I spent yesterday at a conference in Austin, Texas where about 35 administrators, mostly from community colleges, came to discuss the strategies and tactics for deploying technology in marketing their higher education programs. It was a great day, the speakers were enlightening, and the attendees were both engaged and engaging. And while there were valuable points of discussion throughout the entire day, one brief interaction stood out to me as particularly worthy of follow-up. It went like this:
People were getting excited about the undeniable marketing possibilities represented by a range of different “Web 2.0” technologies. As if on cue, one attendee raised a hand, acknowledged the “coolness” of these various web services, and innocently asked just how schools could measure and justify the inevitable and potentially sizeable effort / risk that might accompany them.
What ensued reminded my somewhat of that IBM commercial where the enthusiastic techno-geek is proudly showing his avatar and online “island” to a stodgy executive. Skeptical and unimpressed, the elder statesman suddenly turns into an avatar himself and stops his younger colleague cold by responding with the simple question: “Making any money on your island?” Just as in the commercial, a small dose of reality had momentarily sucked the air out the room.
The measurement of marketing in higher education has received significant attention on many forums. Kyle James has consistently addressed this point, as has Dan Obregon on our marketing blog. Karlyn Morrisette dedicated a great recent post to this exact topic.
I can’t claim to improve upon those and other contributions on this subject.
Nevertheless, yesterday’s group came up with a framework worth sharing. We recovered from our momentary stunned silence to come up with what I thought were some good general categories to which metrics could be applied. These categories revolved around the four basic goals for any marketing effort. They were:
Growth: Many marketing initiatives are focused overwhelmingly on helping an institution grow.This growth can come in various forms: attracting more students, boosting enrollment, driving tuition, and raising money or endowment on behalf of the school.All of these are easily translated into metrics that an institution can use to set goals and measure success.
Efficiency: It is no secret that budgets of all manner of organizations are under pressure in our current economy, and colleges are not immune. In this case, the general heading of “efficiency” translates into expense management, cost avoidance / containment, utilization of staff resources, and just generally “doing more with less.” Again, these can relatively easily be turned into a range of goals that pass the S.M.A.T. test (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, and Time-bound objectives).
Quality: Many tech projects in higher education have nothing to do with either top-line growth or with generating savings. Rather, they are focused on improving the quality of an institution’s offerings. While these are slightly more difficult to quantify, the S.M.A.T. rules still apply. Quality-driven initiatives can be measured in the form of better service to students / prospects, maintaining or raising admissions standards, lowering response times to inquiries, increasing throughput, and measuring satisfaction levels among community members. Note: the notion of establishing and protecting an organization’s brand is incredibly important to institutions of higher education. Brand-building is often considered to be a fundamental part of a schools reason for existence -- achieving its driving mission. The subject of “Brand” is worthy of many lifetimes of study (and is admittedly and notoriously hard to measure). But for the purposes of this conversation, I’ve taken the easy way out and included it under this general heading of “Quality.”
Intelligence: In still other cases, an institution is not necessarily trying to accomplish any of the above goals in and of themselves. Rather, they are aimed at generating data and business intelligence. As one Intelliworks client recently communicated in a survey: “I want STATS, STATS, STATS.” The underlying value of such intelligence lies in evaluating past endeavors, informing future initiatives, determining what worked and what didn’t, and helping to shape and justify forward-looking budgets. With a little imagination, all of these can be captured and made “actionable” via metrics.
I’m quite confident that there are still other important root purposes that are omitted from this list and from yesterday’s discussion. Still, this seemed like a pretty good place to start when considering whether or not to engage in any specific marketing activity. If the goal of a proposed project can be tied back to one of these categories, it can likely be quantified and measured – and results consistently reassessed. If it doesn’t, perhaps it deserves a second-look before diving in.
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