Contributed by: Wade Marbaugh
Publications Coordinator, Georgia Perimeter College

It takes a team to raise a college’s image.

The Georgia Perimeter College Office of Marketing and Public Relations carried that theme to its professional organization’s national conference in March. Director Jennifer Stephens hoped to share GPC’s experience with members of the National Council for Marketing and Public Relations, which met in Austin, Texas.

GPC has seen its MPR office transform from lacking in teamwork and having a low marketing orientation to launching a highly effective branding campaign in 2005. The emerging teamwork necessary to launch the drive involved more than participation by Georgia Perimeter’s personnel. Vendors such as Stein Communications played a big part in the transition, which involved potential competitors working side by side for a common goal.

Promotion of GPC has not always been inadequate. Public Relations director Ann Knight did a great job from the 1970s through the 1990s. However, by the turn of the millennium, Georgia Perimeter was besieged with problems.

The college had grown from a quiet suburban community college — DeKalb College — to a diverse, bustling urban institution. Then suddenly the baby boom ended, dropping enrollment drastically and bringing the need for aggressive marketing strategies.

Knight’s premature death in 2000 left the MPR office in a state of transition and relative disorganization. Budget slashes came with the recession of 2001.

“The evolution of the office from a one-person PR shop to a large, fast-paced MPR office brought about some inherent problems,” Stephens says. “And there was too much internal competitiveness, aggressiveness, and lack of teamwork. Stress levels were high. We needed a marketing plan and a communications plan.”

When Stephens took the helm in 2002, she began building a stronger organizational structure and nurturing a culture of teamwork. The group attended leadership, team-building and creative workshops; internal and external communications improved; new employees strengthened the staff; the office held lunch meetings and had other fun activities at meetings; meetings became more productive.

GPC brought in a marketing consultant, Sandra Golden and Associates. Golden began to steer the office and the college toward a marketing orientation.

Subsequently, Stephens and Jeff Tarnowski, GPC’s vice president of Institutional Advancement, initiated talks with Latham and Associates, a firm specializing in branding issues. That led to extensive focus group studies by Latham at the college’s six locations.

What occurred next may be groundbreaking in business technique — at least it is unique for GPC. In May 2005, the MPR office invited all of its major vendors, even potential competitors, to an Institutional Advancement retreat at which Latham presented its findings and recommendations.

Gene Middleton, Jennifer Bagley, Bonnie McQuagge, and contract writer Scott Suhr represented Stein Communications among the vendors attending the retreat.

That Stein was invited is no surprise. Stein and GPC go way back (from Stein’s days as Phoenix Communications), as Knight contracted with them for many years to design and print college recruiting materials. Through the 2000s, Stein has continued to design and print exceptional promotional pieces for GPC.

Other vendors in attendance included EM2 Design, a Decatur firm that designed two annual reports for GPC that won first and second place in the 2005 NCMPR national competition, and J & R Kern, a Gainesville agency that has produced remarkable print and broadcast ad campaigns for GPC.

“We felt that we should get all the vendors on the same page with the branding campaign,” Stephens explains. “That way we would unify our look and feel in all our promotional efforts.”

At the meeting, Latham proposed a branding campaign that focused on everything from use of the school colors to primary messages. Having the various vendors present produced immediate results.

In fall 2005, Stein produced an award-winning recruiting package — including a colorful viewbook and search piece — that incorporates Latham’s branding recommendations.

“It couldn’t have worked out better,” says Stephens. “The recruiting pieces are in full conformity with the spirit of that branding retreat. Stein even came up with a tagline that we’ve adopted for all other materials — ‘Two years that will change your life.’”

Stephens is quick to point out that “we’re not there yet.” Much remains to be done to perfect the teamwork approach, but her office runs a much more systematic promotion and branding of the college than in previous years. Sharing the branding campaign with vendors at its conception contributed greatly to this success.

For more information on the teamwork approach and branding campaign, contact Jennifer Stephens at jstephen@gpc.edu or 678-891-2684.

_____
Wade Marbaugh serves as publications coordinator in the Office of Marketing and Public Relations at Georgia Perimeter College.

By now you may have received a letter from us introducing CommunityYou and now want to know more about how it might help yield your class this summer. Learn about this innovative solution and its benefits to your institution from the comfort of your office with Stein’s hosted webinars each Thursday at 11:00 EST starting April 20, 2006. Sign up today by emailing Tia Lane at tlane@steincommunications.com.

PersonalizationPlus is a streamlined web solution designed to help your admissions team more easily achieve your institution’s recruitment objectives. We’ve bundled a number of exciting web features all into one solution, including: web-based contact management, broadcast email, community building for admitted students, online journaling, and web site personalization. Learn about this comprehensive admission solution during Stein’s hosted webinars on Thursdays at 2:00 EST starting April 20, 2006. Sign up today by emailing Tia Lane at tlane@steincommunications.com.

Contributed by: Heather O’Neill
Associate Director of Admissions, Vanderbilt University

As the ball drops in Times Square and Dick Clark yells out “Happy New Year!” I smile and exchange kisses and high-fives with my friends, but inevitably I feel a tiny hint of dread invade my otherwise joyful heart. The turn of the new year brings me that much closer to January 3, Vanderbilt’s deadline for freshman application submission, and the awareness that reading season will soon be in full swing again. Though I have yet to experience childbirth, I imagine that it’s something like the application review process — the ultimate outcome (a new baby, a freshman class) is so captivating, so exciting that you immediately forget about all the pain involved in producing it and vow to do it again as soon as possible.

The pain associated with the application review process stems from the fact that all of us in admissions love working with high school students. We enjoy getting to know them during such a turning point in their lives, guiding them in making what is, for many of them, the first major adult decision of their lives, and reveling in all the possibilities for what their lives will become (a veterinarian who plays jazz trombone on the weekends, designs uniforms for the New York Knicks, and builds and flies her own plane — why not!). Unfortunately, the reality of our job is that we must deny admission to a large number of these wonderful human beings who have let us into their lives during the past year. At Vanderbilt this year, we will likely turn down two-thirds of the students who have applied for admission. Most of these students have compiled records that would make them successful students at Vanderbilt and certainly records that we would be immensely proud of, were they our sons and daughters. There simply is not room to admit them all, and therein lies the pain.

The review process begins in earnest each January and continues until we mail out all Regular Decision notifications at the end of March. Each fall Early Decision serves as our practice round, a time for new and experienced readers to warm up and calibrate together. Early Decision applications constitute roughly 10 percent of our total number of applications at Vanderbilt, so the Early Decision review is a mere sprint in advance of the marathon ahead at Regular Decision. From January through March, we will spend most evenings and weekends reading applications, a sacrifice that most of our family and friends cannot understand. Fortunately, we have our colleagues with whom we can share stories about obscene essays or odd teacher recommendations or students who insist on spelling Vanderbilt as Vanderbuilt, despite the fact that the name of the school is printed all over the application.

The occasional malapropism or humorous extracurricular activity (my all-time favorite is the student who founded the Big Eaters Club so that stressed out students could pig out together one night each week at an all-you-can-eat buffet) helps me to keep a sense of perspective on the application review process. It is tempting to imbue our process with too much authority, relying on it to separate the wheat from the chaff, when, at best, it is just one set of values and priorities imposed to create order out of the chaos. I like to think that our holistic review is superior to a process that admits students simply by their test scores, but who is to say which is more fair? We approach each file as a puzzle, attempting to fit all of the pieces together into a cohesive whole that will give us the complete picture of the applicant. We look at the student’s grades and curriculum to see if he or she is taking the most challenging courses available and what those grades mean relative to his or her peers’ performance. We compare the grades and curriculum to the student’s testing to see if he or she is under or over achieving in the classroom and we incorporate the letters of recommendation to bring life to the numbers, to understand how each student learns and participates in the classroom. The letters of recommendation frequently help us to understand what kind of community citizen the student has been at his or her school and what his or her involvement has meant to the school. We read the essays to hear the students’ voice and perspective and to gain insight into the person behind the grades and scores. Ideally the disparate pieces will come together to form a complete picture of the student’s time in high school, explaining any discrepancies in grades and testing or any blemishes on the transcript, so that we can make a case for admitting the student.

It is easy to read too much into the application and to get too attached to the person we have created in the file or not attached enough when the file comes across as flat or uninteresting. It is difficult to remember that we are making decisions based on the ten or fifteen pieces of paper in each applicant’s folder, that some students have access to experienced college counselors who can help them mold and shape the impression we receive from those ten pieces of paper and that others are left to their own devices. That is why it is essential for us as admissions officers to meet these students once they arrive on campus, to get to know them as three-dimensional people, and to be mindful that those few pieces of paper will never tell the full story. Three years ago we admitted a student whose application I read and thought was fairly average, though the grades and testing warranted admission. He is now one of the most prominent student leaders on campus, a voice of reason and maturity with more intellectual curiosity and a better sense of humor than I ever saw in his application. Another student that we were not able to admit stayed in touch with me during her first year of college, at first because she was interested in transferring to Vanderbilt and later to let me know she had decided to stay with her current school. Her life was none the worse for not attending Vanderbilt. We do the best we can to balance students’ welfare with institutional priorities and it is painful for us to fight for a student’s admission and lose, but by connecting with current students, we can put our review process in perspective and remember why the pain is worth it.

Contributed by: Dr. Jean Norris
Managing Partner, Norton Norris, Inc.

A colleague and I were reminiscing the other day about college admission counseling and the changes throughout the years. It seems like you can’t get through a week without hearing about unethical admission practices or a school on probation or losing accreditation. Although many stories focus on the proprietary sector, it certainly isn’t exclusive. Both of us remembered the late ’80s when we worked as admission counselors in the not-for-profit sector. You remember… before the Department of Ed stepped in and banned incentive compensation and for-profit colleges weren’t really viewed as competition. The funny thing about those days is even though we were paid to enroll students, there wasn’t a soul we worked with that would put their personal gain over the needs of a student.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not promoting the idea of going back to paying commission based on enrolled headcount. I am advocating, however, the concept that someone in the role of helping people change their lives might actually derive benefit from helping someone. Instead, we’ve put admission personnel into a no-win situation and made their job something to be feared. They have to think about everything they say or didn’t say. Could the prospective student have misinterpreted something? We listen to their telephone calls; assign them lofty enrollment targets; send them to training; bring in compliance officers to audit recruitment materials; and are frugal with their pay. All the while, they are still accountable to the higher ups to bring in academic quality and a specific volume of new students.

No wonder it’s hard to find good admission representatives and keep them. I imagine a job posting that looks something like this:

WANTED: High-energy individual who desires to meet with prospective students and their families to explore their options on purchasing a five-figure, non-tangible item. Qualifications require the ability to balance faculty desires for high-ranking students with enrollment management mandate of volume. Requires long hours, including weekend and evening work in a position that has little control or respect but responsible for the fiscal stability of the institution and all employees. Benefits include sleepless nights, travel to exotic locations (including Dubuque, Iowa), and the opportunity to have a television producer pose as a prospective student and secretly film you (on a particularly bad day) to showcase your admission counseling skills on national television.

In the end, I don’t think the issue of ethical behavior has anything to do with whether an admission counselor is paid for enrollments or not. I also don’t support that this is simply an issue of the for-profit sector (the desire for student revenue has universal appeal). I believe it has everything to do with the individual integrity of the person in the job supported by the ethical values of their institution. Perhaps we need to reexamine our intense focus on compliance and expand the view to include real leadership. After all, following the letter of the law does little to promote true ethical behavior. Let’s get back to the days of solid values and integrity that are owned, supported, and promoted by employees at all levels. Perhaps then, the stories in the news will focus on the positive model higher education administration has set for others to follow.

_____
Dr. Jean Norris has worked in higher education for the past 17 years in a variety of senior-level positions for both proprietary and not-for-profit colleges. Currently, Jean is a managing partner leading the training and assessment division of Norton Norris, Inc., a Chicago-based marketing consulting firm specializing in Tactical Enrollment Management®. Jean is frequently called upon to present in national venues including the American Marketing Association, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the Career College Association, the National Small College Enrollment Conference, and the Community College Enrollment Management Symposium. Recently published works focus on admission training and ethics in college admission counseling.

Are you passionate about the admissions counseling profession? Do you have a great story about students you have impacted? Would you like to be included in the only book of its kind?

Dr. Jean Norris, well known for her work in advocacy of the admission counseling profession, seeks nominations and submissions of college admissions counselors for inclusion in a book promoting the profession. If you, or someone you know, has worked in the profession for a minimum of two years, has an interesting story and would like to be considered, please contact Jean Norris directly at jean@nortonnorris.com.

Contributed by: Meg Gwaltney
Web Content Manager, Stein Communications

Over the past few years, you’ve probably heard those three letters creeping in and out of conversations. Your boss uses it to get the latest news headlines. The English lit teacher uses it in her class to assign homework, receive assignments, and give feedback on student work. Darren uses it to share online articles and other resources with his students. Even young Alex uses it in his blog (a type of online journal) about playing little league baseball.

The big “it” is not email. “It” is RSS — a recent technology that is easy to use (even for non-IT people) and has extraordinary benefits to those in both secondary and higher education. Here, you’ll learn what RSS is and how you can try it out for yourself. We’ll also share helpful resources and some amazing ways the education community is using this widely adaptable technology.

What is RSS?
RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication, RDF Site Summary, and Rich Site Summary. Each label hints at RSS’s ability to easily summarize web site information and distribute it to a select audience. In short, RSS makes it easy to do two things:
1. Administrators can deliver content to a select readership that chooses to opt-in.
2. Users can receive content from frequently-visited web sites, especially news sites and weblogs that utilize RSS technology.

RSS-enabled web sites rely upon XML (Extensible Markup Language), which creates a behind-the-scenes code called a feed. With software programs (as well as some online services) called feed readers or aggregators, you can subscribe to web site feeds you are interested in reading. In fact, Stein’s e-newsletter, the Scoop, is now a blog with RSS capabilities (you can subscribe to the RSS feed at http://www.steincommunications.com/thescoop/?feed=rss2).You’ll find more suggested feed readers and other blogging tools at the end of this article.

There are several ways to find out if your favorite web sites are using RSS technology:

• Look for links to feeds or RSS feeds
• Look for graphics like these somewhere on the site, usually in a sidebar or at the very top or very bottom:
• If you’re using Firefox (version 1.0.7), look for this icon at the bottom right of the status bar:

To help you better understand the feed reader, take a look at the screenshot below (or click on it for a bigger view). Some feed readers, such as NetNewsWire, resemble email clients like Mac Mail and Microsoft Outlook.

Screenshot: NetNewsWire Lite, one of our favorite RSS readers for the Mac.
It allows you to organize your subscriptions into groups, and conveniently shows which subscriptions contain unread posts.

RSS also goes hand-in-hand with blogs. While blogs include personal online journals, it can also encompass any web site with periodic updates, such as news sites for media companies, educational institutions, and corporations, and more. RSS and its behind-the-scenes programming allow users to subscribe to their favorite blogs. When updated, the user’s feed reader software collects updates and makes them instantly available to the user. Currently, almost all blogging software is equipped with the option to automatically incorporate RSS feeds into one’s blog.

How is RSS being used in education?
It’s mind-boggling the many ways RSS can be used, even for the field of education. Here, we will point out a few of our favorites. We encourage you to explore the internet and talk to your peers and colleagues to find out how they’re using it as well.

Higher ed: RSS is highlighting current students and recruiting prospective students.
To give prospective students a sense of what life at a college is really like, many college and university web sites offer brief profiles of their current students. These profiles often include a picture of the student and information such as the student’s hometown, major, graduation date, hobbies and interests, and even a brief interview.

RSS gives institutions the power to take current student profiles to the extreme by giving students their own blogs. These student journals are unedited and uncensored — and they allow prospective students to learn about college life straight from the horse’s mouth. They can read about a current student’s first day in orientation, the argument she had last week with her roommate, and even her excitement over just having passed her first test five minutes ago. Some blogs also allow students to share photos, podcasts (audio blogs), and more.

Most student bloggers are hand-picked by the admissions office. Some colleges also provide incentives for student recruitment bloggers. At Westminster College, for example, students who are photobloggers receive a digital camera; podcasters receive an Apple iPod. Other colleges also provide additional financial aid.

Check out some examples of how colleges and universities are using RSS and blogging to recruit prospective students:
Houghton College
University of Dayton
List of schools using student blogs for recruitment (brought to you by mStonerblog.com)

Secondary schools: RSS is a community-building, interactive tool for students and teachers, for class notes and resources, homework and feedback, quizzes, student questions, and more.

Today’s students spend a lot of time online. They chat with friends, they email, they listen to music and watch videos, they explore the internet, they read online journals — they also do homework and participate in class discussions.

Teachers who recognize the internet’s impact on students’ lives are stepping up to the plate and extending their classroom to the internet, making use of extroardinary tools like RSS and blogging. Better yet, they’re getting phenomenal results from their students and peers.

One Canadian math teacher, Mr. Kuropatwa from Daniel McIntyre Collegiate Institute, uses a blog for each of his high school math classes. He set up his class blogs using Google’s Blogspot service, which comes equipped with automatic RSS feeds. He posts assignments, expands on topics covered in class, and shares online resources with students. Students participate as “scribes” to post summaries of the day’s classroom lecture, complete with math problems, graphs, and other helpful illustrations. The daily scribe also has the honor of choosing the next day’s scribe — this way students must check the blog to see who’s up next.

Classroom blogs have become an excellent way to keep the conversation rolling even after students have left the classroom. Mr. Kuropatwa is enthralled with the success of using RSS and blogging technologies in teaching:

“The kids have really taken control of the process… Each scribe seems to be trying to outdo the previous one. The kids are doing some really amazing work.”

If you visit any of his class blogs, you’ll see what he means: over time the graphs have gotten better, with visual color cues and helpful hints. It’s obvious his students are becoming masters at effective teaching and communication. What’s more, they’re doing so with a creative flair and through an efficient, ethical use of technology.

Will Richardson of Weblogg-ed.com and Supervisor of IT at Hunterdon Central High School in New Jersey, says his life has really been transformed by blogging:

“I have learned more, read more, thought more, debated more, written more and been more passionate about learning through blogging than I ever was in any classroom with any teacher. And I chalk almost all of that up to the ability to pursue topics that truly interest me and the ability to find and to learn from teachers who are living those interests, not just relaying information about them. The fact that I can access those ideas and those people, and my ability to then contribute back to the community of learners that has developed around these interactions have literally transformed my life.”

Secondary schools and higher ed: RSS allows the immediate distribution of news to the people who want it.

Any secondary school or higher-ed institution with news it wants to share easily should welcome RSS as a saving grace. This technology makes information distribution extremely simple. RSS gives your readers an additional venue through which to access the same information that you post on your web site and, in some cases, broadcast through a daily or weekly email.

Instead of checking your web site every five minutes (as well as their other favorite news sites), readers wait for the information to come to them as soon as it’s available. The feed reader accumulates and makes available to your readers all the updates for their favorite RSS-enabled sites, including yours.

Like email, feed updates can be checked at any time. This instant availability is part of the immense appeal of RSS feed readers, or aggregators, mentioned earlier. For your readership — parents, students, administrators and teachers, and the rest of the world — RSS aggregators make getting information even easier than before.

Here are some of our favorite RSS-enabled education sites and their RSS feeds:

What tools will you need?
Now that you’re excited about RSS and can’t wait to try it out for yourself, you will need to know about some helpful tools.

Feed Readers, or Aggregators
To receive information from RSS-enabled web sites, you’ll need a feed reader, or aggregator. There are several types available:

• Stand-alone software programs. Aggregator software is available for both PC and Mac operating systems; some are free and some are available for a small fee (usually around $25). Some stand-alone programs allow you to organize your subscriptions into groups, and offer syncing and integration with other online readers, such as Bloglines.
  • FeedDemon: PC, $29.95
  • NetNewsWire: Mac, $24.95
  • NetNewsWireLite: Mac, free
  • PulpFiction: Mac, $25
• Online aggregator services. If you plan on accessing your subscriptions from multiple computers, an online aggregator service might be more appropriate for you than a stand-alone software program. Note that quite a few stand-alone programs can be integrated with some of the online services. We suggest you visit the product’s web site and read up on their features for specific information.
  • Bloglines: Mac and PC, free
  • Google Reader beta: Mac and PC, free
  • NewsGatorOnline: Mac and PC, free or various paid subscription plans, depending on licensing and features
• RSS-enabled internet browsers. Some of the latest internet browsers come equipped to handle RSS subscriptions.
  • Firefox (version 1.0.7 and the forthcoming 1.5, still in beta): Mac and PC
  • Internet Explorer (forthcoming in version 7.0): PC only
  • Opera: Mac and PC
  • Safari: only for Mac OS X 4.0 (Tiger)

RSS-Blogging Tools
If you’re interested in setting up your own RSS-enabled web site, or your own blog, we suggest you read MacWorld’s review of the following blogging tools, each of which has the ability to automatically integrate RSS feeds with your web site. You’ll be ready to publish and distribute information in no time.

• Google’s Blogspot and Blogger
• MovableType
• TypePad
• WordPress