The following is Module 1, Section C of a series called Coherence, introducing key strategies that will enable you to market your institution more coherently.

Overview and Objective

You’ve heard it said dozens, maybe hundreds, of times: Actions speak louder than words. That’s true about your institution. Your mission may include flowery or highfalutin language intended to communicate your noble purposes. Higher education has earned its “Ivory Tower” image legitimately. What really tells our story however, is how we act.

Key Points

Your core values—what’s most important to your institution—will be best demonstrated by your behaviors. For example, at Wooster, one of the celebrated moments of the experience is the day when seniors deliver their independent study theses to the Dean. They each receive a Tootsie Roll in return. Prior to that, a significant part of the customer experience is narrowing options to focus on an independent study project. Related to that is the process of working with a faculty mentor—and, of course, the grueling work of research and writing necessary to support and complete the project.

Think about your institution. List the significant customer experiences that characterize and define your college or university. Now categorize or cluster the experiences by frequency and commonalities.

What do these experiences have in common? What’s the big idea behind these experiences? Why are they important to you?

In the aforementioned example at Wooster, these experiences all have research and independent study in common. These may be important to Wooster because they want students to be prepared for graduate school. They want students to leave Wooster with the skills necessary to be resourceful and continually engaged in discovery.

What might these experiences suggest about a core value? Wooster seems to have curiosity, discovery and intellectual pursuit as core values. But they also seem to value the sense of intrinsic reward that comes from this achievement. They give a Tootsie Roll, not a scholarship, as the symbol of success.

What you practice—that is, what you do and how you behave—speaks more significantly to your core values than what you say.

Activity with Worksheet 1C: Your Core Values Navigator

If your institution has not documented core values, this exercise may help you identify the values most important to your college or university. If you have documented core values, see if they surface in this exercise.

1. Look at the key words of your mission statement. (Use Worksheets 1A and 1B from our previous two lessons.) Taken together, what values do these words describe?
2. Identify and list the most significant experiences a student (or donor, or alumna, or visitor) might have at your institution. Are you able to cluster or categorize these experiences around some common values?
3. What are the motivations behind these experiences? Why do you repeat these experiences? What do you hope participants will learn or take away from these experiences?
4. Your motivations are directly connected to your values. What core values do these experiences represent? Do these core values summarize what is most important to your mission—and existence?
5. Take this exercise a bit further. What signals are you sending your constituents about your core values? Examine your flagship publication(s) such as your alumni or research magazines. What are the key messages you are promoting? You could, in fact, create a word cloud of the content of your recent issues. What are the most used words in these publications?
6. Explore your core values more deeply. Take a campus tour of your own campus. What facilities and resources speak to your core values? Which of your facilities are most impressive? What might campus visitors conclude about what is most important to you?
7. Examine your marketing materials such as your website or recruitment communications. What words and phrases and images are most prominent? What are the values that surface as most significant?
8. After reviewing the language and signals you send about your institution, create a list of the top words and phrases that characterize your institution. Write these values in the lower right of the worksheet.

Knowledge into Practice

Now that you have a list of your core values, convene a meeting with key internal stakeholders. Do they agree with your findings? What behaviors might you expect from an institution with your core values? What practices and environments can you encourage given your value set?

Next, continue to Module 2 of the Coherence Series: Position and Competitors.