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10-09-09
Tools of engagement: Universities reaching to the private sector for new perspective and best practices
By Larry Parnell and Julia Parmley
As university costs rise, so has the competition for student dollars and alumni donations. The PR offices in higher education play a major role in boosting enrollment, rankings and publicity - so it is vital for them to understand and use best practices and social media to accomplish their communications goals.
One of the most important ways to keep a pulse on the university community - and prospective students - is constant engagement. For David Muha, chief communications officer at Drew University in Madison, N. J., Web sites are an effective way to promote news on campus and encourage interaction.
In his experience, Muha says that university Web sites are popular and trusted sources of information in college searches. "You want to invest your money in the marketing tool that has the most impact and is the most useful to your audience," he says.
Muha believes that one of Drew's best marketing tools is its home page, which consists of three rotating feature stories - selected to highlight certain places, activities or people at the university.
"We try to make the stories reflective of different programs and community members as well as reflective of the student body as a whole," he says.
The university also keeps students involved with DrewTube, a collection of student-made video clips of "classic Drew moments" such as annual Taco Day, offering visitors a multimedia taste of university life.
By using video as a medium to tell the story of Drew, the university can stay abreast of technology and use it to communicate with its target age group, Muha says.
Another valuable best practice is implementing a unified message and brand. In 2007, an outside adviser helped Drew University undergo a brand makeover and created a positioning focused on "engaged learning," emphasizing student involvement in the surrounding community as well as globally.
So far, the reception has been good and Muha believes it has become a value proposition for incoming students.
"A challenge for all universities is that as endowments decrease and prices increase, students will look at universities and ask themselves why they should pay more to go there when it looks like all the others," says Muha.
The value of branding
Ian Hsu, director of Internet media outreach at Stanford University, also believes that engagement is one of the most effective practices in higher education communications.
"[To engage] we have to get away from the mindset that it's all our content and [instead] watch and see what the community is responding to and react accordingly," says Hsu.
The ability to unify an institution's communications and positioning is a desirable trait in a senior-level higher education candidate, according to Bill Heyman, president and CEO of Heyman Associates, a leading executive search firm in New York.
He estimates that more than 50 percent of the people that he places at universities are from outside academia, partly because their business experience has honed their ability to establish messaging that can set an academic institution apart from others.
"All institutions have to learn how to differentiate themselves - even the best schools in the world," says Heyman. "Branding their programs and making them well-known, and being able to communicate what makes the university special, makes the difference."
Heyman's clients want people from agencies and corporations who understand this notion and have successfully implemented a comprehensive communications program.
Lorraine Voles is one of those people. She was recently appointed to the position of vice president of external relations at The George Washington University, after serving in a senior communications position at Fannie Mae.
Voles, a GW alumna and former PR practitioner who also served in senior communications roles for former Sen. Hillary Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore and former President Bill Clinton, says a diverse résumé is attractive to universities.
"Experience with branding and positioning is important - as well as understanding the importance of a unified message and consistent imaging," says Voles. "Branding is not a word a lot of people like to use, but at a university, it's about finding out who we are and what we do."
Richard Marshall, managing director of the corporate affairs practice at executive search firm Korn/Ferry International, says that the firm's most recent university placements - senior communications officers at Dartmouth College and Purdue University - were from the corporate and media sectors.
Marshall says that the universities wanted to raise their profiles and recognized that they would need new communications leadership to reflect the changing landscape of universities.
"There is a need to evolve from the traditional university communications environment," he says. "When change happens with the leadership at an institution, it becomes a driving factor in helping them to look at how they are communicating."
As Marshall notes, academic institutions are now recognizing that it's a much more competitive marketplace for students and alumni dollars. As such, universities must be smarter and more effective in how they communicate.
Role of social media on campus
Whether it's used for academic instruction, connecting with the community or spreading information, the use of social media is essential in higher education communication.
However, understanding how to use these tools strategically can be a challenge for some higher education practitioners. Hsu manages Stanford's Twitter account and Facebook page, which has 40,000 followers, and says that social media best practices involve "being mindful" of what you are trying to accomplish - and anticipating change.
"At Stanford, we use social media to humanize our institution and showcase the passion and thought leadership of the people here to meet our PR goals," he says. "We not only use social media to establish our people as experts in different fields, but also to make 'heroes' of our knowledge creators and people."
To measure success, Hsu and his staff plan objectives for each platform. For mediums like Facebook and Twitter, they monitor engagement by looking at the number of "likes" and the comments that each post receives. They also note how many people unsubscribe from university feeds.
Hsu has discovered that people want to actually connect with others, rather than just relay information back and forth. "I've realized that regardless of what I was posting, people wanted to connect with the people behind the story," he says.
Connecting with people is the main reason that Menachem Wecker, a writer and editor at GWmagazine, utilizes social media in his current position in the university's Division of External Relations.
"The ultimate goal is to share information in both directions," Wecker says. "I use social media more for listening purposes than for lecturing." Marshall notes that it is critical for universities to figure out how to attract and retain students - even if this means a total communications overhaul.
"Academic institutions are becoming more mindful and strategic in how they manage their communications," he says. "They are recognizing that their student population is engaging in multiple ways and they must be much more in tune with how they communicate if they are to be effective."
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