Colleges: Marcom is critical infrastructure in post-pandemic pivots
The year ahead will be a wild ride. Is your marketing and communications operation up to the task?
As hiring freezes begin to thaw and a new fiscal year brings somewhat less-dismal budgets, college administrators are optimistic that the year ahead will move us beyond the pandemic. Many are hopeful that lessons gleaned from this long-lasting crisis will spur innovation not only in teaching and learning, but also in the business of running and supporting higher education. “We will emerge stronger and better!” they declare. These are admirable hopes. They cannot be achieved without a strategic focus on marketing and communications.
If it wasn’t already obvious, the pandemic made clear that your marcom operation is infrastructure, not decoration. It’s essential to student recruitment and enrollment, to fundraising and alumni engagement, to managing an ongoing campus emergency and uniting a community in the process, and—this is key—to cultivating trust and building support for any post-pandemic pivots you may have in mind. College leaders: As you reassess long-range plans and envision exciting new initiatives, chief marketing and communications officers should be your thought partners, and their teams need deeper investment and strategic planning now.
Marcom’s Heavy Pandemic Lift
There has been much hand-wringing about how the pandemic upended college admissions and the resulting effects on students and families. Inside the profession, we know that admissions teams had to figure out on the fly how to build prospect pools without search lists, how to recruit prospects without traveling, how to evaluate applicants without traditional measures, and how to yield admitted students without campus visits.
Admissions staffs worked beyond exhaustion and amid great uncertainty, and many achieved heroic results for their institutions, partnering with colleagues in marketing and communications to develop virtual programming and content, devise new digital marketing tactics, and connect personally with countless students and families.
The story has been similar on the advancement side of the house. Travel restrictions grounded fundraisers, but the need for current-use financial aid and institutional support was urgent, so they shifted their focus and used new content and digital tools to reach donors. As reunions and family weekends went virtual, the aptly named Zoom propelled alumni relations operations into the future and enabled high levels of engagement, often reconnecting with alumni who had been disengaged for years with quality programming and valuable career support.
Meanwhile, on campuses, a near-constant stream of communications and COVID-19 dashboard updates kept faculty, staff, students, and families informed and—hopefully—united in the 24/7 work of navigating through a pandemic and, simultaneously, an important racial and social justice reckoning. Effective communications tools and vehicles, including those for hearing from campus constituencies, as well as messaging that was straightforward, consistent, and empathetic were key to any successes on this front (alternatively, their absence contributed to an erosion of trust).
At many institutions, the financial impact of the pandemic meant that the dramatic increase in marketing and communications needs were met with reduced staffing levels and shrunken budgets. Which is to say: This isn't sustainable.
Planning for a Demanding Year
In the year ahead, as colleges forge new strategies for student recruitment, fundraising and engagement, and more, they’ll smartly consider what pandemic-era changes should stick, given their effectiveness and cost efficiencies. For their part, marcom leaders right now should be reviewing every job description on their teams and making the case for new and restructured roles and additional budget to support institutional goals.
The need for specialized marketing will continue to grow, as enrollment operations evolve further from traditional list buying and rely more on predictive data analytics and engagement platforms like Scoir and Niche to find and connect with likely prospects. The demand for virtual programming and compelling digital content will continue from all directions (livestreaming that once seemed a luxury is now a basic expectation among alumni and families, and that new virtual campus tour your team scrambled to create last year needs redoing), as will the need for greater bandwidth and ever-increasing skill and sophistication in managing your institution’s social media presence.
And internal communications will be of critical importance. With the dangerous Delta variant surging amid unvaccinated populations, it’s too early to declare the pandemic over, and fatigue with COVID restrictions and inconsistent (often confusing) guidance from public authorities are likely to challenge institutions in new ways this fall, as are considerations of remote-work policies and vaccination mandates. Colleges will need excellent internal communications to navigate this new territory and to help renew and strengthen their communities as many of them welcome back their full populations this fall.
Assess, Reorganize, and Invest
Marcom teams therefore should look to build strength particularly in marketing, digital communications, and internal communications. While some of that strength should come in the form of additional (or restored) staff positions, leaders can look externally for support, too. Freelance talent (designers, multimedia producers, copywriters) can add bandwidth for content creation—and free up staff to focus on work of the highest strategic value—and marcom agencies and consultants can provide much-needed redundancy for lean teams (which is most of them), add specialized expertise (digital marketing, SEO, analytics, and more), and fill temporary gaps caused by staff turnover, which we can all assume will be high.
One other note about reorganizations: This is a moment to think creatively and collaboratively, not territorially. Deepening investment in marketing and communications is in service to the institution, not the building of empires. Marcom should strengthen partnerships with enrollment, advancement, and human resources, potentially sharing new FTEs and formalizing marketing and communications plans for each of those divisions with goals that are aligned in substance and measurement.
Provide Professional Development and Flexibility
Your marcom team is exhausted and burned out. They’re struggling—in different ways, to be sure—and some of them may be about to throw in the towel. Those professional development budgets that were the first to be axed in the spring of 2020? Bring them back, and give your staff the chance to connect with others in their fields, to learn from and commiserate with one another, and to be inspired and energized by those connections and the ideas they ignite. Bonus: Even as some professional conferences will resume their in-person gatherings, the pandemic has changed this part of the world forever, too, and we can expect virtual (read: inexpensive) offerings to continue.
Along with opportunities to develop professionally, marcom staff, like others on your campuses, need flexibility, and they’re now in a position to demand it. As colleges figure out where they’ll land with work-from-home policies, they’re watching the market carefully, and they know that without some flexibility, they’ll face significant employee retention issues.
Many marketing and communications staff work horrendously long hours and attend to urgent needs around the clock; they’ve also proven they can do their jobs from just about anywhere and amid myriad other demands and challenges. Giving them some power to determine with division leaders an appropriate level of flexibility would go a long way toward keeping those staff members engaged and feeling valued.
Cultivate Empathy and Express Appreciation
College leaders and managers at all levels should be mindful that employees will “come back” from the pandemic in all different ways, at different paces, having had a wide variety of experiences and challenges over the past year and a half. Your marcom team is no exception to this, and at the same time they’ve been carrying the flag for the institution in so many ways. Give them space and grace and express appreciation for them at every opportunity. These talented and dedicated team members are part of the critical infrastructure of the college, and they should be deeply valued for helping to advance its mission.
