RHB Vice President for Marketing Leadership Rob Zinkan joined Maya Demishkevich on Enrollify’s The Hidden Gem podcast on August 26 to discuss constituent experiences and the pivotal role those experiences play in creating coherence and supporting an institution’s market position. You can listen to the episode or read the transcript below. 

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Transcript:

Maya Demishkevich

Welcome to The Hidden Gem, your go-to podcast that shines a spotlight on the strategic role of marketing and communications in shaping the future of community colleges. I’m your host, Maya Demishkevich, CMO at Carroll Community College. Every week I sit down with community college leaders and industry experts to unpack strategies that work.

We’ll discuss practical insights and success stories to help you elevate your institution’s profile and achieve your strategic goals. Tune in to amplify your community college’s success one conversation at a time. The Hidden Gem is part of the Enrollify network, a robust collection podcasts designed to help higher education professionals like you grow.

Explore our other shows at Enrollify.org or check out some of my personal favorites linked in the show notes below. Enrollify is made possible by Element451, the leading AI powered all in one student engagement platform, helping institutions create meaningful, personalized and engaging interactions with students. Learn more at element451. com And let’s get started.

Hi, Rob, and welcome to The Hidden Gem podcast. I’m so excited to have you on.

Rob Zinkan

Thanks, Maya. I’m looking forward to the conversation as well. So glad we get to connect and have this type of conversation together. I know it will be interesting.

Maya

Yes. But before we can jump in, I would love for you to introduce yourself. Share with our listeners, maybe your higher ed journey, and how did you get to be where you are now at RHB?

Rob

Yes, I’ll try to keep it brief. I feel like my higher ed journey has been long. I currently serve as vice president for marketing leadership at RHB, a higher education consulting firm. And I joined RHB five years ago to lead the institutional marketing practice, and I came from the client side.

I got to know RHB while I was in a previous role as associate vice president at Indiana University in a system wide role. I was with that institution for almost 20 years in a variety of roles that included campus-level vice chancellor, included advancement, marketing and communications. And I had an opportunity to join RHB, and the focus of the work there is very much on the marketing that you can’t see.

So—and we may talk about this a bit today—around market position and making choices about a position that you should occupy, own as an institution, and then channeling behaviors, strategies, communications to that choice. So, we have methodologies to help institutions with those positioning activities.

And then the other part—and I know we’ll talk about the guidebook on structuring your marketing department—is organizational effectiveness. So, we work with institutions to help them evolve or transform their marketing or marketing and communications organization for greater capability, more impact on institutional outcomes, and that’s really fascinating work.

And just recently, RHB became a division of SIG, Strata Information Group, which is a comprehensive technology provider across higher education. So, excited that our world-renowned Slate team and Slate practice that will now get to work in Salesforce and a variety of other technologies and systems to serve the higher education landscape.

Maya

Well, that’s a very impressive background. I’m excited to learn more from you about, as you mentioned, the reason why we actually talking today and that’s how we met is I downloaded your guidebook. And I think it was titled the structure, “How to Structure Your Higher Ed Marketing Department for the Future.:

And the reason why I downloaded it, because I was doing research, trying to evaluate what are the current skill sets we have in my department, which ones might be missing and how we can set ourselves up for success. And when I downloaded your guidebook, you know, I was very impressed. I think it hit all the points that I was looking for.

And then after we had a great conversation. Which I was like, okay, well, I am sure other leaders in community colleges would benefit from hearing your insights. So that’s kind of how we met, and that’s why we’re talking today. But I did want to start with kind of asking you to briefly talk about the guidebook, because in that guidebook, you have identified four areas that each marketing communication department in higher ed institution needs to have expertise in, can you briefly talk about what are those areas and why you think they’re important for marketing communication department to set us up for success?

Rob

Yes. And first of all, Maya, I’m so glad that the guidebook was useful to you and you found it valuable. And whenever I talk about structuring a higher ed marketing or a marketing and communications department, I’ll often refer to this common refrain that I, typically hear about how there’s no one structure in higher ed marketing, and that’s true for the most part. But there is one main organizing principle and that is typically teams, departments, divisions are organized around function: design, content, web development, all the different functions that we’re familiar with.

And this guidebook is based on a model that we call coherence. And that opens up a different way to look at your marketing department because it’s more focused on what you’re trying to achieve. And in this case, coherence is that outcome or what you may be trying to achieve as an institution. And coherence is when there’s alignment between experience, expression and expectation.

So those are three of those E’s. And that means that the actual lived experience, what’s true about your college, what students experience, that is consistent with what you say is true about your college across all your communications, your expression of that experience. And then ideally, that aligns with what others say about your college and expect of your college, and that’s the expectation.

So that model, then, can also serve as a lens for looking at organizational capability. So what are the capabilities around those clusters: experience, expression, expectation, and then we added a fourth for this purpose of effectiveness. So again, if you look across those four, it can provide a helpful way to think about, Where do I have capability in my marketing organization, where do I have capability in house, where do I outsource for capability?

If you start with experience…and certainly part of that is the digital experience, and hopefully marketing is shaping those digital experiences. We should think of those as our digital campus and think of digital campus in the same way and with the same intentionality that we would think of our physical campus. But beyond that, there’s usually limited influence by marketing on the constituent experience in higher ed.

So in the guidebook, we do advocate for having constituent experience as capability that you would have the ability to have the pulse on the experience as students are having the ability to examine constituent journeys from prospective student, from that journey, all the way through alumni, donor engagement and beyond.

So it really starts with experience, even though marketing is typically not highly equipped for that. Where they are equipped, mostly equipped is around that expression. That can be visual, verbal expression, all the ways that a college expresses itself and communicates with the audience. And then the expectation is more about understanding your brand, understanding your audiences and stakeholders, their perceptions, again, their expectation of you as an institution, because that’s where the brand resides in our audiences and our stakeholders.

So that capability cluster would include areas such as marketing research, insight, analytics. So how you’re able to assess again, awareness, perspectives, opinions of your institution from various audiences and be able to provide insights that inform decision making.

And then effectiveness, that fourth capability cluster, refers to organizational effectiveness. So what are your organizational capabilities in, for example, data management, project management, talent management. So, rather than just looking at function and the typical, well, these are marketing, these are communications, or these are marketing. Those four capability clusters—experience, expression, expectation, and effectiveness—can really be helpful to understand and assess the capability of your marketing department.

Maya

I certainly found it very interesting and helpful in taking this approach to assessing my department. And what I have identified as a missing piece is the experience component. We do work closely with other departments across the institution, and we are trying to kind of design the experience, but there is no one point person who is responsible for evaluating this type of experience for different constituents.

And I think that’s a missing piece. And I think that’s where we can really maybe develop the types of experience that can help differentiate us from other institutions. Because when I think about this, you can differentiate yourself on what you do, like what types of programs you provide, or you can differentiate yourself on how you do it. Like what types of experiences, how do you deliver this particular product to your target audience? And I think the how component is where I would like to spend more time, especially next year, trying to figure out how we can enhance this experience. But of course, for community colleges, it’s always a challenge with resource allocation, people, but I think it’s, it’s important to consider.

So from your perspective, why do you think experience is important, and how do you think it can contribute to the success of the institution?

Rob

Oh, there’s so much there, Maya. Wow. I really appreciate if I could pick up on your introductory comment about being that as a potential void in your work and your capability and the way that you were talking about that hits on such an important point as we think about the role of marketing in higher education.

And I appreciate that you’re thinking about the, again, the experiences that constituents are having, and it’s a different approach that it’s often hard for our colleagues to take. And it’s so foundational for marketers. Do you see yourself? Does your team see itself as being the voice of the student or the voice of the constituent? Is that central to your role as a marketer? Is that a core orientation for your work being a champion for those audiences and those stakeholders? And if you are, how do you not help influence or shape that experience?

The other reason why I think it’s so important for the success of institutions, community colleges, is the implication here as it relates to brand. And when it comes to shaping and influencing brand, we tend to get it backwards. The tendency is to look at how we tell our story, how we express the brand through our communications, but you hit on it, the experiences, consumers, constituents, students, you know whatever label we want to give, they control the brand based on their experiences with you, with your college.

So whatever you choose as your point of differentiation or relative differentiation as a college, the market position that you want to occupy as a college, that has to be supported and substantiated by the constituent experience. So the task then that we have is not only aligning communications with that. We have to align everything we do, everything we say as a college to the market position that we’ve chosen.

And then once we do that, it’s a matter of repetition and who’s taking stock of, Are we consistently delivering on those experiences? Because over time, as those constituent experiences that you hopefully can craft, as those affect the impressions and beliefs that your audiences have about you, that is what ultimately shapes brand. That is how people will come to identify the brand that you intend for your college. That’s how you influence brand over time in that way, based on those experiences, not the other way around.

Maya

Yes, I completely agree. Very often, you know, I see institutions say one thing, but do something completely different, right? Or you might be saying you stand for this. But when students come to your institution, they don’t even see it. They don’t experience what you are trying to communicate.

So alignment between who you are, how you provide, what you provide and how you communicate it to your students and not only communicate, but what types of experiences you offer, I think all has to be considered.

You know, we’re talking about the benefits, but I think for our listeners, it would be helpful to know if you can share any examples of experiences that have successfully improved engagement in higher education institutions. Examples are always great, so if you have any examples to kind of illustrate what we are talking about and what types of experience we’re talking about.

Rob

Well, sure. Certainly again, the importance of this in an increasingly competitive market as colleges are looking for ways to differentiate themselves through the experience they offer to students, we sometimes think of creating or shaping signature experiences as something that can also be identified as part of the institutional brand. And that may be reconfiguring some existing experiences.

And that’s more common at four-year institutions. That could be a first-year experience, a branded curriculum, often a branded general ed curriculum or core curriculum, or it could be a signature experience that is integrated across the entire student time on campus.

Curriculum branding would be one of those examples. That’s something that we do at RHB, and probably one of the better known examples we’ve helped design is Summit at Agnes Scott College.

And certainly experiences and signature experiences can entail a lot of different things from the first year to branded curriculum, core curriculum or gen ed curriculum. Or, in some cases such as Summit at Agnes Scott, that is part of the entire experience. It’s woven across all four years, and it includes coursework and co-curricular experiences that all are connected to leadership development and global learning, so we had the pleasure of working with leadership at Agnes Scott to develop Summit.

And so that involved everything from participating in faculty planning sessions and brainstorming, there was research that was conducted as part of that, and then eventually the naming and branding of that. But part of it, too, was making sure that this created a connected experience. So there are elements of that that are, I think, really unique to Agnes Scott.

One of which is the admissions packet. When someone is admitted to Agnes Scott, they receive a set of gloves. And the significance of those gloves is that as a senior at this four-year institution, once you are admitted into graduate school or you receive your first job offer, you are taken up set of, essentially a set of secret stairs to go ring the bell in the tower, and you sign your name on the wall.

That is a that is a tradition, but you get the gloves—that you will use to pull that rope and ring that bell—when you are admitted. Because that is the expectation. That is what your experience at Agnes Scott is going to entail. And the way that that communicates outcomes right from the very beginning and connects that experience, I think is a great example that Agnes Scott has done.

But sometimes it can be overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be an experience that spans this entire time on campus. You can start small. Ask your, your graduating students what will they miss about the college, you know, in terms of finding opportunities there. My RHB colleague Sam Watterson was telling me earlier today about Concordia University Irvine breakfast burritos that they do for commuter students.

I mean, just one small, you know, touchpoint that can be meaningful. But when we think of whether Carroll, your institution, or other community colleges, and you have such a wide variety of students: dual credit students, you’re working with businesses who are probably taking advantage of customized training, noncredit students, community members taking personal enrichment courses, and certainly those looking for a credential or those looking to transfer to four-year colleges and universities.

So maybe rather than one signature experience, there may be opportunities within those segments for versions of signature experiences that can really connect and reinforce a market position. And so I would recommend starting with a set of questions as you think about possibilities and begin to assess: How does this reflect your mission, vision and values? How does it differ from your peers, your competitors? How does it shape or how might it shape the choice that prospective students are making to choose you, to enroll in your institution? If it is tied to the curriculum in any way, how does it engage the faculty would be another one. And again, how does it reinforce your market, market position?

So I think you can be as creative as you want to be. And in this case, rather than a particular case study or example, is really define something that speaks to the experience or builds on what is true about your institution currently and strengthen, enhance, make current experiences that are meaningful even more meaningful.

I was looking at your institution, Maya, and I was intrigued about the Great Futures Take Shape at Carroll. And how you have this combination of recognizing what students bring with them and what has shaped their life and then how then Carroll can shape their future going forward and the way that you describe that there’s more than a community or more than a college that there is a true community at Carroll and all the ways that manifests itself.

And so it just seems so ripe for potential…maybe experiences that are already there or experiences that can be woven together perhaps more intentionally that then become associated as, wow, this was really central to what made this experience meaningful or special.

Maya

Well, thank you for taking a look at our website, and I’m so glad that you got it. You got what we were trying to communicate because that’s one of the challenges for us as marketers. Do people get what we are trying to say, right? And it sounds like you did, which is great because Take Shape is our new campaign. We just launched it this year, and we are kind of starting to integrate it in more places and thinking about what are the types of experiences we want to include next year for students that are coming back in the fall.

So that’s why I’m so excited about this topic because it’s so relevant to me right now, trying to figure out how we can not only create experiences, but also traditions. Because like you said, traditions are more likely to happen at four-year institutions. Community colleges, since we have so many different students, we, I don’t know if it’s resource based or what, but I’m just now starting to think about this particular topic.

And maybe because I have more time right now to kind of focus on it because I feel like the rest of marketing is in good shape, and that’s where we can enhance. So I hope other institutions are also kind of starting to think about this topic as well.

Rob

Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting making that comparison to more traditional four-year colleges that you would associate with on campus living and intercollegiate athletics and all of those things that would be considered a traditional coming-of-age experience—that 18 to 22-year-old. And that’s not your mission or your promise to deliver a coming-of-age experience. So, investing in, solidifying experiences that align with your mission, who you intend to be, who you are, your brand, should be the, should be the focus. And that can be, there can be traditions associated with that. There can be ritual associated with that.

One other, one example that does come to mind being based in Indiana, I have a front row seat to some of the great work that Lumina Foundation does, which is based in Indianapolis. And as you may recall, in 2022, I believe Lumina foundation had a million dollar community college challenge, which was a wonderful program for, a grant program for branding, branding support to help community colleges raise their profiles in their communities and their market.

I remember going through those finalist videos, which I think are still available online, and one of them was from Houston Community College. And it was about how HCC Online helps to remove obstacle and how they would address or try to address for students everything from basic needs to technology support to emotional barriers—whether that’s doubt or fear or whatever that may be. And their video had this huge stack of cardboard boxes all labeled with one of those obstacles, and then faculty and staff members came in one by one and removed each one kind of revealing the student behind them just to show that’s what your experience will be and the support that you will have.

And so again, that gets back to what we said at the outset. If that’s a promise, how then is the college able to deliver that experience across every, every touchpoint. It gets back to coherence, the importance of everything that you do reflecting who you say you are. That coherence is based in truth and authenticity.

If you want to be a community college that removes obstacles and barriers, that’s your claim, then you have to, you have to guarantee that students indeed have that appropriate support, that frictionless experience. And to do that takes, I mean, that is a total campus effort and investment. And again, who better to bring that external or sort of student perspective to that discussion and planning than the leadership and expertise of marketing.

Maya

Yeah. As you’re talking about this, I’m thinking that additional challenges for us is we do have a lot of online students and creating experiences online or somehow inviting those students to come to campus is not always easy, right? They take online classes for a reason. Maybe they, they can’t come on campus.

How do you create experiences for those students? Do you have any examples or any suggestions?

Rob

Yes. Well, you have to certainly make sure that the online experience itself is, you know, it’s outstanding and ensure that there are ways to create connections that are meaningful, even in that, you know, that environment.

Your question makes me think of Covid. And when everyone had to just change immediately and had to redesign all of these experiences from orientation to commencement and make those virtual. And in many cases, it was marketing at the center of that work and leading that work and helping to bring that perspective of not just the institution’s perspective and sort of the organization, organization’s way of doing things or thinking about things, but that perspective.

And so I think if you evolve to think of your online learning, and hopefully we get to a point where online learning is learning. I mean, that is just, that is just part of the experience, and that there are ways to, that our, our faculty, that our other colleagues are continuing to make that a meaningful or even more meaningful, enriching experience.

I teach online courses at the graduate level, and, you know, there are ways synchronously, asynchronously to make those connections. And I think it’s really trying to understand where to insert, those things, those things that are truly human. Where can empathy come through in those interactions and opportunities, even, even though it’s online?

I think there’s so much to study and watch there. I had a colleague who did dissertation research on alumni engagement from online only students. And you can certainly create strong community in that environment, but it has to be intentional. And so I even think that as a, as a marketer, what as an adjunct faculty member, what I’ve learned from my institution where I teach, their online learning, online teaching and learning resource has even been helpful from a marketing standpoint too. So that’s a wordy answer to say, continue to learn, learn.

Maya

Yeah. Yes. That’s what we’re trying to do. And another challenge that you mentioned already is us having very diverse audiences. So one signature experience is not enough. We have to create versions of the signature experience.

And I think that takes a lot of time and effort to figure out. What would resonate with each audience and how we can make those experiences impactful. So let’s talk about where can an institution who is interested in creating those experiences start. How, how do we even go about doing something like that?

Rob

Yes. Well, I think there’s some tangible steps that you can take, and one would simply be doing an experience inventory and cataloging those key experiences that you currently have, and you could make it manageable, whether it’s taking your top three, five audiences, and then for each identifying some of those top experiences.

And then, whether it you rate formally or just go through a set of questions of, how differentiated is that experience? How does it, how does that experience happen? How big is it? What’s the quality of the experience? How much control, again to your point about marketing? How much control do you have over that experience in terms of its planning? And does that experience also present opportunities for storytelling?

And so you could you could do that. Another step, an additional step would be then to do a journey mapping, which is a great exercise to do and likely have experience with that, identifying journeys within any of those audiences, say, the prospective student or current student experience or whatever audience you may be focused on, and mapping that journey by capturing all the touchpoints, all the milestones along the way.

And then, as you do that, you can start to identify—and in some cases, ideally, if it’s informed by research—but identify point of frictions, identify those barriers. What are questions that students or prospective students have at those points? What are opportunity areas? Even, what are the emotions that they have at those different touchpoints?

So journey mapping is a wonderful thing or wonderful way to get started. I would also say simply spend time with students. Like, imagine if you build into your culture and your work pattern that everyone in your office or your department spent at least one hour a week with a student or a group of students. How much more would you know about the student experience on your campus? How much more informed would you be about what’s happening?

I would also, one other recommendation, Maya, would be that there are so many, there’s so many good books that you can read to find inspiration, and I could, I could rattle off a few for you. But I know if you were to take a look at any of these, it will spark an idea, or it will kickstart your thinking in some way.

We do an annual summer reading list at RHB and a couple of years ago I recommended The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker. Last year a colleague recommended Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. The Power of Moments by Dan and Chip Heath is another good one. And then one of the classics is the The Experience Economy by Pine and Gilmore. So those are great resources too.

Maya

Yeah, those are great. And last time we spoke, you mentioned another tool, reverse focus groups. Can you talk about those? I think that’s, that’s something I haven’t done before, but I would be very curious in doing something like that.

Rob

Yes. Yeah, it’s a methodology that we employ at RHB, and it’s in that same vein—it’s really spending time with students. And so rather than RHB coming in with our set of focus group questions, we really put the student at the center of that to describe their experience and those who have influenced their experience.

So when we say inverted focus groups, it’s really putting students at the center versus us as facilitators. And what that does is it positions the students as the experts and those who are influencing their experience: faculty, staff, fellow students, whatever the case may be. But the students are the ones who are, who are the experts in their, in their own experiences.

And so, for them to be able to describe that in, in their own way, their own language versus necessarily responding to focus group questions that are used from one institution to the next. So, we have a…I can share some more resources if you want to do a deeper dive on that, but it’s a methodology we call Circles of Influence. And again, really focused on putting students at the center and those who have influenced their experience.

Maya

I think that’s such a great way to find out what makes their experience unique or impactful by asking them to identify those experiences and bring those people in. I’m definitely interested in trying something like this to see what kind of answers come up. I do have some guesses, but I’m sure I will be surprised when I do ask.

Rob

Yeah, I think you would be. There’s always some element of surprise for the institution when we do Circles of Influence because we go places that we wouldn’t have even known to ask about. As students begin introducing their, introducing others and again, why they’ve been or how they’ve been influential. And after a while you start to see some patterns emerge of wow, that is, that’s something that is really meaningful at this college.

And then if you go back to that Coherence model, the experience and the expression, and in some cases, that’s not expressed across the communications and marketing materials, something that is meaningful. It helps to uncover some of those things. And then the other item is, yeah, having done this at so many institutions, we very quickly identify something that wow, we, we’ve not heard this anywhere else—this particular experience that from an institution standpoint is just, that’s just what we do. And they don’t have the perspective to realize that you’ve got something special here. Let’s bring this to the surface where you might be, you know, four or five layers deep on the website. Like, let’s bring that, let’s bring that to the forefront.

Maya

Yeah. It’s like with a person, right? Like, you might have this innate skill that comes naturally to you and it’s easy for you, you don’t even realize, right, unless somebody tells you that this is something special that you’ve got. So I think that’s kind of the same idea with the institution, it might be something that we do naturally, but to others, it is special. And the only way to find out is to ask. So that’s a great, great suggestion.

And I want to go back to the book you mentioned about the moments. So I was thinking about when we talk about the enrollment cycle, there are four different stages, you know, starting with awareness, interest, and then the last stage is called delight, right? And that’s where we should really delight our customers, our students, and provide those moments, those experiences that are not always expected, that delight them. Because I think if it’s something that you don’t expect, it is more memorable.

So we kind of started doing this on campus with chalking. So to introduce this Take Shape campaign every so often, especially in the fall and spring, outside of our main entrances, we’ll chalk inspirational messages that relate to Take Shape. And those experiences, they don’t take a lot of time or effort, and it’s pretty cheap, but they do add to the experience and they delight people because that’s not something they expect to see when they come to campus.

So I’m trying to identify more of those delight moments that we can add to the experience.

Rob

That’s great. That’s great, by the way, I love that. And after a while, if that’s not there, students are going to say, well, where are the messages? And it’ll be, it becomes part of their experience and what they expect.

Maya

Right. And now we are including clubs on campus and give them the permission and the chalk to go outside and create and write those messages. So it’s actually not coming from us, but it’s coming from students, but they do have some guidelines around what we expect. So that was interesting. And it’s great to see some Instagram pictures that people post.

So yeah, adding more of those experiences. And I was thinking, especially with community colleges, it’s important to kind of start early since we do serve kids and families, starting with summer camps. Adding it moments and experiences for younger kids so they get used to coming on campus and almost creating an environment where people want to come to your campus.

It becomes a destination. They get used to being on campus, and they associate very positive, fun moments and experiences with the college. So I was thinking at my college, we have great hills, and in the winter, I usually take my kids sledding. So why not offer hot chocolate and invite families for a sledding day?

And then next year, I’m sure those kids will be like, hey, mom, can we go to Carroll Community College again to get that hot chocolate and sledding? So it almost becomes like a tradition and then creates those positive associations. So figuring out how we can integrate, how we can find resource to, to bring community to campus and create positive associations.

Rob

That’s great. You’re on a roll, Maya. You’ve got great ideas.

Maya

I’m just trying to brainstorm and see what we can do.

Rob

And I love that you’re talking about very early too. I mean, that’s the full life cycle, starting, starting with children in your community. It made me think about they’re really two levels of constituent experience that you have: the touchpoints and then the journeys.

And if you step back, it’s another reason why I get on the soapbox about opportunities for marketing, because if you step back and think of this really lifelong potential integrated journey, and no one—and you said it earlier—no one owns that, or no one is necessarily thinking about that.

And it’s so important because our constituents, they look at the institution, they look at the college holistically. But unfortunately, we’re often organized into these silos. Though, if we can think about how do we create a more seamless journey for our constituents, or even thinking about, thinking about current students.

Of course, we want them to give as alumni. We want them to be engaged. We want them to hire other graduates, all of those things. But those decisions about their behaviors as alumni, those get shaped by their experiences when they’re a student. Everything is everything is connected. And to the extent that we can help our colleagues on campus, think like that as well or see that bigger picture, it’s helpful and I think pays off in the long run.

Maya

So if you were to convince someone to create those experiences on campus, they would probably ask you, well, how do I measure the impact? How do I measure that the experiences are actually driving revenue, driving enrollment, driving exposure?

What would you say? How do you measure experiences? What do you look at?

Rob

Well, ultimately, I do think you are looking at those, at those measures, and they may be lagging measures, but related to admissions, retention, graduation, alumni engagement, giving. But definitely along the way, there would be, there would be other things that you would look at, and, and there are probably other things in place that you would want to be assessing and monitoring: ways that you’re looking at student satisfaction, the community college survey of student engagement, any brand research that you are doing or have in place would be helpful in that regard.

I remember you had a great episode with Eddie Francis on employer branding, so don’t forget about the employee experience and employee engagement survey data too. So net promoter scores across different audiences can be helpful, whether that’s employee NPS to alumni NPS. Your social listening efforts can reveal experience opportunities and ways that you’ve enhanced or grown in terms of the work that you’re doing related to constituent experience.

But I think in general, you want to be building in a culture of measurement and evaluation with everything that you do. I mean, even if you think of your, your meetings as experiences…that you run a simple survey afterward, your department meeting and you send out a survey, three questions: What was your favorite part of the meeting? What was your least favorite part? What was one thing that we could have done differently or improved on?

That all the experiences that you have some measurements component so that you’re able to track short term while you’re also looking at those more significant outcome measures.

And then one last point would be the metric of student lifetime value. And I don’t know too many places that are playing that long game or even have developed a formula for their institution. And I would encourage institutions to do that, or at least have that discussion. And that, it goes two ways in terms of the value to the institution, and obviously you could develop a formula for that. But also, conceptually to be thinking about student lifetime value in terms of the value to the student if they’re engaged with the institution across their lifetime. What is the value that they, that they gain from that relationship as well?

Maya

That’s a very interesting way to look at the value because I never looked at it that way, but yeah, we’re here to provide value. So how much value do we actually provide to a student compared to how much we gain from getting that student in terms of monetary investment. Very interesting.

Rob

And hopefully that would be reflected in some of those, whether again it’s NPS scores, your brand research, if you do any sort of brand tracking or have a brand health index, that that value would be evident across those measures as well.

Maya

Great. And then the last question for you is, as we’re looking ahead, what future trends do you foresee in higher education marketing and maybe in particular, the experience component of marketing? And how can colleges prepare to stay ahead of those trends?

Rob

Well, that is a big one to end on, isn’t it? Well, I think if we, if we go back to some of the foundational points, that we’ve established that constituent experience shapes opinion, shapes brand, and ideally those touchpoints, those journeys, we’re designing them to meet, to surpass constituent needs and expectations.

And it’s important as we think ahead and plan that we’re remembering that we’re not necessarily competing with your competitor community college in this regard. That your constituents, they’re comparing experiences to all kinds of other experiences, whether that’s their app experience or in-person experience at Starbucks, to any number of other experiences they have, and so to be thinking more broadly in that regard.

The first place likely to go in terms of future trends would be digital transformation, and that will continue to be at the center of any discussion like this, and constantly working on how technology is best suited to, as a tool, to enhance experience is critical.

I recently read Paul LeBlanc’s book Broken, which is excellent—another book recommendation. And he said in there, there’s a chapter about scaling, and he said, scaling human relations, putting those served at the heart of the work means understanding which interactions are merely transactional versus impactful.

So I think that’s really profound as we rely more and more on technology to enable and enhance the experience that we understand or help figure out where the human element, where connection, where empathy, that meaningful human interaction is most, again, impactful, most critical.

Humans are complex. We know that. So maybe not an answer, but something to think about. I’m not going to make predictions about new technologies or how virtual or augmented reality might play into the constituent experience, but I would reiterate thinking about the constituent experience as part of an increasingly integrated experience.

To that earlier point about how online learning is just going to become learning at some point. At some point, we’re all going to be considered students because we’re all flowing in and out of what we need to upskill and learn and grow. I hope we no longer think of nontraditional students as nontraditional. They’re traditional. They’re contemporary learners. All of those things to think in an increasingly integrated way about those experiences. And always, always, as we do this work, to come back to mission and values. Is our mission, do our values come forth in these, across these experiences?

Maya

Well, I appreciate you adding four more books to my list. I’m already reading three books. So, what’s four more? But yeah, I’m always looking for good book recommendations. So I appreciate it.

So, Rob, it was a pleasure speaking with you, and I have learned a lot again. So I really appreciate you taking the time and coming on this podcast.

Rob

Well, my pleasure. Thanks for the great questions.

I know we did not get to talk about it. I saw your post on LinkedIn, Maya, about your digital detox and going off the grid and hiking in West Virginia. I would love to hear about that and trade favorite hikes at some point, but that will have to be another time.

Maya

Well, we will talk again, so thanks again.

I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it valuable. Let’s keep this conversation going on LinkedIn at Maya Demishkevich. I would love to hear your thoughts, questions and suggestions for what you’d like to see next on this podcast. Remember, by tuning in to The Hidden Gem, you’re not just listening to a podcast, you are joining a movement of amplifying community colleges’ success.