a line from a Barenaked Ladies song of the same name. We began to refer to our secretive planning as The Green Dress Initiative. We hummed a great 90s pop song and got to work.
Purpose, outcomes and measuring success
The first, and arguably most important, step for our team was to clearly identify our purpose, our desired outcomes and how we would measure success. As basic as this sounds, it was important for us to begin here so that our ideas for this new initiative would stay grounded in institutional goals and priorities and we would know how to measure its success as we debriefed with university leadership. This particular project focused on yielding high-ability students from outside of our local footprint and was directly connected to institutional goals of increasing both the geographic diversity and academic credentials of our incoming class.
Start with Rainbows and Unicorns, be prepared for Glitter in the Grass
Once we set this foundational framework in place, we could get to brainstorming. We intentionally broke our brainstorms down into three categories: Rainbows and Unicorns, Sunshine and Flowers, and Glitter in the Grass.
We started with Rainbows and Unicorns, imagining an unlimited budget, welcoming wild ideas and removing “no” from our conversation. This was an essential part of the brainstorming process because it gave our team the opportunity to get creative without having to justify it within the budget parameters. Once we identified our Rainbows and Unicorns and were inspired and excited, we started to pare it back.
The next level was Sunshine and Flowers, building out the initiative with the continued air of a fairytale, but more rooted in reality: the budget isn’t endless in this stage and “no,” “can’t” or “shouldn’t” start to pop up a little more.
The third level of our brainstorm, Glitter in the Grass (environmentally friendly glitter, of course), enabled us to get into difficult conversations about creating meaningful change without investing as much financially. This is where the hard work happened: we asked questions about efficiencies, using systems differently or better and thoughtfully considered paring back based on necessity.
Once we identified our initiatives, we built their respective proposals and submitted them. At the high end, we proposed fully funding the cost to bring Admitted Students to campus, including flights and accommodations. On the low end, we budgeted for a catered meal. We were thrilled when we received approval.
While we didn’t get the Green Dress (or million dollars), we landed somewhere between Rainbows and Unicorns and Sunshine and Flowers, receiving enough funding to create a meaningful program for prospective students and their families that included accommodations and catered meals, but didn’t include airfare. We got to planning, creating and hosting a great event and were pleased with the result.
Debrief, evaluate and improve
The event was wildly successful and we were prepared to tell that story. Because we started the initiative by identifying the purpose, desired outcomes and how we would measure success, we had a plan when we met to debrief. The team thoughtfully came together immediately after the event to talk about what worked, what didn’t work and what we would do differently if it were to receive funding again. After the dust settled and there was data to illustrate how the initiative impacted prospective students, we connected asynchronously to finalize a report for the President’s Office.
Our intentions from the initial rumblings of “a million dollars,” our Rainbows and Unicorns brainstorming and our ability to tell the story after our debriefing meeting created an opportunity to justify the investment. This resulted in long-term support and an allocation of funding to duplicate our new event annually. Ultimately, the Green Dress Initiative evolved into a signature program for the institution that was different from anything that had been offered before.
Ken Anselment, vice president for enrollment management
The Monopoly lesson
When I first started playing Monopoly as a kid, I was a saver. I would get those stacks of $500s and $100s and $50s, and guard them carefully as I held my breath on every dice roll around the board until I would pass Go, collecting my next $200.
While I was saving, my opponents were buying up properties, their money stacks depleting while mine remained a proud towering testament to my fiscal prudence.
That condition would hold for the first several trips around the board, but then my sturdy money stacks would begin to disappear slowly as more of my opponents’ tiny houses started popping up, and then rapidly as those houses gave way to hotels, sending me to the sidelines while my friends continued to play.
It wasn’t until I changed my strategy from saver to investor that I started staying in the game longer and eventually winning.
The same is true for your budget: saving isn’t a winning strategy. If you want to reach your institutional goals, you’re going to need to make some investments. A penny saved is not always a penny earned.
Beware the DIY trap
This is a symptom of the so-called “prudence” behind my initial approach to Monopoly, and I see it happen at a lot of institutions that may not be flush with cash, but are flush with creative energy: “Why would we invest in outside help when we have all the talent and horsepower on our own team?”
This line of thinking works well when your own team has plenty of capacity (and time) to advance your cause … but the last time I checked, there weren’t too many higher ed teams that would describe themselves as “looking for more to do.”
You may, indeed, have a team loaded with talented people who can do wonderful work for your institution, but those talented people often have many other things competing for their time, attention and energy—especially in a resource-constrained environment. What you might be saving by not investing in outside resources you may often lose in time to completion. Furthermore, you might miss a new perspective or a different approach that an outside expert could provide.
I have a colleague who used to work at a small liberal arts college that was long overdue for a virtual campus tour. The institution solicited proposals from some established players in the marketplace who could bring a product to market for them quickly, if rather expensively. However, because that institution happened to be loaded with talent in web development, videography and writing, they opted instead to do the job in-house because they thought it would be interesting, innovative and inexpensive.
Eight months later, they had a clever and functional campus tour mounted on their website. Meanwhile, for eight months, other more important projects that required the attention of those talented team members fell by the wayside, overrun by the shiny and fun project. Furthermore, while the college had a nifty new campus tour they could proudly display, they didn’t build in plans for updating the tour in future years and found themselves in the position of doing what they should have done in the first place: hire outside expertise to develop a new virtual campus tour.
In an increasingly unforgiving marketplace, consider the big strategic levers you need to pull to make a difference in your institution’s prospects for success, such as market positioning, academic program enhancement and market development. Are there strategic and technological advances that would enhance your ability to deliver timely and relevant communications to your prospective students, moving them toward desired behaviors? (Hint: it’s probably not a virtual campus tour.)
Then evaluate whether you have the in-house horsepower to pull these levers not only effectively but quickly. Would an investment in outside expertise get you there more quickly or perhaps in a direction you haven’t considered? Would that investment free up your team to do the things they truly do best, such as delivering high-touch care for your prospective students and their families?
Short-term investments in outside resources can be the booster rockets that accelerate your progress to your goals, launching you more quickly into a stronger competitive position.
Rob Zinkan, vice president for marketing leadership
Choice making: The heart of strategy
When colleges and universities come to RHB to help evolve or transform their marketing organization for greater capability and deeper engagement in institutional priorities, we use a process called The RHB 3-5 Design. Three forms of analysis address critical questions across five organizational areas: strategy, structure, staffing, systems and spend level. The fifth “S” (spend) is often a point of frustration for VPs and CMOs because the marketing investment is not to the level they would like.
To appropriately answer the spend question—how marketing and communications should be resourced for the work that the first “S” (your strategy) requires—your strategy must be clear. Senior leadership must be aligned on the change that marketing will affect and the institutional priorities in the strategic plan that marketing’s work will advance.
As you just read the words “strategic plan,” I wonder if you rolled your eyes or nodded affirmatively. Does the strategic plan merely document your institution’s wish list or items it should already be doing, or does it reflect choices the institution has made with an understanding of its market position, the position it occupies on the landscape of competing institutions? If the former—a common formula for higher ed strategic planning—commence eye rolling.
In our most recent RHB study of higher education strategic plans, we analyzed new plans that launched in 2022 and 2023, and we noted an uptick in reputation- and brand-related overarching priorities. Still, these priorities or pillars, such as “leverage the brand,” do not reflect choice making. What fits and doesn’t fit under “leverage the brand?” Shouldn’t the institution be leveraging its brand already? Was the other choice to not leverage the brand? (Please note we’re not picking on strategic plans for the sake of pointing out deficiencies, but rather highlighting the significant opportunity after reviewing thousands of pages of plans across our studies. The lack of strategy across the sector is apparent while the need for strategy has never been greater with the headwinds facing higher education.)
In another newly launched plan, one overarching priority for an institution is to “distinguish the university regionally, nationally and internationally.” This lack of choice making will lead to unfocused budget planning. In our organizational design and development work, we reviewed a marketing and communications budget that had 44% of its total operating budget (excluding personnel) allocated to the university’s magazine. These examples all point to the gap between strategic planning and marketing budget planning, which should be critically linked.
As you develop your 2024-25 fiscal year budget proposal, seek alignment. Does your institutional strategic plan reflect strategy choices? Is your marketing and communications work aligned to those choices and priorities? Then, is your marketing budget aligned to resource that work?
