What would your employees say to a friend or family member who was interested in applying for a job at your institution? How can you ensure that employees have positive, truthful stories to share about their experiences with you? The experiences your employees have shape your employer brand. Your employer brand creates expectations about what…Read more
Author: Aimee Hosemann
Transcript: Your Institution’s Employer Brand: An Exercise in Coherence
Earlier this month, Dr. Kevin McClure, author of The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation (to be published in 2025), and Drs. Aimee Hosemann and Rob Zinkan, authors of What Makes a Strategic Plan ‘Strategic’?, discussed the current landscape of higher education employer brands. The panelists examined higher ed’s inattentiveness…Read more
The Campus Visit: In-Person Vibes and Virtual Values
This is the first in a two-part series about maximizing prospective students’ campus visit experiences, this time featuring on-campus events. In-person campus tours are one of our favorite experiences. Even if we’ve been to a campus many times, we love listening to a student tour guide describe the research they do with faculty in a…Read more
A Meditation on Possibility: RHB’s Annual Summer Reading List
What is possible? RHB’s summer reading recommendations derive from a variety of genres and themes. But, they share one feature: a meditation on possibility. What is possible if we have faith, if we imagine, if we fall in love, if we follow a trail through history in pursuit of a life’s story or to solve…Read more
Face the Future with Organizational Clarity: Building Capability with The RHB 3-5 Design
The RHB team frequently receives questions from higher education marketing and communications leaders about what structural and effectiveness trends we observe from our perspective across the sector. Leaders ask us about everything from high-level strategy to the shape of organizational charts and all the way down to tactical questions about working more effectively: How do…Read more
Keep Discussing DEIB in a Challenging Climate
This article previously appeared in Inside Higher Ed and it is posted here with permission of the author. Over the last few years, the work of steering higher ed toward its promise of creating equity and social mobility—including for those who work within it—has only become more difficult in many locations. Conflicts over why—and for…Read more
Transcript: Emerging Strategic Planning Themes and DEIB Implications
RHB Director of Qualitative Research Aimee Hosemann and Vice President for Marketing Leadership Rob Zinkan led a February 28 webinar as part of the Leading Edge Thinking in Higher Education Series by Bay Path University’s Center for Higher Education Leadership and Innovative Practice (CHELIP). In the webinar, they share RHB’s latest strategic planning research, including…Read more
Why—and How—You Should Do a Communication Inclusion Audit Now
The legislative and judicial landscape around diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) has become ever-more contested since that time. We’re republishing this piece to account for this moment in history, in support of institutions who remain committed to DEIB. In the last three years, the already hard work of steering higher ed toward its promise…Read more
How to Structure Your Higher Ed Marketing Department for the Future
If you’ve been reading our recent insights or if you’ve reviewed takeaways from our study on higher education strategic planning, you may already be aware of our research suggesting, while institutions have embraced marketing as a vital means of promotion, the embrace of marketing to aid in new program development or signature experiences is still…Read more
Webinar: Modern Strategic Planning: Committing to DEIB in a Continuing Climate of Challenge
In 2023, institutions of higher education are talking about and planning for diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging, even in an era of increased scrutiny and challenge to these vital efforts. In RHB’s 2023 round of strategic planning research, we’ve followed up with institutions we met during our 2020 research and examined DEIB language and goals…Read more