On February 15, RHB’s Rob Zinkan hosted a webinar with special guests Jeneane Beck from the University of Iowa and Kate Ledger from Old Dominion University to discuss the organizational challenges and opportunities of integrating marketing and communications. A recording of the webinar is also available.

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Transcript

Rob Zinkan

So pleased to have Jeneane Beck and Kate Ledger, and we will have them do a quick introduction here, but I wanted to ask as I said before we started recording, we will certainly talk about challenges today and some of the issues that those who are leading marcomm are dealing with, but—and again it’s always wonderful to be with both of you—but I thought before we get into the topic in full force, I’d love to hear what you are both excited about, optimistic about right now in your work, in our field or more broadly across higher ed.

Jeneane Beck

Kate, do you want to go first?

Kate Ledger

Sure, I can go first. I’m Kate Ledger. I’m the associate vice president for marketing and outreach at ODUGlobal which is the online arm of Old Dominion University. Today actually marks eight months since I joined ODU. Time flies. And prior to that I spent 20 years of my career at the University of Pittsburgh always in a marketing role, and eventually interim vice provost for marketing communications. So I would say what I am most excited about in terms of the work that I’m doing now, which is really enrollment focused, is the ability to build in some new things.

I mean, our, as we all know, our space changes so quickly, but at ODUGlobal, we are really building out fast and so we are adding staff and we’re adding different capabilities and we’re strengthening our brand platform and so, you know, doing all of these things at once while overwhelming is also really exciting. So it’s fun to be in this space right now.

Jeneane

Well, I’m Jeneane Back. I’m the assistant vice president for external relations at the University of Iowa. So I lead our Office of Strategic Communication, which is the centralized marketing and communication shop for the university. And I think the thing I’m excited about is we continue to see evidence that our brand work that we launched sort of a brand in 2020 that we had done research and started to lean into what we’re actually known for, which is writing and communication, and getting the campus to sort of singly focus on something that you’re known for broadly and get behind that is actually paying off and we get all these wonderful anecdotes about students in far flung places that maybe hadn’t heard of us before and suddenly are very interested in coming to Iowa.

We just got another one the other day and that just the growth we’ve seen in the writing and communication majors at Iowa and the ranking and so I think for our work for all of us just, you know, it’s hard to convince your campus to focus on something and, and lean into that because everybody says, but what about my program, and so—and it’s certainly that you don’t get to ignore the other programs—but when you start to see success and how that the rising tide lifts all boats, then it helps you. So I’m excited about that.

Rob

Yeah, and congrats to you both. And I was just, Jeneane, commending you and Iowa last week during a different webinar about that very thing and you all making a choice as an institution to lean into that. And that’s often the hardest thing to do is making that choice. So, well done, well done.

And I would add, and I’m Rob Zinkan and I serve as vice president for marketing leadership at RHB. I just had on Monday evening…I teach as an adjunct in a doctoral program in higher ed leadership and organizational studies and any time I am with students, it’s hard not to be encouraged or inspired, and I, our session Monday night and I just, I was left with this feeling of wow, I feel good about the future of higher ed and our future more broadly. And so I know we’re always buried with so many things to do but carving out that time just to spend time with students and understand their worldviews and their experiences. There’s so much value in it because the work your institutions do and the work that you do is so, is so meaningful.

Alright, well one other introduction is an introduction of RHB. And RHB aims to help institutions reach greater relevance. And all of our work, the design of our firm, it’s all oriented toward that. And you see our four practices here, and I have the pleasure of leading our institutional marketing practice. And there, colleges and universities come to RHB to help with the marketing you can’t see. So making choices, just as I said, making choices around market position, research-informed choices. Ensuring institutional strategies, behaviors, communications, all support that chosen market position. And evolving or transforming marketing and communications organizations for greater capability and institutional impact. And that last area, our organizational design work, organizational effectiveness work, is one of the reasons for addressing and exploring today’s topic.

And we’ve conducted organizational capability assessments across higher ed. This has become an increasingly challenging topic to navigate for institutions and their marcomm leaders, this integration. And the questions that are coming up in this work repeatedly are number one, what do we, what do we do? We’re having to spend so much time on issues management, and it’s really hard to do everything we want to do and need to do from a marketing standpoint.

For new VPs again and again we’re hearing about the need to create an infrastructure or better infrastructure for managing issues, whether that’s developing an issues team or creating and formalizing processes, what set of players needs to be involved, what needs to be done. And then the other, even more directly from president asking, hey, should, should we be thinking about splitting these functions? Should we be thinking about splitting out comms because of these growing issues management and the weight of the comms demands?

And so there are plenty of organizational implications and they’re also individual leadership implications, such as overall wellbeing. And even some from the marketing side who would be outstanding in a VP or CMCO role who are at the AVP level or director level. And simply deciding not to pursue that path or for some of these reasons. So there are a lot of considerations here and, Kate and Jeneane, you both bring a depth of experience and your own perspectives here, so it would be helpful for attendees to hear the particular angle in which you bring and the perspective you bring to this topic and why it’s so relevant for you and your work and your previous work. And Kate, let’s start with you again.

Kate

Sure. So as I mentioned in my introduction, I had spent 20 years at the University of Pittsburgh and increasingly, you know, working more and more across the university, I started really focused in marketing, but naturally as you know positions rose up through the levels also took on communications as well, particularly during COVID. And for me, the decision to actually leave the University of Pittsburgh and find a job that is really more focused in enrollment and marketing in particular was a very specific decision because the communications really started to overtake the work that we were doing as a unit at the University of Pittsburgh.

So it really became the urgent over the important and just given not only COVID, but protests and safety and, and all of the other issues and you listed some of those there, Rob. It was all consuming, not just time consuming, sort of mental space consuming for myself and for the team. And so looking for an opportunity that really frankly distanced me from the communications side so that I could focus more on marketing was what was great for me.

There are definitely spaces and places and people who are outstanding in the communications side, and we need those strengths. But it’s also how we, you know, raise the value of marketing and comms a little more equally, I will say up, to leadership as well. And I think raising the value of marketing has always been a struggle in higher ed. The weight of comms is making that even harder more recently. But that’s really the angle that I come from is, you know, really how do we sort of carry both of those weights at the institution and keep marketing really valued as well.

Jeneane

And to Kate’s point of sort of encourage our leaders to think of these as two pillars, equal pillars, I come from the same line of thinking, though from the comms background, right. And came up through comms, have led a lot of crisis comms at the institution and media relations functions of the institution and then in this leadership role, have marketing under me as well and when we lost our senior director of marketing about a year-and-a-half ago or almost two years ago now, we treaded water for a little bit and had a study done by RHB—and that treading water, because marketing can be less visible to the administration, I remember at one point, my vice president saying, I don’t think we need to replace that position. I said, not only do we need to replace that position, we need to elevate that position. And here’s this, and having to admit to him, here are the skillsets we do not have on our team currently and that is why we need to elevate this to a chief marketing officer.

And some guidance I might give to any of you if you don’t have that role currently is making it very clear to your institution the value of that and I do think the enrollment cliff helps those conversations for sure. It did at least on our campus, and we had an admissions team that was really beating the drum hard about the enrollment cliff, which did help leadership sort of key in on this. But explaining that just because you couldn’t see it, doesn’t mean there weren’t needs, and really showing him what true marketing looks like. I think a lot of leaders think marketing is just communication and so I think having very honest conversations that they are two very different functions that they should coexist—I do think they should be together—but I do think they should be equal functions.

Rob

Well, with that, and that’s a great preview and a look at the landscape, and we know that the predominant model in higher ed is to have a blended marketing and communications function. And we have several attending who are, the webinar, who are not in central roles but lead marcomm for an academic or an administrative unit. And especially in academic colleges and schools, these are definitely blended roles and blended functions. And the conflation of marketing and communications is often even more pronounced at the unit level. We have strong representation from those working in enrollment today too and want to get Kate, your perspective on that, especially with your, with your current role.

And here’s a quick look at attendees today in terms of their areas. And again, recognizing that this is based on title, if someone has a marketing only title, they still may be part of an integrated marketing and communications operation if they are, for example, an AVP for strategic communications. And the other category there—so we have marketing only, comms only, both marcomm if they’re, they have marketing and communications combined role—and then the “other” is, other primary responsibility such as enrollment management.

And what’s interesting, if we look outside of higher ed in other sectors, certainly the corporate sector, marketing and communications have been distinct functions, more clearly distinct functions. However, we’re seeing more and more examples of marketing and communications becoming increasingly integrated there. Higher ed marketing, as we know often gets a bad rap, as being behind marketing and other sectors. And I know that’s some of the VPs who are part of today’s webinar who have joined, I know that’s why they’ve been brought in to their institutions to elevate the function at their institution and increase marketing sophistication and marketing effectiveness.

So the good news is, well, for once, higher and marketing is ahead of other sectors. You know, how about that? We’ve already had integrated marcomm operations, but the not so good news is that well, it was more out of default than necessarily intentionally blazing a trail. And we have blended marcomm models because it’s common in the academy, as you know, to conflate marketing and communications. It’s more than common. And a main reason they get conflated is because marketing is often limited to just one of the four P’s, promotion. So marketing is merely marketing communications to get the word out, to tell our story or to combat what leadership may say, we’re the best kept secret.

And also blended marcomm, it gets conflated because there are just vast misunderstandings of these functions. They are distinct but related functions, but that nuance is not particularly well understood. And I should note that this is not just pointing fingers at our colleagues. The onus is on us too. That, that’s part of the responsibility of leading the function, doing that hard work so that everyone understands marketing and communications, they value it, they see their role in it. But we know there’s a lot of ground to gain there. In RHB’s research, our research about higher and strategic planning, this was so evident. It was eye-opening and frankly disheartening looking at more than 100 current strategic plans how inconsistent and sometimes just downright incorrect references were to these areas, particularly when institutions talked about brand or their ambitions about strengthening their brand.

And one of the most fascinating things in our work that I mentioned earlier when we conduct an organizational capability assessment is to ask the question of internal stakeholders on campus. What is the purpose of marketing and communications? What is the value it should create? And wow, what a range of different—range of perceptions about what these functions are—answers, what they do, what they should do, even among leadership colleagues. And then number three here, resourcing these as two functions separately is something that many institutions just aren’t prepared or willing to do. We know that the investment in marketing is significantly lower as a percentage of overall operating budget in higher ed compared to other sectors. It’s simply more efficient for these functions to be together as an integrated operation. And would some of us advocate for having a VP/CMO as part of the cabinet and, as well as a VP/CCO as cabinet role as well? Sure. But is that a likely path? Probably not. You may essentially have a CMO and a CCO at your institution as separate roles, but it’s more likely that those are reporting up to a single leader, a VP, or an SVP who is the one sitting on cabinet and reporting to the president.

So, let’s look at how these functions have evolved and go back to that previous comment that these are distinct but related functions and see how those distinctions are becoming grayer and grayer to get to some of these issues that Kate and Jeneane talked about. So once upon a time, it was much easier to draw a line between marketing and communications. And one of those dividing lines used to be channel or media type. The perceptions that marketing is focused on advertising, and communications is focused on media relations. People come to marketing because they want an ad, and people come to comms because they want to press release. You know, I, I can feel everyone cringing at the thought of that or the memories of that happening at your campus. But, of course, now both functions work across own, shared, earned and paid. We know earned can be part of brand building. We know paid is being used to amplify owned content.

And I think of some of the public institutions we work with who are working to show how their institutions’ cutting-edge research is helping, is benefiting communities and citizens across their state. So they’re developing own content with all of these great stories. They’re sharing it, promoting it on social. They’re gaining credibility through earned media, and then they’re promoting it further through paid and getting it in front of new audiences, trying to reach new audiences across their market with paid.

And then we can also look at these functions in terms of audiences. And marketing may be seen as much more limited, only external, only focusing on the customer. While communications would have a much larger breadth of audiences. And I’m always reminded of an email exchange with the marcomm VP who said, I like the idea of thinking holistically and strategically about relationship management with all important publics. That’s the core of the principle of the professional public relations and why I identify first and foremost as a PR professional. So an interesting perspective that aligns with sort of this view of the audiences that the functions are responsible for, but that line is blurring. The more sophisticated marcomm organizations are playing a role with internal audiences, for example, beyond just internal communications. So marketing is engaged from an employer branding and employer, employee engagement standpoint, helping an institution retain, recruit talent, become an employer of choice, and we could talk—and, and Kate may want to touch on this as well—we could talk about student retention and the important work and the opportunities for marketing teams there.

And one reason that those oversimplified lines don’t work is because of the audience multi-dimensionality in higher ed. And this is just one constituent example of someone with, who falls in a multitude of different audience categories. And, those groups or categories could look different depending on the constituent, but just think of your faculty and staff and how many other categories they would be part of besides an employee, a staff member, a faculty member. How many of them are donors? How many are alumni or even parents and so on?

Or that line has been traditionally drawn based on the outcomes of the work. So when marketing is seen just from a sales standpoint or a transactional standpoint, a short-term way focused on sales and the need for growth. If you’re in a blended marcomm organization, you may have team members who come from a journalism background. And they find marketing icky. Uh, I wasn’t planning on saying “icky” in the webinar, but icky, they think marketing is icky.

You know, I’m sure some of you have had maybe experienced that and they’re coming from the perspective. They see. And they’re coming from the perspective, they see comms as the side that’s rooted in truth and authenticity. One of my favorite things that you say, Kate, is that the best brands are rooted in truth. And that is both sides of the house. To say that marketing is just about short term and comms is the long term, again, is really oversimplified.

We know brand is about building long-term value. And actually I’m writing a piece now right now about how there’s too much short-termism now in marketing as we think about budgeting and how we, how we allocate dollars because of all the pressures and increased turnover and some of those other factors that we can, that we can touch on.

So we briefly made this case about why the traditional lines between marketing and communications, despite being distinct functions, are increasingly blurring. And we’ll make the case further for a future path that is integrated. And that gets to the symbiotic relationship between reputation and brand. If we’re orienting our work more around our audiences, how we’re informing and inspiring them to change attitudes, beliefs, behaviors. And if we’re orienting our work around top institutional priorities, rather than the functional definitions of our work, then those functional distinctions between marketing and communications become less relevant. So again, we have this nuance of distinct but related functions, along with the power of when they’re integrated as a singular marketing and communications organization.

And there’s a parallel here with reputation and brand. Because there’s nuance required here too with some overlap. Reputation is your track record, the sum total of your track record going back to that earlier point about trust and credibility, where brand is more forward-looking. It’s an expectation. What is my expectation of what it will be like or what it would feel like to be part of this institution’s community? What’s the, what’s the story that I’ll tell myself if I choose this institution? So branding exists when there’s competition. So how are you building a brand that will inspire choice?

And a couple of more here, and then we’ll get into discussion and some of the critical questions and, and get perspectives from Kate and Jeneane. This is an RHB model about the domains of marcomm influence. And this is another way to look at the span of influence across integrated marketing and communications work. And you see the work associated with reputation and brand. Promote or protect that is. Protect, promote and perform. That third P, perform, is one that not enough marketing teams are engaged in. So are you performing on the promise that your institution is making? How are you helping to ensure that your institution is delivering what you say you will deliver as an institution? And that’s ultimately what shapes brand over time, delivering on that promise, performing on that promise.

The other takeaway here is the challenge to move the work more upstream. And yes, marketing is charged with increasing the flow of resources into the institution through enrollment, through philanthropy, and we could have a category here for other revenue such as licensing and trademarks and auxiliaries. And certainly the resource of talent there too. But first, are we helping to answer some fundamental questions, some foundational questions around relevance? Is your institution relevant to the market? Is this new program that you’re launching or want to launch, is that new program relevant in the marketplace? And then how are we deepening relationships with the audiences who matter most to the institution? How are we helping to strengthen that relationship across the constituent journey?

And then one last model, and this is part of a guidebook that I’ll share a link to but won’t go into too much detail here, but you’ll have that as a resource. In our work, we see most organizations trying to navigate the balance between an output orientation and an outcomes orientation here. And they of course want to become more and more outcomes focused, more strategic, where the work is aligned with top institutional priorities. What we don’t see are many examples where marketing’s work is helping to shape or inform institutional strategy based on a deep understanding of the market, of critical audiences, or where marketing is helping institutions think and behave in a way that accounts for constituents more holistically. So that, that multi-dimensionality that I mentioned earlier and the total journey and relationships that constituents have with an institution. So we’re talking about today the future of marcomm, the future of this function, so I wanted to be sure and share this with you. So hopefully, as you think about where your organization sits, and it’s helpful to see where you sit currently and where there’s potential to evolve further organizationally.

So, to get more specifically then back to the topic of integrating marketing and communications, we have some critical questions and topics to dig into. And the first area is around educating senior leadership. How you show leadership the choices you’re having to make, the real impact of the, the growing communications demands that you’ve heard about and that you’re experiencing. And then how to go about demonstrating value in a holistic way. And Kate, I know you have a great model from your previous institution in terms of how you aligned with enrollment and philanthropy and athletics. But perhaps you want to get us started here with some thoughts for attendees.

Kate

Sure, sure, happy to share. So I think that particularly in marketing the KPIs are often hard to raise to the level of senior leadership, right? What information, what measurements are we looking at to help define success? Certainly we all believe those should include enrollment and philanthropy and those things, but, you know, what other things can we measure, and one of the things that we did at the University of Pittsburgh and this was not my idea—credit to Marc Harding—but we had a meeting that was called the four corners meeting, and it was athletics, it was admissions, it was our alumni and philanthropy team as well as university communications. And of course at some point along a, whether it’s a student or alumni journey, we all considered ourselves the front door to the institution, but we would meet regularly and talk about what were we working on, what were we putting into the world and really informing each other that so that when we were in front of each other’s audiences, we were able to share that information more broadly and not look like these siloed institutions, which we all know exist at the university at that level. So having those meetings, communicating that information, also what I found to be really inspiring was when leaders of those parts of the university would share the information with our leadership, right? So if they’re, if they’re talking about a bowl game as an example, but all the great work that university communications and marketing did in promoting that and how alumni fed into that, right? Finding those ways to promote each other up to leadership was really helpful.

Rob

And Jeneane, what would you add there?

Jeneane

You know, one of the things that we had to do early on is to find pockets of support outside of leadership as well. So, we’ve been working on our relationship with admissions for, I guess, 10 years to really improve that because I think it had, they really viewed us as a job shop to produce their materials, to produce their halftime spot but, but they don’t, I don’t think they viewed us as equals in terms of setting the course for how that should look and so once we started taking on research, I mean leading with research and then bringing that to the table, that really helped because they would, they had their own research in the sense of, they were going and doing student forums and different states and they’ve got listening tours and things like that and they know what they open or look at.

But doing research really helps get your foot in the door with leadership to say, but we, but this is what they’re telling us they want and need. And so that helped, and then hiring the people that can go toe to toe with maybe a really strong enrollment management director or VP and, and speak the language because of marketing and say, and it took us years to get them to allow us to do individual things like landing pages for a specific campaigns. They only ever wanted things to go to the admissions site, and that was very difficult then for us to ever track our role in that. And then they would downplay our role in that because, well, we don’t really know that that’s what had an impact on it.

So we finally got there this year, and it was a huge win for us to say, no, no, now we can track that it came from this spot or this, you know, digital ad or things like that, but so finding other pockets of strength outside of, I guess, the cabinet or members of the cabinet, that’s what helped us. It’s just working those relationships and building trust over time and not getting frustrated that it’s going to take multiple years to bring them to the table.

Rob

Yeah, that’s, that’s the reality of that work. I know we’ll talk more about strategic planning too in the in the next slide, but this question about the choices that we’re having to make and just choice-making more broadly. And it goes back to the point earlier of the importance of having institutional alignment around those fundamental questions: What’s the purpose of marketing and communications? What’s the value? What’s the quantifiable change that marcomm should create for the institution? And, ideally that’s evident in a, in a strategic plan, can help in making those choices.

But from our research, it’s clear that in many cases the strategic plans themselves are not a reflection of choices, that they are more of a wish list or a large to-do list or things that we’re already doing that we’re going do more of or do better. So it’s not always as evident as it, as it should be. And one of the reasons why both, why I admire the two of you and the work that you do is because you are, you are so skilled and, and authentic in bringing people together in a collaborative way towards institutional goals.

But this point about how do we show leadership the choices we’re having to make, and I mentioned this when we were together in Chicago, Kate, of having, feeling for you when you were in the acting vice chancellor role and all the things that you were having to deal with from active shooter hoaxes and, and protests and, and so many of those things that we know you were not alone. But how did you, how did you demonstrate that, you know, all the things that, all your time and your team’s time, those items can be all consuming and what doesn’t happen as a result?

Kate

So I think that one of the reasons that I continue to really harp on the importance of the marketing and the brand work is because that’s where I grew up, right? So I was really part of driving the university’s first master brand in 2019. So once COVID hit and we started to see some of the other issues and concerns we were dealing with, we could have very easily just talked about all of that all the time, but for me it was really important to keep pulling it back to the brand at some point and I definitely got vibes at various times that that was not what mattered to the leadership, but that didn’t mean I was going stop talking about it because in at the end—and you talked about this, Rob—this idea of reputation versus brand, so many of the issues really were driving the reputational conversations, particularly in social, which I don’t think a lot of leadership realize is as loud as it is for our audiences and so you know continuing to circle back to that in conversations, showing data, you know, when it was available to us.

Looking at visitors to our website, really treating that as another campus, which is something you taught me, Rob. This idea of we had four regional campuses, but we had a lot more visitors to pitt.edu and, and where was the conversation and what were they seeing as well, so it really was just harping on that information and, and continuing to pull it back in the leadership conversations. And a lot of times as we know in marketing, repetition works.

Jeneane

I think what I would just dovetail with is that sometimes those conversations are uncomfortable. So for example, as we were making changes in our Office of Strategic Communication and I was, slowly but surely as, as maybe a writer moved on, not filling that role the same way, saying, alright, I, I know that we need a web strategist centrally because that is not a function that each of these colleges is able to do for itself. I’m going to forego two writing positions to be able to afford a web strategist. And, you know, we would go into our meetings with deans and take it on the chin sometimes. Oh, you write less about us and because they don’t, they don’t measure success the same way.

They don’t know how to measure what we do. And so they would say, I don’t get as many stories out of you. That’s the measurement that they…and being very upfront with them and explaining and then eventually they would see when they were able to give up certain positions and then hire writers, right? They were able to give up…we took on web development centrally and they were able to give up web developers, web developer positions that maybe weren’t actually true web developers, right? They were sort of doing the best they could, but it wasn’t a premium product. And so I think being willing to have those difficult conversations and know that for a little bit, you’re going to frustrate people because you’re trying to do what’s right for the institution holistically, but they’re going to see change and that is change management is difficult.

Rob

And in that example, Jeneane, with the pressure to, or the ask of wanting to see more stories from that area, which of course, it is common to have colleagues see the performance of marketing and communications in terms of activity and output. So would you be willing to share your, your process or evolution in terms of how you in Office of Strategic Communication, how you’re demonstrating value and trying to shift that for colleagues in more of an outcomes oriented way?

Jeneane

Sure. I mean, we have a quarterly report that we put out, but I can’t say that they look at it. You really have to have the conversations with them regularly and meet with them and talk about, okay, you’re right, we are doing fewer stories, but the metrics showed that it was only, I mean, metrics really when you put a number on it and say I, we were doing this many articles before, but only this few were actually attracting enough attention to warrant the time and work involved in producing all of that content. And then instead, showing them metrics on attracting more eyeballs to the web and they still, I mean, we are not where you are in this in terms of them understanding the web as a building. I really wish that we were, but, but I think just having to lean into metrics and show that okay, yes, we gave this function up over here but we’ve increased this functionality for you.

And those aren’t always immediate, so there’s a little bit of a lag there and showing, okay, we’ve invested in social media because, again, you can all have channels, but we’re going to raise the profile of the institution nationally with, with really strong social media accounts. And again, that provides some metrics. So, leaning into metrics was the about the best way we could do that. But it, we will, I remember the review you did for our campus. There were those who fully understood because they were able to come to us for expertise and really valued it. And then there were still units who said, I get less out of them than I got before because they haven’t really flipped. And we just have to accept that that criticism exists. But as they step up there and change their own models, they start to see that it’s not just output. It’s, there are other metrics to measure than just a number of articles you produced over the month.

Rob

Yeah, in that scenario also, could open up a wide-ranging conversation about centralization and decentralization, and we could, we could go there should people have questions about that or want to explore. There is a great question in here that just disappeared from Patrick—Patrick, hope you’re doing well—about the four corners. Did you see that Kate in terms?

Kate

Yeah, I just saw it and actually, I answered it. I can cover it real quickly. Patrick asked if the, did any of the parties, any of those areas take a leadership role or were they all equal and then what were the benefits and challenges? And my response to that is that all the parties were equal in leading so it’s not really that, you know, any one area took point other than sort of Outlook scheduling I would say, but it really ebbed and flowed depending on the time of year, so if we were bowl game, athletics might have more to say versus a May 1 deposit deadline where admissions is truly chiming in versus a, you know, a fundraising campaign where we’re going to see, you know, that philanthropic lead there, so I think allowing that ebb and flow to happen is really important, just really realizing that we’re all dedicated to the same success of the institution.

A lot of times we have our own budgets, we have our own goals, and we get very stuck in these silos and ways of, you know, we’re going to do this, right? And so I think that because we met monthly, because we were sharing what we were doing and we could start to find like, oh, we’ll piggyback on that there or we could add this to the work you’re doing. It took time, but it’s definitely worth that ongoing repetitive, you know, getting together and having those conversations and sharing.

Rob

Yeah, great.

Jeneane

We started meeting as, we have a something we call the external relations council that includes athletics, includes advancement, but then we have a smaller group that meets quarterly. That’s just athletics, advancement, healthcare, central comms to talk about what are the big pillars the institution needs to move forward and then how do we all put our shoulder behind them together and who—to your point, Kate—who’s going to do which work, how we’re going to use it in the magazine versus on our digital channels and, and then how are we going, how is advancement going to then turn that into a campaign for donors and I do think getting together and being less siloed is the key to all of this and that’s very difficult. It’s very time consuming, but it is about the, especially when you have small teams, you have to just stay connected.

Or when I first got here, and I’m sure you guys have examples of this, but when I first got here, I found out three different writers on this campus were writing the same article because somebody pitched it to us in Strategic Communication and it was assigned to a writer, someone was writing it at the collegiate level because they assumed they had to write their own version for their magazine and then someone had pitched it to, at the time it was the alumni association for their magazine and I said this is insane that three people being paid by single institution are writing this article because they viewed the channel as the owner as opposed to, and so breaking those down and yes that was you know eight-and-a-half, nine years ago but it takes time to break down those old silos for sure.

Kate

I think adding the health system is a really important note. That has just become more and more powerful for those of you that are at universities with associated healthcare systems that’s really important in the conversation. They, they hold a lot of power.

Rob

Yeah, for sure. Okay, so we touched on some elements about educating senior leadership and we’ve touched on previously too some pieces here about the case for integration and I wanted to pick up on, because you both referenced social media. And while there could be, in many cases, there are an integrated marketing and communications team or organization or operation, there can still be siloing within that organization where it is structured based on function. So within a VP or CMCO, there is the marketing side of the house and there is the communications side of the house. Social media, which touches all areas is one of those that as a function can become a question, a challenge of, where does social sit? How does that get managed? How is that led? How does that fit within the organization?

So, how have you both navigated that or what advice would you provide to colleagues who are, who may be dealing with that or needing to address it in a, in perhaps a better way than it currently works within their organization?

Jeneane

I can certainly start. When I arrived, we had a very, we had a single person dedicated to social media and it was only part of their job and largely they relied on students and we’ve really, I hired a director and he’s built a team. And so because I hired this individual and because we were at the time were we sort of worried about flare-ups on social media and that’s often where we would first see discontent among students or a social unrest or things like that. So they did report to, the director reports to me and when we hired a chief marketing officer last year and elevated that role, the director of social media and, the director of digital media now, has a dual report to both of us. So to bridge that and I guess acknowledge that the role, that it really should straddle both houses and that’s how we handle it and you have to have a team member that’s willing to have a dual report.

But I don’t think it, we’re very aligned. I mean, the CMO actually does report to me, but we meet constantly and we’re, we’re fortunate that we’re all in one building and one team on one floor so we’re all down the hall from one another, we can pop in and speak to one another, but that’s how we handle it at Iowa.

Kate

When I moved into a central role at the University of Pittsburgh, the social media position was combined with video and they sat within the news side of the function. Very reactive, right, very much posting the stories that were already written, those sorts of things. And as, you know, times change, it changes everything, really. We, I begged, frankly, to move that role to be really reporting both to marketing and communications. It’s a very powerful tool in terms of promoting your brand, which I’m sure all of you know. So after a lot of begging in addition to finally getting that reporting both to marketing and communications AVPs, it was also elevated and I think the elevation of social media and adding a bigger team was really key to building that engagement, especially dealing with the engagement on the negative side and the social listening and everything that comes with the mental health of our social media folks. That’s a huge lift. But also on the very positive side and building out interns and teams. The University of Pittsburgh in particular does very well because we were able to really elevate that role. It’s really important in the work that we do and build out the team that both supports marketing and communications. And so I would encourage everyone to think about where it sits because it does reflect the work that’s being done on social.

Rob

Yeah, yeah. And that reminds me too, I wanted to come back to it to mention it earlier about enrollment management and those who are responsible for marketing and communications within an EM division or doing marcomm work specifically for enrollment-related audiences. And you are leading enrollment as well, Kate, at ODUGlobal. So, what are some of the challenges there or again any, any advice or counsel you would give to those marcomm leaders who are who are working on some of these issues, but specifically within an enrollment division?

Kate

Well, I think one of the things that has been really a great surprise, frankly, that I didn’t realize was going to happen when I moved to ODUGlobal was that admissions moved under marketing where I definitely have been a big believer in the idea of those being tied together. And then we’re working very closely—and Jeneane talked about this—that that is not been happening in most institutions for a very long time and in some institutions they are very separate and don’t work together. But now in the space that we’re in with admissions actually reporting up to marketing so that all of the work that we do, you know, every step of the admissions process is an opportunity to reduce friction. And we can do that through marketing and communications and how we do that is very important.

So I think for the enrollment function, communications does need to be part of that conversation—certainly any of the crisis stuff is going to influence the work that you’re doing in enrollment. So being aware and having conversations and having a tie to what you do or don’t say at a time like that is really important and really hot right now, but also being tied, you know, in with the admissions team, whether they’re working, you know, on your team or next to your team. Hopefully there’s a really strong tie there as well.

Rob

Yeah, that’s such an interesting case. And in terms of structures and models, sometimes I get worried when I see, because of budget issues, and an institution that has moved toward a VP level position for marketing and communications, and they’ve gone back to a model where it’s VP for enrollment and marketing. Or, where there’s a need to reduce administrative size and that VP is now back within the advancement division and might be an AVP within advancement. But, it’s really interesting to think about, as you said, a model where marketing is leading admissions or a marketing communications professional is leading an integrated advancement model, not necessarily someone who’s the chief development officer. And it’s not about, you know, power or authority or kingdom-building or any of that, but thinking about—to the earlier points—understanding audiences in a more holistic way or, or seeing that total journey, what some of the benefits can be.

Kate

And I think it also ties back, Rob, to the slide that you have up now and the idea of the strategic plan because our president at Old Dominican University has made it very clear that one of our goals is to double enrollment for online education. And so with that as a plan and also recognizing, I would say that we recognize marketing both as part of some of our institutional strategies and also as an institutional strategy, right, so it’s not just weaved in, but it is also very exclusively out there as one opportunity and that to me illustrates a leader who values marketing and can see the power that it can have in the enrollment space as well. And so marketing is not often included I think exclusively in strategic plans. So, you know, really pulling that in and making it clear, finding a place that does that well is important.

Rob

Yeah, that’s true. And interestingly, so I mentioned when we looked at a few years ago, more than 100 strategic plans. Our most recent study we looked at new strategic plans that were launched in 2022 and 2023. And there were more examples of marketing and communications, typically related to brand, being an overarching priority or a top priority, which was interesting to see.

But what was still somewhat discouraging is how those priorities are, are articulated or described. So for example, things like, and one from the original study was, “announced an even more powerful brand” as if we are, you know, we declare what our brand is. But things like “reclaim the narrative” or “change the narrative.” And we, it’s not marketing and communications that’s solely responsible for that. We change the narrative by changing institutional behaviors, by changing actions and we can—we, marcomm leaders—can provide the leadership on how an institution can go about changing the narrative and what it will take but can’t solely be responsible for changing the narrative.

Jeneane

Rob, I think that, and I apologize if I’m jumping ahead, but I think that’s why the blended departments are so critical because the brand isn’t something we just devised. The brand is sort of owned by your, you know, those who use you and, and purchase you and, and experience you. So this notion that you just come up with it and give it to them sort of exists and you have to figure that out through your research of what, how are we viewed currently and yeah, you can try to shape that and change it over the years, but we really leaned into some of our existing strengths and then also what people said about us that we were friendly and that we were cooperative and more likely than at other institutions maybe slightly less competitive with one another and more willing to collaborate and so things like that.

But then if the, those colleagues doing internal comms or doing campus communication aren’t aware that this is based on what people told us about ourselves, we’re not going to remind people to behave that way—that sounds terrible—but to continue to live the brand. And so I, that’s why I felt like they, it was so critical that we’re working together because it can be very siloed in our internal comms even for the fact that we stopped calling ourselves the UI or, you know, we’re just going to start referring to ourselves as Iowa because we are the flagship in Iowa and that, that was the way most people talked about us off campus. We’re the Hawkeyes, and we’re Iowa. And so getting the people on our own campus to drop and just start referring to us as Iowa is even a change. And so again, if we weren’t together within the same organization, I’m not sure those changes, it would maybe be an external-facing change and then not really owned internally.

Rob

The last point I’ll add to that on, the on the value of integration is when there are those reputational issues or crises and when marketing is tightly aligned with the comms side, and being mindful, being part of that in terms of being mindful of all those relationships that again, if we’re thinking of audiences, the customers, that may not be top of mind necessarily when those issues arise, but that marketing is mindful of those relationships and thinking again in a more holistic way across an institution’s audiences.

Okay. Let’s look at this last set of questions, which are looking at the future, the ideal structure, organizational approach, the competencies needed for an optimal integrated model and then the position itself and what would be needed in terms of leading an ideal structure. Who wants to take this one first?

Kate

I can start. What’s interesting as I look at this question today is, I think about it sort of in the same ways that I think about recruiting students. I think so often parents want us to tell them exactly what the right fit is for their student, right? Like this is where they should go and this is what it should look like when in fact I think it depends on both the student and the institution. So for this I would have this a similar answer, which is it depends on the organization. I think very, thinking very holistically about marketing and communications and all the functions within that area is really important. And a leader, you know, a leader can come from marketing or comms or some other background, frankly, but really believing in the value of the work that the entire group does I think is really important.

I’ll just quickly also mention that there is a question of, you know, generalization, a group of people who can do many things or people who are very deep in their expertise in each area. My personal preference is those who are very deep in expertise, right? Like we can, you can pull the right people who really know what’s happening in social or in public relations or in those in brand marketing, for example, that is a really powerful tool as well.

Jeneane

I would add, I agree with Kate 100%. I think that the, our colleagues in the colleges are often, they have to hire jacks-of-all-trade because of the, they want a lot of skill sets and I say centrally we hire experts along lines because then we can help you and provide that expertise in the area that maybe you’re not as skilled, if you’re a jack-of-all-trade.

But in terms of, I think you get there a little bit naturally by building trust across your campus. I mean, we’ve talked a lot about organization and how to organize and then I want to just be realistic that in some ways you might be where you are and unable to change the structure but there are ways through that with building relationships with other colleagues and, and eventually we get asked on our team a lot of how to do things that aren’t related to comms, like okay help my, should I provide support services for students in this moment as we’re having this crisis? That’s not technically a comms question, but they come to us because we’re leading them through a crisis or, you know, I think you just build expertise that they come to you for and you’re right, you kind of land in this position whether you get the title or not, so that might be if you show any competence at all you just get more work. So I have to warn it, warn than that caveat there but over time, I do think people see the comms leaders, the marcomms leaders as much broader than that, but as the strategic experts.

Kate

On that note very quickly, I just have to say Ellen Moran who’s at George Washington now, she used to say—and I’m sure she still does—you know that’s, that’s not a comms problem, that’s just a problem, but the idea that people are asking, you know, leadership in our space for help now is, is a difference.

Rob

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I would add to this discussion, as we think about future directions, especially if, if people are in the midst of structure questions and trying to work through what’s the best structure going forward or for where our institution is headed and, and certainly the point, and this gets to the strategic plan point as well, but that structure should follow strategy. And again, strategy is about that choice making and that gets back to that institutional alignment about what marcomm is for and the change that it should create.

And we hear whenever they’re discussions of structure, there’s always the comment that there’s no one model, you know, every, every place is different or there’s no one structure. And that is absolutely true. There are a variety of models out there, but there’s typically one single organizing framework in higher ed marketing and communications, and that is by function.

And when we think about organizational design or see organizational design in higher ed marketing and communications, it is very function centric, so organized around marketing, organized around communications and the various functions and responsibilities within. So if you are in this midst, I would encourage you to think about, think beyond that framework and of course we would be happy to talk more formally about that.

But what would it mean to organize the function around a strategic plan? What, and what might that look like or what would it mean to organize based on the most important outcomes that marcomm should create the most, most important institutional outcomes or even the most important audiences? There are a lot of different ways to look at it, but again, it’s typically based on a, on a function centric type of model.

Graham added as a question: It seems that marcomm professionals might actually be the best positioned to lead strategies since they know audiences and the institution’s offerings with a greater degree of objectivity than many other seats at the leadership table. Does this resonate with you and others? Won’t others be reluctant to give us a more influential seat at the table? 

Well, I want to go back to that, that model that shows that as one of the future directions of, you know, a chief strategy officer, not necessarily as a title, but conceptually as marcomm helping to define, inform, set what institutional strategy should be. And that’s not just coming from a, you know, we’re the marketing or marketing and communications group, it’s based on that understanding of the market and that’s one thing again we don’t see in strategic plans is, there’s a lack of market orientation, that there’s not external research done. There’s this broad view of all the forces at play but not a really detailed understanding of where an institution sits relative to others in the marketplace.

Are we at time? How about that? How did that happen so quickly? Okay, so as mentioned, we will provide, provide this resource, a guidebook on how to structure your higher ed marketing department for the future, a piece that we just recently updated and published. So we’ll provide that as a resource. You see a link to that there.

And I know we’re at time, but if we could squeeze in one last question because this was submitted ahead of time via email and that is, I want to get to this, Doug, in the context of major campaign operations, is it a good practice to have a small comms team within the advancement unit that coordinates across channels with the central marcomm team or is it preferable to centralize comms staffing with a full-service marcomm unit that also can specialize in advancement comms like case statements, project briefs and appeal letters?

Kate

I’ll just very quickly say having heard there’s a couple of great female leaders, I think, Binti and Mary, I forget where you are off the top of my head, but, that are really leading advancement, you know, from a marketing and communications point of view. I think that as long as a campaign follows brand, it doesn’t really matter who sits where, as long as you can tie them broadly back to the institution’s brand overall. So, you know, whether that’s function following form or form following function, keeping the brand at the center of the campaign is really important.

Jeneane

And I do think there’s expertise in donor communication that you may not have in central comms. So I do believe, I mean, I do think they should be aligned. They should be teams that work well together and meet, but I would say on our team centrally, we would lack some of that skill set that I know that our Center for Advancement colleagues have in terms of writing for and communicating to and thinking about donor relationships. So I do think there’s an expertise there that might need to live maybe, could live centrally, but you need to acknowledge that that’s a skill set.

Rob

Yeah, I would agree. I’m seeing fewer and fewer central teams have that responsibility for advancement marketing and communications. And especially if that advancement marketing is part of, is engaged in annual giving, which can be heavy heavy direct marketing, heavy heavy segmentation and that understanding of donor and prospective donor audiences, you know, is, is specialized and to think of as, as marcomm operations within advancement increase sophistication, increase capacity though to be thinking about some of those specialized areas of research and other ways that there can be collaboration between a central unit and an advancement unit versus building out specialized teams, and again market research as one example.

But I will second that point of, wow, when you can align, that power of aligning strategic plan, brand strategy, comprehensive fundraising campaign all focused on institutional objectives is so powerful when that integration together in that way.

Okay, if you have other questions, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn, email. We will follow up via email early next week. I will send you the deck and the recording so you have direct access to that.

Thank you so much for joining. We are, it was great to be, to see so many familiar names and see such interest in this topic.

I know there are more questions, so again happy to address those via email or a conversation over coffee. But best of luck with the important work that you’re doing, the meaningful work that you’re doing with your, for your institution. And Kate and Jeneane, thank you so much. Always wonderful to be with you.

Kate

Thank you, Rob. Thanks for having us.

Jeneane

Thank you.