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 not as ubiquitous. Even as marketing has increasingly entered the C-suite in higher education, its role in strategy setting—thanks in part to a constituent-centric focus that should bring an intimate understanding of stakeholders and the marketplace—is underdeveloped and underutilized.

But the connection between marketing strategy and the success of endeavors like new program development, signature experiences or other strategic plan initiatives is undeniable. Marketing needs to be brought into the conversation sooner, which requires a stronger, more capable and more responsive department.

Having a well-structured marketing department on campus offers tremendous value to an institution. Yet achieving that ideal structure is no easy feat, particularly if your campus still considers marketing to reside predominately in the domain of promotion.

The guidebook also poses some foundational questions to center your perspective on the change that marketing should affect for your institution. The guidebook can then help you understand the roles and expertise you’ll need, take stock of the resources you currently have, and decide what components you may be missing in order to shape the department in a way that best suits your institution’s goals.

You may wish to share this with your team, and other leadership on campus, in your efforts to prepare for the challenges ahead. Should you discover along the way that you need support, we’re ready to assist. Our counsel in organizational design and effectiveness has helped institutions of all types transform or evolve their marketing departments for greater impact.

To download the guidebook

The post How to Structure Your Higher Ed Marketing Department for the Future appeared first on RHB.

Over the course of my first year here at RHB, I have been going through our vast library of Insights articles to tap into the best thinking of my RHB colleagues over the three decades (and more) that RHB has been providing expert counsel to our clients. The article below strikes me as particularly evergreen, especially for student success-minded institutions seeking a seamless transition between their recruitment and retention efforts, ensuring that the promises made in the former are realized in the latter, and that there is—to use a word that carries a lot of weight at RHB—coherence throughout the student journey from discovery all the way through to degree and beyond.

Back in 2018, I remember reading this piece by Rick Bailey when I was Lawrence University’s Vice President for Enrollment and Communications, and it catalyzed my thinking around how a customer experience manager would be an optimal role for us to create as we embarked on a campus-wide effort to improve our retention and graduation rates. It turns out that we even had the right person already on our team, even though he was in a more narrowly focused role at the time. The role—as you will see in the job description below—serves as the “coherence keeper,” aligning the institution’s behaviors across all departments and divisions around the values it expresses. 

One of the silver linings of the Great Resignation is that it creates opportunities for institutions to rethink before refilling open roles. Would a customer experience manager help your institution progress more effectively and rapidly toward its goals? Read on, reflect and—to quote Rick yet again—imagine voraciously.

Look. We get it. Calling students customers really makes you squeamish. We’ve heard the arguments against that label. Still, follow RHB Insights for a while and you’ll no doubt read our thinking about customer experience. I’d like you to understand our comfort (and I’d like to help you be more comfortable) with the word customer as a fitting description for all your important audience groups: faculty, students, parents, prospects, donors, alumni, neighbors—anyone with you transact and make exchange, whether it’s ideas or money.

Customer is a great word and granted, we know the trouble with it when it comes to higher ed. We’ve been part of the conversation of the pros and cons of the notion of “student as customer” for years and we’ve read both points of view, especially the “anti-customer” perspective (here, here and here are examples).

One difficulty in understanding students and alumni as customers is their inability to return for a refund. They’re stuck with what they get from you. Dissatisfied customers have little choice other than to drop out or transfer impeding your retention ambitions. Or they stop giving, or never give in the first place.

I’m beginning to believe that reluctance to adopt the customer label stems from your fear that we support the notion that “the customer is always right.” That’s simply not true, especially when it comes to students. Viewing our audiences as customers doesn’t equate to our bowing to their every whim. It simply means that we respect that the person on the other side of our transaction is an intelligent and reasonable consumer. A consumer with needs, interests, ambitions and defined parameters perhaps different from the ones we may deem best for them. Yet, until students appreciate the significance of transformation, they must be understood in terms of what they carry into the transaction. The student is always a consumer of our services: in the residence hall, bookstore, dining commons, health center, and in the classroom.

What’s most important to your students? A degree, or a degree from a College that Changes Lives? A diploma, or a diploma from an Ivy League institution? Studying at home or studying in the library? Studying alone or with a virtual cohort or studying in a classroom with 50 others? Learning at their own pace or pacing their learning by semester hours?

When faced with options, customers are empowered to choose. We need to respect that customers have alternative choices. If they choose us, we need to deliver experiences that consistently reflect their choice of us.

The ability to choose reminds everybody in your organization of the significance of exchange. Even though most campus personnel weigh transformation as the currency of exchange, those on the other side of the exchange understand it to be weighted as transaction. Parents and prospects are writing checks and they want something specific in return. Even altruistically-motivated donors see the importance of transaction and most expect to be recognized in some way.

Customer is not a bad word and certainly nothing to fear; it only helps to understand the mindset of the other parties in an exchange and helps campus personnel think about their accountability to the other parties in the exchange. As a firm, we refer to our customers as “clients,” a term I have heard higher ed professionals use in place of “customers.” Our clients see themselves as clients and call themselves “clients.” I appreciate the elevated nuance of the word “client.” The point is, however, the self-perception of those you serve should act as your guide. If families see themselves as customers, you should see them that way too. Get on their page to allow your relationship to flourish.

Customer experience is nothing new, of course, but the idea of managing customer experience has seen increased favor in recent years. Knowing that your brand is built on the impressions you make or have on individuals heightens the importance of their encounters with you. While it’s relatively easy to control the messages you send in digital and print communications, trying to manage all the touchpoints with customers becomes a heftier proposition. The greeting of a receptionist answering the phone, a smile from a student walking across campus, the manner in which a professor lectures, the quality of the campus landscaping, or the availability of parking for visitors all shape perceptions and customer impressions. Yet these “experiences” are often well out of any marketer’s control. At best, preferred standards can be established and communicated; and these standards can be taught and managed to a degree.

The management of these encounters with customers—their experiences with you—prompts interest in adding professionals to your marketing team. Increasingly, corporations are building entire departments to address customer experience management. Thus, experience and service designers are among the most employable new experts in the market. Technical teams include experience designers to ensure their new products will meet the demands for ease of use. Hospitals and health care systems employ customer experience managers to ensure patients are receiving exceptional care. Athletic franchises use the expertise of their customer experience managers to make the fan experience fun and memorable. High Point University has invested in customer experience to the degree that a campus concierge helps to address the needs of students, and the physical plant staff is referred to as the “campus enhancement team.”

Since a customer experience manager is quickly gaining momentum as an essential employee for campuses, we’re providing a model job description to assist you. You may already have someone on campus equipped to move into this position. You may need to recruit a professional. Here are some ideas to jumpstart your thinking about this significant role on your campus.

Who are you looking for?

Because service design, design thinking and human-centered design are all relatively new fields, you may find it difficult to find a seasoned practitioner. Several colleges and universities have added programs in customer experience design, most notably Stanford’s D School, enabling you to recruit from these programs directly. You may have success finding a marketing professional with background in business management who possesses skills in customer experience or design. Overall, you’re looking for someone with strong leadership, communication, and professional skills. Your customer experience manager likely will be a connoisseur of hospitality in all its forms.

What will a customer experience manager do?

Job Description

Reports to President or CMO

1. Examines/Audits customer journey identifying opportunities for improvements in customer experience across the campus.
2. Oversees qualitative and quantitative marketing, customer, and satisfaction research. Works with research professionals to collect, analyze, and interpret customer interaction data to identify requirements and information useful in optimizing customer experience.
3. Clearly understands the scope of audiences and constituencies of the campus.
4. Defines and implements standards/procedures for ensuring optimal customer experience. Helps define and establish a standard for customer experience across the campus.
5. Convenes campus teams charged with managing customer experiences to offer insights and evaluations/work across teams.
6. Contributes to new employee training; cooperates with HR in conveying customer experience expectations.
7. Presents data to stakeholders including trustees as a measure of success for the campus.
8. Offers recommendations regarding campus facility improvements or accessibility.
9. Partners with IT and data managers to assess and improve communications with customers (online, social, print, digital).
10. Liaises with marketing, sales (recruitment and advancement) and advertising units to analyze customer feedback and develop programs effective for improved customer experience.
11. Enlightens campus personnel on the associated benefits/consequences of their decisions on customer experience and revenue.
12. Oversees the hiring, orienting, and training of an organization’s customer experience team.
13. Supervises the activities of customer experience team to ensure their interaction with customers reflect positively on the company.
14. Organizes training programs for customer experience representatives in order to update their job knowledge and enhance their skills.
15. Teaches hospitality and customer service skills across the campus.
16. Establishes communication mediums through which customers can readily contact a company and vice versa.
17. Prepares and manages annual budgets in achieving set objectives and goals.
18. Attends seminars, workshops, and conferences related to the industry in order to improve performance and inspire new opportunities for campus improvements in customer experience.

The post What a Customer Experience Manager Does (and Why You Need One on Your Campus) appeared first on RHB.

As Lee Gardner noted in “The Barriers to Innovation” in The Chronicle of Higher Education ( 2019 ), “universities often flounder at innovation because they are not really meant to change.” The notion that institutions are inflexible is disconcerting at best. If innovation is considered impossible, no incentive exists to even imagine change.

Nonetheless, outdated approaches and strategies are no longer adequate to serve the customers of higher education. Institutions who cling to the status quo risk survival. From the readings I’ve encountered in my doctoral research, coupled with insights from over four decades of experience working on behalf of colleges and universities, I’ve identified a common thread of fear that encumbers institutions and academic communities from achieving the health they need amid new economic, post-pandemic, Great Resignation and enrollment shortfall challenges.

Here are just a few of the many fears that hamper innovation on college campuses:

1. Fear of failure. While a tenet of learning is to fail early and often, conceiving and implementing new ideas can threaten one’s standing in the community.
2. Fear of cost. At a time when budgets are challenged, making new investments must pay off; there is insufficient room for error (adding to the weight of the fear of failure).
3. Fear of effort. In “Academic Entrepreneurship: The art and science of creating the right academic programs,” Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson suggests that innovation can be perceived as being too difficult, requiring too much effort to see change to fruition on a college campus.
4. Fear of reputation. Campus employees put emphasis on personal reputation (just think of your last slip-up using the wrong title or credential!). Being an innovator can be characterized as being overzealous by setting the bar too high for others. And failure can label someone as an impractical dreamer.
5. Fear of perception. Institutions crave being perceived as stable. The very word “institution” suggests “establishment.” Innovation can sometimes be perceived as flighty, too experimental and not sufficiently serious.
6. Fear of success. The opposite of fearing failure, some leaders fear success because it raises expectations.
7. Fear of the spotlight. Relatedly, success may yield greater scrutiny and attention, and elevate personas to uncomfortable places.
8. Fear of change. Perhaps you’ve seen that Twitter thread from Bill Holohan about how the width of horses’ backends have influenced the spacing of railroad tracks and the width of tunnels. The influence of our habits makes it comfortable to resist change itself.
9. Fear of the unknown. Because it may lead to something new or at least unfamiliar, change can thwart innovation ironically.
10. Fear of responsibility. Once innovation thrives, new responsibilities emerge. The care and feeding of ideas come with costs (time, money, effort, e.g.) that add weight to the leader’s shoulders.

All of these fears can stand in the way of freedom to innovate. It behooves leaders in higher education to create an environment that welcomes creativity, values failure and provides an aura of confidence to the community.

Maybe you need an external partner to offer support or counsel to amplify, verify or inform your innovative ideas for the sustainable future of your institution. If so, I encourage you to call on the expertise of RHB consultants in enrollment management, executive counsel, institutional marketing, and Slate technologies who stand ready to help alleviate any fears that may be holding you back from success.

A colleague to help you cross the street (or launch a courageous new endeavor) is always a good choice.

The post 10 Fears Stifling Innovation in Higher Education appeared first on RHB.

You may be too tired these days to think about innovation or new ideas. You may be exhausted from the upheaval of life in the past three years. You may be overworked because your colleagues have taken flight in the Great Resignation. You may be tired from trying to find and recruit their replacements. You likely are giving energy to considering what you should keep of all the pivoting you have been doing; and you wonder what normal even looked or looks like today. We get it. Change is exhausting. Still we hope you are regaining the strength to use your creativity muscles again. With that hope in mind, it’s likely a good time to talk about how you can power up to see a bright future.

In the fall of 2021, I enrolled in Bay Path University’s Higher Education Leadership and Organizational Structure (HELOS) doctoral program. I figured that at age 68, I was finally ripe enough to dive into my lifelong goal of earning an Ed.D. or Ph.D. Though I’ve had occasions where I almost took the leap, life was interrupted with one thing or another and I put my goal off. At last, I am in the throes of deep study toward my degree. And I am loving it. For the record, I recommend the program. I wouldn’t say that every moment has been sensational, but certainly the vast majority of them are. The structure of the program—your classes and dissertation run in tandem so at the end of three years, you are done with everything—and the content are captivating. I wish I had tackled this 30 years ago, but I may be enjoying it more now as I have more time—and maturity—to relish the experience (voluminous reading and writing).

I’m in a course right now called Entrepreneurial Thinking and Innovative Practice that is right up my alley. I’m learning a ton despite having practiced the course title for more than 40 years. This week we have been studying design thinking principles and its application to higher education. I have had opportunity to consider RHB’s practices in this arena in greater depth. We’ve considered ourselves design thinkers for many years. Though design thinking has its roots in the 50s and 60s ( Simon, 1969 ) and came to concept in the 70s, when IDEO brought design thinking forward in 1991 (the same year RHB was founded), the industry buzz naturally attracted our attention and we began to adopt the concepts and processes of design thinking as our path to problem-solving. 

Being the creative types we are, we fashioned our own version of design thinking strategy. At RHB we have developed our i-i-i-i (pronounced “ay-yi-yi-yi”!) process. We begin with solid data garnered from our Three Satellites research strategy (What is true about us? What do we say is true about us? What do others believe to be true about us?) The Input (our first “i”) of this data is presented and accessible to our entire team—consultants, writers, designers, developers and others who may be called upon to implement a solution. Our work to this point parallels the first step of design thinking: Empathy. Our first task is to understand our audience, to get inside their head and skin, to walk in their shoes, to feel their joy…and their pain. We have several ways to engage with our clients to accomplish empathy, one of our most “famous” is Circles of Influence. We are most fortunate to have an anthropologist, Dr. Aimee Hosemann, as our director of qualitative research. Aimee brings a natural empathy to interviews and investigations that our clients feel. She “gets” people and places with her skill. Yet all of us come to clients with that same intention of deeply understanding before we begin defining or solving problems. Empathy is the powerful first step of design thinking. Until you have it, you likely shouldn’t proceed.

We host an Ignition meeting, our second “i,” that allows everyone access to the qualitative and quantitative data we have gathered to clearly define the problem at hand (the second phase of design thinking). Having invested in the experience of our clients allows us to discover core problems, not just surface issues. Heiftetz et al. ( 2009 ) differentiates between technical and adaptive challenges. Technical challenges require no new learning and can be readily managed. Think of a scheduling problem for your team as an example. It’s a problem, perhaps, but nothing that a great project manager and some decent software can’t handle. An adaptive challenge on the other hand requires new learning and most often involves many stakeholders. Design thinking offers a problem-solving path for adaptive challenges and those are the types of assignments we take on with our clients. Our Ignition meeting serves as the spark to both precisely define the adaptive challenge and a free-thinking conversation about directions we might pursue to solve it. At this early ideation stage (the third phase of design thinking), all ideas are considered and little evaluation comes into play. We keep the wheels turning by using affirmative words like “yes” rather than “no” and “and” instead of “but.” This Ignition meeting is a type of creative briefing where we address the essential facts that will lead us to the right creative choices.

Why is it important to know the phases of design thinking? You can benefit from following these steps in solving problems on your campus. You and your team can use the principles to more fully understand your audiences, better identify and define your real problems, consider bigger and more effective solutions, and discover how your perceptions align with customer responses to your solutions. 

It’s fun to ideate and brainstorm (well, mostly it is; I’ve been in some truly dreadful brainstorming sessions). When there’s a problem ahead, you and members of your team likely light up at being able to exercise your creative muscles. But adaptive change is much more than an “idea party.” Disciplining yourself and your skills to develop empathy, to specify a real problem (not a superficial concern), to discern viable solutions and test them for effectiveness takes the investment of your will and your time. It’s an investment that will pay bigger dividends than you may have previously thought or experienced. 

RHB continues our i-i-i-i process by allowing for a period of Incubation following the Ignition meeting. Giving the creative team time to percolate on the ideas generated in the Ignition meeting promotes the critical thinking that allows the best ideas to rise to the top. This week I was reading Elaine Dundon’s The Seeds of Innovation ( 2002 ). She writes about the importance of calmness and a clear mind for innovative thinking, so we allow time for that as best we can based on the delivery schedule. Sometimes the Incubation period is a matter of hours; other times it can last a couple of weeks, depending on the scope of the assignment. Regardless, the result is always an Inspiration, the coherent solution that will be implemented. At the point we arrive at potential solutions, we prototype (design thinking phase four) and test (design thinking phase five). 

We encourage you to engage your team in design thinking processes. Here are a few resources for an introduction if you are unfamiliar with the idea and are a Harvard Business Review subscriber (and if you are not, you should be):

• Design Thinking
• Why Design Thinking Works
• Design Thinking = Method, Not Magic
• The Explainer: Design Thinking

Fun fact: Before joining RHB full time in May 2022, Ken Anselment, our Vice President for Enrollment Management, taught the Designing Your Life course (based on the class and book by Stanford University professors, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans) at Lawrence University. You may wish to check out that book or better, a workshop with your team on your campus with Ken.

The post Design Thinking for Higher Ed appeared first on RHB.

If you are headed to Nashville for Summit, your taste buds are likely starting to pine for barbecue and maybe grits. It’s never too early to plan your dining itinerary, so here are some ideas to jumpstart your agenda. We’ve selected some spots we know about that are near — most within walking distance of — the convention center. If you were hanging with the RHB team, you’d likely end up at one of these establishments.

We have not included all the options on Broadway — we decided you could readily find your way through that strip of neon-fronted saloons. Broadway is a definitive Nashville tourist experience and you should stroll up and down the street just to say you’ve been there, done that. Our list includes places you may not stumble upon (as it were).

Etch ($$$)  Enjoy a great wine list and good cocktails at this upscale restaurant with an eclectic menu that’s consistently rated well by diners.

The Catbird Seat ($$$$)  You will remember this meal; it’s a higher-end experience with a seasonally-changing menu. It also happens to be right next door to one of Rick’s favorite speakeasies.

The Patterson House ($$$)  It’s easy to miss, but don’t. If you love great cocktails, step into this blast from the past. You may be greeted coolly and asked why you are there before you are allowed behind the heavy curtain into the dark speakeasy. Drinks aren’t cheap but you get what you pay for.

The 404 Kitchen ($$$$)  The 404 Kitchen is a deep-wallet dive, but it’s also very good. You’ll enjoy fresh, locally-sourced food with a cool industrial vibe at this trendy upscale spot located in the Gulch.

Adele’s Kitchen ($$)  This one may be more comfortable on your wallet and comforting to your tummy. Local farm-to-table dishes will make you feel at home in this open-style space.

Sambuca ($$)  Located in the Gulch, Sambuca serves reasonably-priced American food. And if you want more activity with dinner, it also has live music and a dance floor.

The Farm House ($$)  Offering southern food at reasonable prices and specializing in farm-to-table, you’ll find the Farm House not far from the convention center. Try the quail.

Husk ($$)  Located in a historic home just south of Broadway, you’ll enjoy Southern food and charm with a nice break from the hubbub.

Arnold’s ($)  It’s nothing fancy, but you’ll certainly feel at home in this mom-and-pop country kitchen that locals swear by. Get in line out the door of the you-can’t-miss-it red block building.

Joyland ($)  This gem, located a quick ride from Broadway in East Nashville, is one of Sean Brock’s latest projects. Here you’ll find hamburgers, fried chicken and boozy milkshakes set in a fast-food experience created to inspire joy.

Sixty Vines ($$)  If you and your group want to take a sampling approach, you can enjoy a variety of wines on tap in a light and airy setting. If you’d prefer to focus on food, they offer fresh options that range from heavy hamburgers to light salads.

lou/na ($$)  Enjoy an exceptional experience with craft cocktails and a spectacular view of Downtown Nashville. We recommend taking the meandering walk down Broadway and timing it so you can watch the sunset from their location on the rooftop of the Hyatt.

TENN ($$)  This might be where you find the cool kids in need of local Southern fare. You should try the cinnamon buttermilk biscuits with spiced chocolate gravy for dessert.

Those options should get you started. Most of all, enjoy your Nashville experience, preferably with good friends. Make new friends and experiences over a great meal. Have fun!

Looking for recommendations on how to make the most of your time at Slate Summit? Check out the RHB team’s advice in our Summit guide.

The post Nashville Dining Guide for the Slate Innovation Summit appeared first on RHB.

While digital transformation was already well underway, the pandemic accelerated our collective adaptation to new ways of living. Many digital capabilities already existed in February 2020, but the mandate to stay at home a month later forced us to avail ourselves of the possibilities already in place. Like me, you probably have more groceries and products delivered to your home than you did a couple of years ago. If you’ve visited your physician, you’ve done so online. We made a decision to adopt a remote working environment at RHB; we downsized our office space and allowed everyone to work from home. The office is visited occasionally, but the days of all of us being in one space are over. 

While digital experiences were increasing as a regular part of our everyday lives, until the pandemic, we weren’t forced to use them.

Now that we’ve become adept at virtual experiences and digitally-enabled experiences, we won’t be going back. Sure, we’ll visit the grocery store. Yes, we’ll go see the doctor in person. But video conferences for a checkup and grocery delivery will now always be part of our lives. Think back to your retail shopping habits as a case in point. There was a time when you had to go to the store to buy stuff (though you may not remember it). Ebay and Amazon changed the face of shopping and retail. While novel at first, digital technologies made our encounters with online shopping the norm. We should expect the same transformations to digital dependence as the norm going forward in the post-post-pandemic world.

Even as we conquer the pandemic (hoping, of course, that ultimately we do), there’s no going back to a pre-digital experience. With that in mind, it’s important to think about how we begin interactions with customers and constituents. Our first encounters will be digital for the most part, for example. (Think virtual campus visits, Giving Tuesdays on Facebook). We may, in fact, never meet some customers in person. 

The pandemic helped us see that the digital transformation of everyday experiences is suitable for achieving what we may have previously regarded as possible primarily in-person. Face-to-face has taken on new meaning as we have identified the power for digital experiences.

To that end, we need to be planning better introductory experiences digitally. How do you create the best experience to say hello for the first time? How can you initiate conversation when you don’t have a party or cocktail hour to prompt an occasion to start talking? How do you take the first steps toward exchange if virtual is all you have? Your future depends on your ability to make your first impressions using technology to convey your winning smile and personality.

More than a form or enticing email. How can we change the inquiry process? How can video introductions help us do a better job of welcoming families, courting new donors, engaging potential partners, or recruiting faculty.

How will the digital transformation we are experiencing (due to the force of the pandemic) shape our practices in higher education?

Keep reading to gain insight from my distinguished RHB colleagues. Then, be sure to take time for reflection about how technology is changing the landscape and your opportunities for the future. What can you do better now, post-post-pandemic?

Assess, Reimagine and Redefine

—Erin Gore, Vice President for Client Technology

The topic of digital transformation has permeated discussion in higher education since the pandemic hit in 2020; however, institutions have been technologically evolving for over a decade. The difference now is that the pandemic pushed the pendulum—forcing even the most hesitant and reluctant institutions to technologically evolve the ways in which they operationalize, communicate and teach. Additionally, admission offices had to reinvent the ways in which they approach recruitment and outreach.

March 2020 is a month and year permanently ingrained in my mind. At the time, I was overseeing Slate.org at Technolutions—a free platform for secondary school counselors, community-based organizations (CBOs), students, and colleges and universities. In speaking with school counselors and CBOs, the collective concern was clear: How would a virtual world impact the college admissions process? More importantly, how would it impact college access? How do you maintain communication and reach your most vulnerable and underserved student populations when they’re disproportionately impacted by the pandemic?

There isn’t a magic answer to these questions, especially due to the systemic challenges that forced us to ask them in the first place. However, at RHB we would start by encouraging institutions to ensure that their digital investments align with their institutional strategy and goals. After all, the pandemic has signaled the need for holistic change. 

So what now? Assess, reimagine and redefine. After all, this is how we approach diagnostics at RHB. What are you currently doing? What’s been working? What are the pain points? What do you aspire to do? We work with hundreds of clients each year and help them to gain efficiencies  through technology and innovation while emphasizing the human experience. We’ve all received that one email with the wrong name or content merged into it. It’s not the end of the world, but it is a conscious reminder of automation. It can be beautifully efficient, yet impersonal—and students know it. If the goal is to attract, yield and retain the best fit students for your institution, you cannot disregard the human element. You must consistently think about how your digital efforts will foster a human connection.

Technology is powerful. It can transform how institutions connect with students (current and prospective), but it does not define or replace human interactions. A pivot to virtual events should be accompanied by follow-up calls. If your institution is cutting back on in-person travel, think about how you’ll reach underserved students. Send that personal note. Be in touch with family/guardians, their counselor or CBO. Share application, tuition and financial aid data transparently. Connect. ‡

The Importance of Context

—Aimee Hosemann, Director of Qualitative Research

What’s been reinforced as truth to me in my role as Director of Qualitative Research is how important context is when we ask about digital transformations that have occurred since March 2020 and which ones will stick. Specifically, we need to ask: which transformations, where, and for whom for which purposes. Keeping these questions in mind will help us understand which transformations should occur following an important time in which so many institutions made heroic efforts to change course delivery and keep their communities close in new ways.

One factor that plays an important role in answering some of the questions I asked here is whether institutions have the will to transform tactics that worked during an emergent situation into routine features of life on their campuses. This also pulls in work-life issues for faculty and staff. One possibility here is that those institutions with the will to continue to allow flexible course delivery and work options will draw faculty and staff from institutions where there is less such will. As well, I’ve observed that students may newly understand their power as consumers who can make demands with an expectation that those will be met. This can further put pressure on institutions to consider routinizing flexibility in working and learning. This flexibility is not now and will not be distributed equally across institutions. It also likely won’t apply equally across academic programs because of academic freedom concerns.

Speaking of concerns about academic freedom, we cannot remove legislative context from this conversation. For instance, consider states where there are moves in legislatures to challenge tenure and the ability to discuss race and identity through an honest lens. Add in the politicization of pandemic response, and we have an environment in which institutions of higher education could be subjected to ever-greater forms of control over their daily functions.

My point here is not to discourage long-term digital transformations. Rather, my point is to be clear that they should be well considered in relation to the nuance of your particular situation. The encouragement I provide is to carefully plot your digital transformations through strategically-minded, specific plans that are transparent and realistic about the goals and priorities those transformations can meet. ‡

Mission-focused and Student-driven Intentionality

—Amanda Sale, Senior Consultant for Enrollment Management

I distinctly remember my last day in the office as COVID-19 shut down in-person operations—it was Friday, March 13, and I walked out of the brick-and-mortar space with my laptop and a screen in the late afternoon, preparing to set it up in my home office for what I thought would be the next two weeks. We had just released decisions and had full campus visit programs throughout the next couple of months and admitted student events that were close to waitlist capacity. What happened next can only be described as a flurry of impressive pivots and creative problem-solving in a mad-dash to create virtual experiences that didn’t duplicate our in-person events, but at least engaged students and told them our story.

Now, two years later as we’re transitioning into an endemic and I’ve transitioned into a new role, I’m drawn back to the lessons I’ve learned and thinking about how I can use them moving forward. Maybe you were at an institution that was at the forefront of the digital landscape, barrelling into virtual options much before it was necessitated by the global pandemic; I was not. We moved into the fully virtual world with hesitation, maybe not kicking and screaming but there were some deep sighs and a few tears. When the visit experience holds a pivotal role in yielding a student, how can you reframe the situation and engage them differently?

The creative problem solving that I witnessed during those first couple of weeks and over the next couple of years is my biggest takeaway and lesson learned from the pandemic and the pivot to our digital environment. It was exciting to watch the conversation shift and take a reverse-engineered approach that focused on the purpose and outcome of a program first and built out the details after that was vetted through. This gave the team an opportunity to build a program that incorporated various platforms, met student needs and identified a plan to measure outcomes, creating an intentionality that was mission-focused and student-driven. It is my hope that we can take that approach much more often than not, because doing this type of heavy lifting before deploying specific tactics gives institutions an opportunity to coherently tell their story and deliver an experience across platforms that is meaningful for both students and their supporters. ‡

The Digital Campus and Flexible Work

—Rob Zinkan, Vice President for Marketing Leadership

The future of work and the Great Resignation are constant topics in our organizational design work with institutional leaders. Across our portfolio of clients, we are seeing all versions of staff work arrangements for individuals and teams. A marketing and communications team, for example, is working fully remotely at one university, while their counterparts at another university are physically together in the office 100% of the time. For most of our clients, the current state is somewhere in the middle. Post-COVID remote work policies—many still in a pilot phase—look different depending on the institution. At colleges and universities where department or division leaders can make those decisions at the individual staff member level, you may have all three work arrangements—fully remote, fully in-person (physical campus office) and hybrid—across a single team. The considerations for building and developing an effective team and desired culture are both significant and complex.

I was listening to a recent episode of the Future U. podcast where Northeastern University President Joseph Aoun discussed lessons for higher ed from the pandemic. “What we learned during this COVID period is that there is a difference between a university and a campus, because we always assumed that, for instance, if I ask you, ‘What is Princeton?’ You say, ‘Oh, Princeton is in New Jersey.’ When Princeton closed its campus at New Jersey, it doesn’t mean that it closed itself. It kept functioning. So this congruence between the university and the campus has been called into action. We have been liberated from there. Therefore, in order to maintain the contact with the students, you have to go where the learners are. And that’s what we’re doing with our building global university system, where we are in California, in Canada, in Seattle, in London.”

I would argue that there is not a difference between a university and a campus. Rather, we need to broaden our definition of campus to include both the physical campus and the digital campus. Before the pandemic, the digital campus was already playing an increasingly vital role to support, supplement and enhance our physical campus experiences. (Previously, we may have only considered the digital campus to be a gateway to the physical campus.) Post-post-COVID has heightened our awareness that these modalities are not binary. Even institutions that are committed to a residential experience have realized the effectiveness and/or efficiency afforded by the digital campus for certain experiences, ranging from specific course offerings to various support services. Marketers should play a leadership role in ensuring that the experiences of those who matter most to your institution, including staff, are congruent across your campus—physical and digital—and with your market position. 

What are the implications for work if the university and the campus (both physical and digital) are indeed the same? Our terminology and labels matter. (I previously advocated rethinking the “office of” nomenclature for administrative units given the changing nature of the “office.”) I hope we move away from the narrower “remote work” label and instead focus more broadly on “flexible work” as the future of work. If our campuses are both physical and digital, our work should not be defined primarily by location. Flexible work takes a more holistic view of work, encompassing location and time and a host of other factors related to employee well-being. It is now among the requirements to attract and retain top talent in marketing and communications and other key functional areas. ‡

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I’ve heard it said many times (and I think it’s attributed to Robert Shuler, the famous TV pastor of the Crystal Cathedral in California): “Tough times don’t last, tough people do.” I think you may join me in raising an eyebrow at that optimism. Apparently, tough times do last. The COVID pandemic is closing in on two years of disruption. About the time we think we’re nearing a conclusion to its deleterious effect on our lives, a new variant blocks the roadway to the finish.

In an email from Jeff Selingo, he referenced a recent NYT article suggesting that campuses were strategizing for maintenance with lasting COVID implications rather than planning for a post-COVID environment.

The second half of that statement may be more true: tough people hang in there even when the way is tough. You’ve had a real go of it these past months. You’ve been taxed, tried and tempted to give up. But yet, here you are, still hanging in there, still reading this post. I commend you. However, I have no intention of promising that things will get better soon.

Instead, let me suggest a handful of ways you can certainly outlast the tough times.

Practice gratitude. It would seem that there’s little to be thankful for during a crisis like the one we’ve been living through. But there is. You may have to dig a bit deeper to find it when life on the surface feels glum. I challenge you to take two minutes right now to list five things for which you are grateful. Family? Friends? Personal health? Technology? Work? Roof? Blanket? Home? Last weekend? Those suggestions are easy and a good place to start. But try this exercise again tomorrow at this time to add five more. By day three of your effort, you’ll find richer expressions of gratitude that will change your outlook. (And statistics show that if you keep at it for 21 days in a row, it will become a habit.) A thankful heart turns to a glad heart pretty quickly. Take your mind off the frustrations by replacing them with thoughts of your blessings.

Pause for reflection. Confession time: Until more recently, my practice of reflection has been minimal. I didn’t see how taking time to think about what was or is happening or what can happen would help me get things done now. Anytime I paused to reflect, my thoughts turned immediately to something I could be doing in that moment. I can be easily distracted by my eagerness to “do.” But, I’m learning the value (and the art) of stopping to consider how and why I am acting, behaving, responding as I am in the present. I’m appreciating what I can learn by rehearsing my steps leading to the present. And I love the privilege of imagining what might be or how things might be better next time. I’ve had more time than usual to develop this practice during COVID. Yet I hope the habits of reflection I am building stay with me after COVID doesn’t tie me to my home. I intend that an already full schedule made more robust by non-stop Zoom and other COVID-inspired disruptions will not preclude reflection time. The richness of that quiet time to simply ponder yields fresh thinking, better ideas and higher levels of conscientiousness. It’s given me greater appreciation for most everything (see above).

Partake in service. This piece of advice comes from my parents. Throughout my childhood, anytime I was out of sorts, they’d see moments to get me beyond myself by helping others. Mowing the neighbor lady’s lawn. Running an errand for a friend. Delivering something my mom had baked to someone she felt needed it. Helping my dad with a task. The point of their instruction was to help me see that it wasn’t always about me. In fact, it rarely was. During COVID, it was easy to take difficulties personally, as though COVID happened to you. When we take care of others, we do ourselves a tremendous service as well. We get out of our own heads and our self-pity. We raise our spirits by raising the spirits of others. Their joy becomes our joy.

Pass the dessert. I didn’t say pass on the dessert, I said pass the dessert. This is a good time to allow yourself a moment of ease. Eat cake. Have a bowl of ice cream. Or do something that brings you joy, especially if it’s not food. Moments of celebration may seem inappropriate in times of distress, but those are in fact the times when you need them most. Throw a party–even on Zoom—for no reason at all. Make up a holiday to enjoy with friends and family. You need this, and likely deserve it. And frankly, it will be good for everyone around you who depends on your smile.

The stress of the pandemic isn’t over; we have much yet to live with and through. We still need to “process” what we’ve experienced and how we’ll change going forward to accommodate a new way of thinking and living. We have great ideas inside us just waiting for an opportunity to be released. This tough time is likely going to last. Try building these four habits into your life and you will last, too.

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I hope I don’t quickly forget the thrill of being in a room with all my colleagues for the first time. The RHB team met in December in Indianapolis for the first time in more than two years. Bear in mind, we’ve added a good share of our team since COVID began. Consequently, this was the initial occasion where we were meeting colleagues face-to-face.

The hum of genuinely excited voices—not just polite banter—and the number of simultaneous conversations with animated hand gestures shed its own energy throughout the room. As Abraham, Ken, Alex and I were chatting, we all commented how palpable the charge was. And when I looked around the room at the incredible talent and capacity represented by the collection of these specific and gifted people, I was compelled to describe it as “power,” as in a source of energy like an electric company. So, when I used that comment (“The power in this room is amazing!”) in my introduction, I wasn’t thinking of its negative connotations or its potential as a trigger word, particularly in a room filled with people of diverse life experiences and backgrounds. Amanda rescued that moment with her quick reply: “Power for good.” Her insightful response became a bolt of lightning theme for our few days together as a team. That recurring charge carried through to the end of our in-person time together. I’ve felt it often since we returned to meeting on Zoom, but now with the added benefit of having been in the same room.

I felt that power for good  in our review of the year as we draw near to the close of our 30th year in operation in April. We’ve had a remarkable couple of years and in 2020 alone, we’ve added substantially to our team. Candidly, it’s an employee list of rock stars and for whom I am so grateful. Being in the same room with them is simply delightful. Recalling our accomplishments with clients is completely satisfying.

As we met in December, we addressed challenges that have risen from substantial growth. Getting our collective act together and ensuring that we all buy-in to processes—and invent new ones—requires a high level of mutual respect and cooperation. As we dissected our technical and adaptive challenges related to client care and success, the privilege of observing power collaborating for good was exhilarating.

When we met for dinner that first night, you could sense that power for good in our social interaction. We don’t use the word “love” much in business settings, but I have to say, I felt it authentically that night. Our collective power frankly felt good! That first evening together, we honored Sam who celebrated his 20th work anniversary this year. We had fun reminiscing about his RHB career with some photos we dug out of the vault. But the theme of that tribute was the incredible good he has done throughout his career to date, for RHB and especially for our clients. His strategic and creative stamp on our work is formidable.

The next morning, several members of our team reported on assignments we had completed in the past year or so. How amazing to see the power for good expressed in the breadth of that work–Slate solutions, portals, creative design, content development, experience-making, impeccable forms, effective consultation, curriculum design, marketing strategy. The work itself was impressive, but the results of that work was the core of power for good. When we stop to think about the number of students reached, faculty supported, processes streamlined, hours saved, dollars raised, systems improved, that is when our hearts are glad. Our work for the most part is great fun. More importantly, it’s good work for good clients doing good things.

At this team gathering, we had special guests. David Wantz, president and CEO of Independent Colleges of Indiana, led an open dialog with Sue Ellspermann, president of Ivy Tech Community College; Rob Manuel, president of the University of Indianapolis; and Nassar Paydar, chancellor of IUPUI. We were honored by their willingness to meet with us and more so by their transparency about the challenges they face as presidents of their institutions. The power for good was evident in the way they each spoke about their work and their interest in student success. Our engagement with them was a clear reminder of the importance of our work in higher education as a power for good.

As we looked ahead to a new year on RHB’s path forward, we were challenged by Tammy, Sam and Alex to build on our past successes. They outlined a path forward that will expand the scope of our services and will create more opportunities for good with our clients. The vision for the coming years

The sense of our collective power for good was profoundly  intense as we met later that night for our annual holiday gathering. Naturally, we had great fun dining together and our table conversations were lively (and perhaps a bit noisier than Vida is accustomed). RHB has a few traditions around the holidays, one of which is a white elephant gift game (or pink elephant, if that’s what your tradition calls it). We have strict rules for the number of times a particular gift can change hands before being declared finally “owned.” Each year these rules are contested almost as if the rule challenges were part of the tradition, in the same way that your aunt can always be counted on for the chocolate pecan pie. Our gift theme this year was books; @abbylovesbooks made a #BookTok highlighting some of the selections.  

Perhaps, for me anyway, the power for good was most explicit in the remarkable gift giving at the end of the evening. Throughout our 30 years of owning RHB, our team mates have always celebrated by giving us a remarkable gift. In the past, we’ve received a paddleboat, a patio deck heater, a year of great movie-going, Broadway tickets, fine wine, spa resort days, luxurious sweaters–truly kind and lovely gifts that we have loved and enjoyed. This year, however, our team decided to each make a gift in honor of Tammy and me to organizations of their choosing whose work reflected our values of truth, beauty, love and justice. As each team member stood to tell of the organization they had supported, we were genuinely awestruck by the compassion and passion they reflected in their comments. In that hour, we were joined in our effort to make the world a better place; to help transform the universe. From education to healthcare, caring for the homeless, feeding the hungry, welcoming refugees and twenty more (even our alma mater received a gift!), that moment was one of true good spirit— power for good spirit. There’s really no telling how much good was done in that one united effort. It’s wonderful to imagine how those gifts changed life for the number of people—hungry, ill, homeless, lonely, outcast or impoverished people—because they were influenced and aided by those organizations. I am thinking about students who will unknowingly benefit from the generosity of team members represented in that one evening’s giving. Collectively, we will likely have affected thousands of lives. We of course don’t know precisely where our investments will be felt or by whom. What we do know is that we are a power for good and RHB is energized by the possibilities before us.

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Rick Bailey was recently invited to lead a webinar about his recent book, Imagine Voraciously, by Bay Path University’s Center for Higher Education Leadership and Innovative Practice (CHELIP). In the webinar, Rick highlights some of the takeaways from the book and offers insights to encourage your own voracious imagining. You can watch the recording here.

Melissa Morriss-Olson:

Hello, everyone, and welcome to our July leading edge thinking and higher education webinar. We are so excited for today’s webinar. I think if you are like me, coming out of the pandemic, I’m feeling a very strong need to ignite my own sense of creativity and imagination. And personally, I cannot think of anyone better to lead us in this process today than our presenter, Rick Bailey.

I am thrilled to welcome Richard Harrison Bailey, who goes by Rick Bailey. Rick is the founder and principal of the higher ed marketing consultancy agency RHB. He has 30-plus years of experience in not-for-profit marketing. I have been a client of Rick and his team in two different institutions. I can tell you that he is one of the best, if not the best marketing professionals that I have worked with. He and his team really have a gift in terms of getting inside your institution, and figuring out what makes you tick. He’s also spent a good chunk of his life and career in thinking about Coherence: How Telling the Truth Will Advance Your Cause, which is the title of his first book and his recent book, Imagine Voraciously, is a wonderful, wonderful resource. And it’s something that we all need now coming out of the pandemic more than ever. So with that, Rick, we’re so excited to turn it over to you to learn from you and to imagine voraciously together over the next hour.

Rick:

Thanks so much, Melissa. And Jen, are we good on our screen?

Jen Palma:

Looks good.

Rick:

Great. Thanks. So grateful for the invitation to be with you today, and I appreciate your joining me for this webinar. I’m really glad you’re here and I look forward in this next hour to getting inside your head a bit. If you’ve ever seen the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, you’ll remember a great theme song written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley called Pure Imagination. Some of you might even be humming that right now. In the song, Willy Wonka sings about the bliss of a life of pure imagination. And he sings, “Living there, you’ll be free if you truly wish to be. If you want to view paradise, simply look around to view it. Anything you want to do, do it. Want to change the world, there’s nothing to it.” Your imagination will take you to places you likely have never been into adventures you may have never dreamed.

So let’s begin by using your imagination right off the bat. Let’s start with this exercise. I want you to imagine a color; just get a color in your head. Just see only color. You can choose one you like, but it might be one you’ve never seen before. Create a blank canvas and just cover the canvas with your color. You got that? You may need to relax to the point that it’s all you see in your mind. If you can do that, you’re using your imagination. Now, I would like you to park that color in your head somewhere, just stash it somewhere for a minute. So Melissa told you I wrote a book this last year—actually she helped to inspire it. But it came about because the last 20 months or so have taken a real toll on all of us. And early at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote a post called “The Next Best Thing” in response to the cause of what sounded like panic from our higher education clients, and they were very concerned about what to do in light of the pandemic.

For most of these callers, the thing that would have been great was the return to normal, whatever normal was for them. But things at that time were anything but normal. The disruption to normal caused them a ton of concern. And of course, we wanted to offer expert recommendations to find the next best thing to do going forward. And even though every client has different challenges, they all needed reminders of some basics, so I suggested five important and viable things to do. The first of which was to keep your eyes open, that is stay alert, watching for both dangers and opportunities. The second thing was to imagine voraciously or use the precious time of the disruption to think newly and differently. The third thing I suggested was not to cut off your nose and I offered that as a caution to administrators who are slashing budgets out of fear. And they were tempted to reduce their budgets in areas that they probably should not. A lot of times they were taking big chunks out of marketing—that was the wrong moment to do that. As leaders, I encouraged them to keep spirits bright because part of the leader’s responsibility is to provide support and motivation to the team. And finally, I suggested that they prepare for extreme pivots knowing that normal was being severely challenged, and it would likely require immediate and substantial change.

But of those five, the phrase I used, “imagine voraciously” seemed to strike a chord, and a few folks suggested I write more about that. The topic and message seemed timely as a ray of hope when hope was pretty scarce. And I’ll talk about that a little bit more when I suggest that the word voraciously was intentionally chosen to address this particular time. But as we begin, I think it’s important for us to understand what imagination really is.

Imagination is a bit mystical and difficult to describe, but science is helping us better understand what goes on in our brains. And what science sometimes does best is to tell us what something is not. And with that in mind, let’s look at some misinterpretations about our imaginations. First, it’s probably not left or right brain power, it’s all-brain. You’ve likely heard the claims that suggest whichever side of your brain is particularly wired as a priority leads to the type of thinker you are, or worse, determines what you should do with your life, whether or not you’re going to be an accountant or an artist. But as science has learned, our brains are networked to connect in all sorts of ways, from various parts and hubs of our brains. The use of our imagination crosses all of them repeatedly.

Last year at RHB we invited a neurologist to speak with our team about the research she and her team were doing to map the movements of neurons through the brain to determine patterns, particularly when deviant behavior is present. And you might wonder what that has to do with imagination. But Dr. Jane Yap is measuring capacity for coherence, a topic that is, as Melissa suggested, very dear to me, and how we connect dots of meaning. Her findings are illustrating that our brains are wildly active, and not necessarily given to left or right side in priorities.

Next, it’s not just for the uber-emotional; you’ve probably also heard someone say that creative people are more emotional. So when you describe someone with a vivid imagination, you’ll assume they’re more in touch with their feelings. And this, too, is proven to be untrue.

While those with some effervescence may enjoy their imaginational adventures more, you don’t need to be overly emotional to activate your imagination. Here’s good news, it’s not exclusive; use of your imagination is for almost everyone. There are some people who struggle with imagination, and I’m going to talk about that in a few minutes. But for the most part, you can count yourself among those who have a high capacity for imagination. And this piece is important: imagination is not reality, but it’s sufficiently powerful to reshape your sense of reality. Imagination is a powerful tool that can alter your sense of reality, it can affect what you taste, or smell, your sense of time, your ability to recall events and their sequence. It’s influential in your sense of what is real, but it’s not the same as reality. Nor is it the same as creativity. I’m going to explore those differences a little bit more in just a minute. But I’m going to first start talking about what imagination is.

Imagination is mental imagery, or your ability to practice mental imagery. Cambridge University neuroscientists have arrived at the most accepted definition of imagination as “conscious simulation that can impact perception, cognition, and emotion.” It’s a succinct description. But think about a time when you’ve used your imagination. In all likelihood, you can identify how your imagination changed what and how you perceive circumstances, what you understood, and how you felt. Let’s say you imagined your next birthday party, perhaps you could visualize the cake or who would be present at the party or whether you’d be surprised. You might have come to terms with an awareness of your age. And you may have been elated, or thrilled, or maybe even a little depressed by the thoughts of it. Your imagination is at work shaping your sensibilities apart from a real experience.

A minute ago, I told you that imagination and creativity are not the same. Imagination is serendipitous, it just happens. I’m going to tell you how you can train it, but it is pretty serendipitous. The beautiful thing about it is there’s no why question imposed on it; there are what questions but not why questions. It’s free, it’s free-reining, there are no boundaries, you can go where you wish, anytime you wish, it’ll take you outside your reality. But it has no side purpose. Creativity, on the other hand, is a result of your imagination. It has a purpose, it has reason. It’s real, it has a frame. It’s intentional, has boundaries. It does ask why, because it’s purposeful. And it’s generally accompanied by some motivation that is outcome driven.

So let’s say you have a picture in your head. One of my peculiarities is that I hear full orchestral scores of songs I’ve not heard before. This happens a lot to me on an airplane. I don’t know why, but that’s where my imagination takes me. But I can hear a whole score inside my head. Now seeing an image or hearing a new song is my imagination at work. If I chose to sit down and paint that picture, or write the score to the song, that would be creativity. Can you see the difference? But here’s the important thing to know, imagination comes first, I would have to “hear” that before I just drop it down (on paper). Now some of that may happen more simultaneously for some than others, but imagination comes first.

Let’s try this. Earlier, I told you to imagine a color. I would like you to take that color from wherever you parked it and bring it back. And now choose an animal and apply that color to the animal. It doesn’t have to be the color of the animal (as you know it in your reality). Just think of an animal, take the color that you had before and now cover that animal with that color. Getting the color in your head and the animal in your head is imagination. But applying that color to the animal in this instance, is creativity because I gave it to you as an objective assignment. So if a blue flamingo popped up in your head, without the prompt, it would more likely be imagination. But since I told you to do it, it’s creativity. These are closely connected things, but imagination comes first. And If I told you to model what you saw in your head with play dough, that for sure would be creativity.

The nuances are subtle, but I think you get the point. So, you know a little bit about imagination and I want to talk about why we need to use it voraciously. I love this word, it’s a great word. It’s like another word I like very much too; veracious—that’s about truth telling. As Melissa suggested, it’s also one of my favorite topics. But these two are not the same.

Voracious comes from the Latin root vovare, which means to eat greedily. You’ve heard that expression before right? Maybe applied to me, “Oh Rick, he’s a voracious eater.” You might also be a voracious reader, one who seems to constantly be picking up books of all types to read. But vovare is where we get our word devour, and carnivorous, and all the other vorous words like herbivorous or omnivorous, or frugivorous, or graminivorous or piscivorous. All of those are our ways of describing how we might eat greedily. You know what all of those are? First one’s herbs, then people who will eat anything are omnivorous. Frugivorous if you like fruit, gramini is if you eat grass and piscivorous is if you’re committed to fish.

But all of those words come out of that vovare, to eat greedily. Another meaning of that word is “very eager;” it’s a similar expression and you can see the connection there. Now, here’s what’s awesome about your imagination. It’s never really depleted, there’s always more, which is why you can, and I believe you should, use it fully and greedily. Just try to use it up again. I’ll speak in a bit about the value of feeding it but, we can’t deplete your imagination. Your imagination will lift you, help those around you and create better circumstances when you use it fully, particularly when times are bleak. When disaster strikes, your imagination can help you break free from chains of what seems like limitation. Your imagination will lead to the creativity necessary to see your way out of or through the difficulty. Remember, imagination comes first. So if I need to be creative, my imagination needs to be engaged voraciously in order for me to arrive at workable solutions.

Have you ever been frustrated when describing something that doesn’t exist to someone who just doesn’t get it, who can’t see what you see? What did you try to do to help them envision what you could clearly see? And if you have a response that you want to share with us, be sure to use the chat.

I told you earlier that imagination was fairly universal. There are some people who struggle with imagination. And let me identify two groups that scientists have studied. One is a small group of the population that suffers from aphantasia. They’re simply unable to derive mental pictures. So when they’re redoing their homes, and their interior designer suggests that they picture a wall of wisteria blue, they just can’t. And despite a designer saying, “can’t you just see this?”, they can’t; they don’t have that capacity. The other group is almost the opposite, and this is also a small portion of the population. But those with synesthesia—(say that 10 times real fast)—their imaginations are so vivid, that they connect sound with color or associate shapes with math equations, or may even experience the sensation of touch when hearing a particular instrument. They’re over imaginative. And those are two deviations from the norm, you may find yourself in one of those groups.

I like this quote from Picasso: “Children seem to have a keener imagination than adults.” And their sense of play and time for it are more pronounced. So let’s go back to a time when you were a kid, for just a minute. What did you pretend as a child? Do you remember? Again, if you feel so inclined, feel free to share that in the chat. Why is it, do you think, that children seem to have an easier go at imagination? Why does it seem effortless for a child to imagine something? I think there are at least three reasons.

Childlike wonder is fed by three primary things.

One is freedom, and that’s because typically, children are unbound by adult concerns. Of course, some children face horrible circumstances that rob them of this freedom. But generally, children have schedules that are open, they have less responsibility, and they usually have fewer commitments that require their attention. So they’ve got freedom to mentally explore.

Second, with children, we tend to encourage the use of imagination in a way that we don’t with adults. For example, we allow children to play dress up or pretend to be other characters or use dolls to act out their imaginings. We emphasize reading to them and storytelling, and we introduce new images and ideas that feed their imaginations. We don’t do that so much with adults.

And the third is this sense of happiness that most children experience. Now, I’ve mentioned earlier, there are children whose circumstances are truly dire and they don’t enjoy this level of happiness. But for the most part, children are more inclined to a happy outlook. And that release: it’s time to wander without worry. All three of these factors almost seem out of place with adults. We don’t let adults wear costumes of all sorts for playtime. And we don’t let them work to disencumber them from responsibilities. In fact, we lock people up with responsibilities or burden them with difficulties. They’re faced with all kinds of challenges and as we mature, that means that the opportunity and the mindset for imagination is thwarted. And I think they’re also thwarted by three things.

One is a sense that we adopt some untruths. Like, we can’t do that, or we’ve never done it that way, or that’s too expensive, or there’s not enough time. And when you hear enough of those lies, you have a tendency to believe them. And consequently, you don’t allow yourself to occasionally even imagine something different. Likewise, related to that is fear if your imagination wasn’t encouraged, or you were chastised for having wild ideas, or you were one of those kids that everybody said, “Well, their imagination’s really vivid.” You can develop a fear of not being socially accepted, or worse, criticized.

So here’s some wonderful news. Your imagination does not need to be shared with anyone, it’s private. It’s a gift to yourself that you can nourish and exercise without anyone elses knowing. And that’s just fine.

And the third factor that thwarts imagination is failure. If you’ve had experiences that suggested your imagination was weak or ill appropriated, you might feel a sense of failure that tends not to make you want to repeat it.

So remember, the difference between imagination and creativity: you can have a vivid and active imagination, with no responsibility or purpose. So feel free to let your mind go. All of those obstacles have to be overcome for you to enjoy the gift of your imagination to the fullest.

Did you come up with some things that you pretended as a child? When I was a kid, we played kick the can and all kinds of things. But if I could get the neighborhood organized, we’d play secret agent. I grew up in the middle of the Cold War, so spying was a big deal. And so we would play secret agent and organize the kids around the block as agents.

And the other thing that’s weird—I haven’t found anybody else who played this on their block—but I’d organize the neighbors to be an ad agency and we’d find some kids to be “clients” and some to be “creative types” and we’d set up buckets on broomsticks to serve as spotlights so we could take photos. It was great. The kids didn’t know what we were doing, but it was fun. So, when’s the last time you devoted any time to pretending? You don’t do that very much. You need to. And I want to talk about how you can feed your imagination, how you take care of it. This might be what your last 20 months have felt like. In order for your imagination to take off, you need some good rest, particularly after a year and a half like you’ve just been through. Space and freedom, remember, are hallmarks for healthy imagination, and rest delivers on both of those. You need downtime, away time. You have to allow for those if you intend to be your best imaginative self.

The other thing you need is will. You need some determination to make better use of your imagination. You can wait for your muse to kick in, but that will only occur if you desire it, too. You can stop that, thwart it by will. Your control of your mind and body can obstruct effective use of your imagination. But you can also lasso your mind and body to more effectively use your imagination.

And the third thing I think you need is a good diet. And while I’m a huge advocate of good snacks—I think good snacks are always a good idea—I’m not talking about food for your body. I’m talking about feeding your mind and soul. And let me suggest three ways to improve your imagination diet.

The first is to shake up your routine. We get addicted to ruts: they’re easier, we get our tires aligned with the ruts and we almost don’t have to think about it, we just go where others have gone before us. But that’s also a lazy approach. A bit of disruption will force you to pay attention especially to your imagination. So when there’s disruption, you’re required to think differently. No longer mindless, disruption requires full engagement and there’s value in that.

Secondly, I encourage you to take adventures. We learned early on when we started our firm that our team needed prompts to get out of our routines and so we introduced Crew Advance to our calendars as a way to break free of our ruts. We would do Crew Advance once a year. And you may have something similar with your team, but you might call it a team retreat.

We think, and thought then, that “retreat” sounded like we were going backwards away from the action and we didn’t care to do that. Instead, we intended to invest in breakaway activities that would promote breakthroughs. We wanted to go forward into new territory. So we planned our outings that included adventures like horseback riding in Texas Hill Country, or deep sea fishing off the coast of Florida or mountain hiking in Arizona or sailing in a pirate ship in Lake Erie or bourbon tasting in Kentucky (a particularly good one). These past two years, we’ve had to do this virtually because of the pandemic. So we’ve taken virtual trips together. Not long ago, we went to Prague to learn about how the pandemic of the 14th century was managed, and how healthcare worked in the 14th century in Prague.

We also went to Portugal to see street art. And I would encourage you to take adventures with your team to inspire imaginations by feeding it with new stuff. Speaking of new stuff, you need to absorb as much as you can. You just can’t squeeze anything out of a dry sponge. Wherever you can absorb, do it. So for example, let’s say you really enjoyed comic book art, and maybe that’s your exclusive art intake. So you’re really familiar with classics like Jack Kirby or Will Eisner. But if that’s all you had to go on, your imagination wouldn’t take you much further outside that. And you would miss some of the other delightful ways that comic art is expressed. You’d miss the dynamism of expressions from Gaudi, or Hadid, or Degas, or Klimt, or Calder, or Seurat, or Miro, or Grabuschnigg. All of those would feed your comic interest, but would served to inspire your imagination for something new. So step out of your familiar, it’ll help you imagine voraciously. What I’m encouraging you to do is to be a greedy eater.

Alright. Remember that color you had in your head a few minutes ago. You applied it to an animal. I want you to apply that same color to everything in the room around you. Imagine your computer, that color, your keyboard, your desk, your pencil, your stapler, your walls, cover the windows with that color. It might take a minute to get there. But use your imagination fully to capture a different way of seeing. Work on this and I’m going slowly here so you’ll spend some energy doing this. You’re going to go back and forth from reality to your imagination. You might even be staring at your computer and see the computer in real time and in real space, and with the color it was manufactured with, but your imagination can paint that a different color and you can see that in a different way. As you glance around the room, keep your imagination going by covering each item with color.

The value in exercising like this is that it trains you to more easily drift in and out of your imagination. And you use your imagination as a tool for problem solving. Think about the next committee meeting you’re part of. Without anyone knowing, you can engage your imagination, freeing your mind to take you to new places. That could be really fruitful in the work before you in that committee meeting. But you can go to a private place, practice your imagination, while you’re in real time. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. And remember, if we’re imagining voraciously, because imagination comes first, we can then apply it creatively. One way we’ve tried to help the RHB team in transferring between imagination and their work assignments was to host Great Fridays. The name Good Friday was already taken, so we adapted, called it Great Friday.

Once a month, we’d invite a guest artist, a writer, calligrapher, a chamber ensemble. A guitar player, a screen printer, a sculptor, someone who devoted their time and energy to creativity. We’d move the furniture in the office around to create a bit of stage area and our chairs, we’d assemble little rows, so we could be in the audience. And then for 20 or 30 minutes, our guests would demonstrate their creativity by performing. We agreed with every guest that while we wanted them to show us what their talent was, we especially wanted them to talk about it with us after the performance. We wanted to learn how they use their imagination and creativity. How did they exercise and become proficient? What had they learned about using their talents imaginatively? What were the transferable lessons we could learn as a team?

One of them I remember was a chamber ensemble, who talked about how they converse with their eyes while they’re playing, so that they can stay together in tempo, in rhythm, and in their dynamics as they played and in their breaks when they played. And we learned a lot from watching a chamber ensemble play to teach us how to work together as a creative team. Those hours with artists outside our area of expertise were some of the best-invested hours of the month. So I’ve given you some ideas about how to exercise your imagination, and if you want spontaneous imagination, you can exercise to make your brain more readily receptive to imaginative stimuli. But you do need regular practice. Here’s that chamber music image I was looking for a minute ago, sorry.

I want to revisit this question in closing. Why this book? And why now? I think they must have a word–There’s some organization that must select the word of the year and my vote would go for unprecedented. How many times did you hear that word or someone started a comment with “these dire days” or “in this challenging year” or “in this time of challenge or distress” or… but I heard the word unprecedented more often than any other. Unprecedented means unknown, as in: it’s never happened before. And those that used that word unprecedented probably discounted the plague of a century ago. These months have been really new to us, and this period of the last 20 months have challenged us, disrupted us, in ways that have forced us to think differently. And because we had no experience with this, we didn’t really have a protocol for what to do. Which is why clients were calling with a bit of panic, to ask us what we should do.

I believe that our imaginations are our greatest asset and defense in unprecedented times. If we’re facing new experiences, a well-oiled imagination can kick in to do the work of seeing possibilities not yet experienced. Our imagination serves as keys to the unknown, and our imagination fuels creativity. We need people like you to help us move forward. We need people like you willing to engage their imaginations to prompt creativity in problem solving. Which is precisely why I encourage you to exercise your imagination. This last exercise may take a little bit of time so you might even want to do a screencap of this slide so you can think about it later. And I hope it encourages you to engage your imagination fully to address some questions.

Let’s say you’re a founder of a college or university, Imagine what that feels like. Imagine your first day. Imagine how you might draft a mission. Imagine how you might shape a curriculum. Imagine what was happening in the world around you that would prompt you to think about studying at college. Or imagine the market conditions at the time that would help you figure out what you want to do differently than anybody else. Imagine your enthusiasm for the effort. And imagine your dreadful fears about the undertaking. I think stepping into that experience will serve you well, particularly if you’re marketing your institution and think about why you’re here. And how you might tell your story and your history in a way that’s relevant.

So fire up your imagination. I think we’ll all be better for it. So my invitation is for you to imagine voraciously. Thanks so much for joining me today. It’s a pleasure to be with you. I hope you’re encouraged to exercise your imagination to its greatest capacity. I wish you the best as you lead through unprecedented times. I think we have about 15 minutes, so thanks so much and Jen, I’ll turn it back to you and see if there are any questions.

Jen:

All right. Thank you, Rick. That was amazing. I am happy to take some questions. As Rick mentioned, we encourage you to type any questions you may have or just some comments or share in the discussion into the questions box, which you should see there on your GoToWebinar panel. And I will read them aloud and Rick should be able to answer them. If there’re any other questions about, like, logistics of the GoToWebinar platform, I should be able to answer those, as well. So I’m going to turn my webcam off just for the time being and will read aloud those questions just from the audio. Okay, Rick, here comes one. What are other favorite imagination exercises of yours?

Rick:

We do an awful lot of different ones. I think, finding ourselves in other places, one of the things we do is, take your chair, where you’re sitting now and move it in your imagination to another spot in the room. Before you do that, look carefully at your current surroundings, get a sense of where you are and what’s in front of you, beside you, above you, below you, just take it all in. And then mentally use your imagination to shift to a different spot in the room in your chair, your body in your chair, go to another spot in the room. And sit there and imagine what you’re seeing now that’s different. Same stuff in the room, but you’re seeing it from a different perspective. And try to imagine what you’re looking at. For example, right now, I’m seated in front of my computer. But if I could imagine myself moving six feet to my right, I have to think about what I would see there and I wouldn’t… My computer would be off to my left, but I’d be staring at a blank wall.

And I’d have to think about where the desk was in relationship to my chair. I’m closing my eyes, because I’m trying to imagine that. What’s to the left of me now? To the right of me will be a wall and in front of me will be a wall. And I can imagine myself sitting in that spot. I think when we work at it, this is a great thing to do outside by the way, get in your favorite lawn chair and try. A little more interesting than doing it in your office, but transferring yourself to a different spot, and imagining what you’re seeing, will help you particularly in your problem solving as you’re trying to get perspective about somebody else’s point of view, or some other circumstance. That’s also great when we’re in an unprecedented time. What would I be doing six months ago, before a year and a half ago, before the pandemic versus what I’m doing now? And how do I transfer those things? How does my perspective help me arrive at creative solutions? I also encourage you to flip through the book, you’ll find a bunch.

Jen:

All right, great, thank you. A little follow up to that: what benefits are there, if any, of allowing your body to move in response to imagination? Imagining yourself leaving a meeting a presentation and allowing your body to mimic or mime what you imagine yourself doing?

Rick:

Yeah, I think that’s great. That’s awesome. Even when you’re preparing for a meeting, I think getting up, if you’re going to stand to speak, stand to speak. It’s a little bit like going back to that sense of childhood where we encourage children to act stuff out. We typically don’t do that for ourselves or for our colleagues. But I think there’s great value in immersing ourselves in an experience like that. So dress the way you’re going to dress, stand if you’re going to speak. Try those things out. I think that your ability to picture how things are going to go puts you in a mindset and a frame for what you can anticipate. I think those kinds of pre-experience imaginings make us more successful in the moment.

Jen:

All right, excellent. Another question, can you give us some recommendations on how to convince our colleagues who may be reluctant to participate in these exercises that they’re a good thing to do.

Rick:

That’s so interesting, because at RHB we’re in the middle of a consultation with a group that’s helping us understand our customer experience better. And with every lesson, there are exercises that were given. And the one we were given last week, this just doesn’t sit right with me and I’m trying to imagine doing it with our team, particularly virtually. And I kept being the resistor saying, “This isn’t going to work. Let’s not do this.” And we’re going to do it on Thursday and so it’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out. We’re going to quote Shakespeare together, but in sequence, and with different emphasis. So we’ll see how that goes. But it’s easy to just say, “Oh, we can’t do that as a team, we’re not going to do that, I’m not going to try.”

Your job as a leader is to try, I’ve had some miserable failures along the way. There are a couple of doozies that I’ve proposed to the team that I still get teased about 15 years later. But I encourage you to try, and I encourage you to get everybody to participate. Start small, do something that’s not too invasive at first, but work your way up. I think you’ll find more receptivity than you probably can project at this point. But bring everybody along with you and explain why you’re going to try something. I think you’ll have more success if you talk about what it is you’re trying to achieve and why it’s important for everybody to participate. Common problem.

Jen:

Thank you. How do you address the challenge of unprecedented times being a time where imagination is most needed, but yet it can be hardest to take the time for it or be intentional about it with so many other stresses, etc?

Rick:

Yeah, right. Right. That was part of my counsel earlier to say, particularly in an unprecedented moment, you’ve got to make sure that you’re feeding your imagination. And again, part of that is getting rest. And there’s no time for it, so you’ve got to figure out how you’re going to carve time for rest. That’s when you need it most. You also need will. But then feed yourself, feed your imagination every moment you get and feed the imaginations of your team. In those unprecedented moments is when you deliberately need to take a creative break with your team. Take an hour to do a virtual experience; we’ve had a lot of success doing Airbnb experiences. They only take an hour. They’re not horribly expensive. And you can go somewhere around the world. We’re going to do one in a few weeks with a beekeeper in Portugal. And at this point, I don’t know what beekeeping is going to do to feed us, but I’m pretty sure it will. And even the planning of one gets everybody encouraged and excited and they look forward to it. So you may not feel like you have an hour, but that investment of an hour will pay incredible dividends. I’ve watched it so many times that I’m a huge advocate.

Jen:

Okay, great. Thank you. I’m just reading a couple of these questions, making sure some of them are ones we’ve already answered. Rick, can you share a practice or two with us, that you do to keep your thinking fresh?

Rick:

I am a voracious reader; I like being exposed to lots of different things. So one of the easiest ways for me to take in different information is just to read all kinds of things, things that I may not think I’m interested in. Different artists or different ways to make things or different periods of history, or particularly I find biographies or autobiographies pretty fascinating. And I’m trying to read as many different kinds of things as I can. An easy one, I used to do this all the time was window shop, and be a retail investigator. And just, I didn’t have to buy anything, I just wanted to see what products were out there, and how they were presented to me. That’s been a little bit difficult during COVID. But prior to that, just taking something in, go to the art museum. Take a walk around the grounds of park. Walk around your community. One of the greatest things about COVID is that I discovered all kinds of neighborhoods I’d never really paid attention to, been to places here in Indianapolis I’ve never been before. Because I took a walk and take a walk. All of those things will feed you. Any place that you can gain a new experience is healthy.

Jen:

Okay, excellent. We have time for just a couple more questions here. Rick, what power do you believe imagination has over changing the future?

Rick:

I don’t think the future will change without imagination. And somebody’s imagination is going to influence it. Whether it’s somebody flying in outer space, to show us what could happen for a couple of minutes, or whether it’s somebody showing us how to create an electric vehicle, all of those things come out of somebody’s imagination and I think it’s imagination that is the driver for the future. And I don’t think we’ll have the future we want without you using your imagination shape it.

Jen:

Awesome. Thank you. So I encourage folks to put in additional questions or comments that they may have. Right at this time, I’ve got one more official question, but we’ll give a few minutes for anyone still typing. Rick, if people want to follow up and talk to you about this, how can we contact you? And how can we get the book?

Rick:

rhb.com. And drop us a note. You can write directly to me, if you wish, at rbailey@rhb.com and I can hook you up with a book. The book isn’t on Amazon, my book on Coherence is on Amazon, but we haven’t put Imagine Voraciously on Amazon yet. I think we’re going to have to, but for now you can get them directly through RHB and you can grab our email from there, or fill out a little form on there and just tell us you want to book and we’ll get one to you. I think they’re $24.

Melissa:

Can I jump in here? And just first of all say thank you, Rick. This has been an incredible, incredible hour and I have the book and it’s a wonderful book to do with other people. So the way you have designed the book with the questions it makes for a— to the questions about how to inspire others or involve others with the book itself is a great vehicle for doing that. So I think you must have had that in mind, right?

Rick:

I was hoping teams would be able to make use of it. And we found that to be true where people are asking for multiple copies for their teams, so that they can work through the questions and the exercises together. And they’re using them for team meetings.

Melissa:

Yeah. Well, it’s a great vehicle for that. The other thing, I love the story you shared about, when you were a little kid, and you used to organize the kids in the neighborhood, to do an ad agency. I did the same thing, you and I would have been great pals. I didn’t do an Ad agency, I set up my garage as a school. And I went out and rounded up the neighborhood kids and I made them come to my garage school, and I was the head of the school and so it is going back to that. And what triggered this for me was reading Richard Branson’s comments after his incredible spaceflight. No matter what you may think of Richard Branson, his ability to honor his imagination throughout his entire life is a great example. And he talks about how when he was a little kid, this was in his head, he had this dream of going into space and it took what, 70 years, but he never let go of the dream. And wow, look at where it wound up.

Rick:

Yeah, I was interviewed a few weeks ago, and somebody asked me that question about what I played as a little kid. And I said, secret agent, ad agency, and architect. And I said weirdly, I think I’m doing all of those things now. So those things I pretended, became reality for me even before I knew that was truly possible.

Melissa:

Yeah, yeah. Oh, gosh, it’s so powerful. And we lose sight, right? Growing up, some of that stuff gets punched out of us, but to go back and take the time to think about who we were as kids, and find a way to reconnect is so powerful. So, wow, well, thank you so, so very much. I mean, we could go on and on, we could have you here for weeks, learning from you. But I highly encourage folks to get the book as a next step, and to reach out to you for— if they want to have a dialogue or just involve you in their own efforts. So, Jen, is there anything else? Any other questions before you do your ending?

Jen:

I don’t see any additional questions. I think I’ve gotten to everything. If anyone, there’s ones that I’ve missed that I’m just not seeing, go ahead and type that into the chat. But I think I’ve gotten to everything.

Melissa:

Okay. All right. So we’ll turn it back to Jen for the ending here. And again, Rick, thank you so much for sharing your imagination with us today.

Rick:

Thank you, Melissa. It’s been a pleasure.

Jen:

All right. And thank you all for staying with us today.

The post Imagine Voraciously Webinar Transcript appeared first on RHB.

This piece of advice and counsel is long overdue. While the related concern is not new at all, the COVID pandemic magnified its urgency in terms of our addressing it.

The traditional funnel of movement toward engagement by audiences and constituents has been in disarray for years. We’ve been warning you about that for a decade or more. We favor a model that describes your “customers” in three ways:

1. Those who are unaware of you
2. Those who have interest in you
3. Those who have intent on buying

You may be reading this and you’re already angry because we’ve called students and donors “customers” and suggested that you have something to “sell” that they may be interested in “buying.” We understand the difficulties inherent in those labels, but we’ll use that language to represent the important exchanges you engage in every day to keep your campus afloat. Try to get over your anger to appreciate the principle here. And, we’re going to focus on enrollment in this post although the same principles apply to any exchange with any of your audiences.

Instead of a funnel (which suggests that gravity plays more of a role than your energy), we represent movement progressively from unaware > interest > intent. Your customers can’t have intent if they don’t have interest, and they can’t have interest if they don’t know who you are (or that you even exist). Your goal is generally to move customers to the point of purchase, then to keep them satisfied with the purchase they’ve made.

Traditionally, enrollment marketing efforts to build awareness have centered around some form of Search activity. For years, you’ve likely invested in the annual tradition of buying names from testing agencies or other data sources, then initiated a series of introductory messages–either postally or digitally–to these unknown suspects in hopes of triggering a response that allows you to nurture these leads with relationship-building strategies. This, we must note, is an exceptionally costly enterprise. We’re guessing your institution may have had millions of dollars tied up in these efforts in the past 40 years. (Don’t think about it too long. It will make you sick.)

With the advent of new technologies that streamline our—and our customers’—ability to access information, these conventional Search efforts are now essentially obsolete. You’ve noticed this, and you’re trying to rectify your losses by pivoting to investments in advertising—predominantly digital—in hopes that you will be noticed in new ways. Schools without widespread brand recognition struggle to make the investments necessary to generate sufficient interest to keep the fires burning. Some aren’t able to, and we’ve seen far too many news stories about them in the past decade. Not to put too fine a point on it.

So here’s the concern: If you no longer have the resources to create sufficient awareness, how can you convert those who have indicated interest into customers with an intent to purchase? And if the old funnel model is broken and the potential buyer now expects to initiate a conversation, how do we monitor and measure the exchanges in any sort of meaningful way? Who’s a suspect? Who’s a prospect? Who likes us? Who loves us? The increasing dependence on digital exchanges blurs the line between interest and intent. We used to assume that raising a hand (usually a search inquiry) in some way indicated permission to begin a relationship. And a payment by May 1 of a deposit indicated intent. Those measures used to be fairly cut and dried. But today, you’re faced with fuzziness when it comes to measuring how inclined a particular prospect is to show up in the fall—right up to the start of classes. Those old May 1 indicators made your CFO happier; today you’re feeling the pressure of discerning what your data say.

You offer a wide menu of options for your customers to maintain or build relationships with you. (Again, you can apply this to any of your audiences, but we’re focusing on enrollment practice here). Determining which of these best serve as indicators of intent (versus mere interest) becomes more difficult all the time.

Because more events now are asynchronous, it’s difficult to tell the difference between interest and intent. For example, when a potential customer takes the virtual tour on your website, how do you know if they’re simply curious or seriously interested? Intent on heading your way or just passing through?

To evaluate initial engagement, start by asking “Do we know this person? Do we have a relationship?” If not, you can assume only interest and you don’t know yet the level of that interest.

One way to improve your sense of a customer’s level of intention is to imagine that you are assigning an admission fee to experiences. A little skin in the game from your constituents can be a strong indicator of intent. By charging a modest amount for webinars or events, you would winnow your participants to exclude those with less interest. A quick note: by charging a fee for events, you run the risk of eliminating those without means or accessibility due to cost. Determine how you will override that danger by offering coupons, discounts or event scholarships. Of course—channeling the expertise of Joe Pine and James Gilmore, authors of The Experience Economy—you’ll want to question whether the experience is worth paying for. (Whether you charge a fee or not, you should be auditing your experiences by asking that question!) Nonetheless, willingness to pay would be a strong indication of intent.

These are big considerations, to be sure. My esteemed RHB colleague Megan Miller has written two outstanding articles to follow this that help you decipher appropriate strategies for communication with those who express interest versus those who indicate intent.

Note that your assessment of interest and intent by your prospective student pool will likely differ in some ways from your peers (a.k.a. competitors). You can investigate the patterns of behaviors within your pool to determine the signals that should trigger responses from your team. While you are waiting to read Megan’s thoughtful recommendations, you may wish to complete an exercise with your team to evaluate how your prospective students show interest or intent. Knowing the difference will make your efforts all the more productive.

Consider making a chart of five columns; label these SUSPECT ACTIVITY, PROSPECT ACTIVITY, APPLICANT ACTIVITY, INTEREST, and INTENT. Under the first three columns list the actions the student may take in the recruitment/admission journey. List as many as you can for each of the suspects (defined as those who may be a fit but who may not yet know us), prospects (those who have engaged in some way) and applicants (those who have begun or completed an application). Only add one activity per row in your chart. For each activity, evaluate with your team if this is HIGH, MEDIUM or LOW interest or intent. As an example, based on your data, you may rate a virtual campus visit as HIGH interest for a suspect, but LOW interest for prospects. This assessment should provide a more realistic view and generate better perspective to make plans for your incoming class.

The post Interest or Intent? Take the Guesswork out of Your Higher Ed Marketing Communication appeared first on RHB.