Cheryl Broom (8s):
Hi, I'm Cheryl broom, CEO of graduate communications. And today I'm super excited to bring you a guest who is dynamic and awesome storyteller and who has made it his life's work to help colleges and other educational systems be better at helping students succeed. So Brad Phillips is the CEO of the Institute for evidence-based change. Also known as <inaudible> VC and IVC is a nonprofit organization that's dedicated to helping education stakeholders, use coaching collaboration and data to make informed decisions and craft solutions that improve practice and increase student success.

Cheryl Broom (50s):
Brett and I have a great conversation around how you can use data to tell really engaging stories, how to use personas to better understand students and better market to students. And we also talk about how to make your campus more of a caring campus so that you can help students succeed. It's a fantastic conversation, and I know that you're going to learn a lot. Thank you so much for being here with

Brad Phillips (1m 24s):
It's my pleasure. Thank you for inviting me to participate.

Cheryl Broom (1m 28s):
I'm really excited to have you as a guest because your work keeps popping up everywhere. I look, and so many colleges are now engaged in your caring campus initiative and using your amazing services. So I think that the audience is going to learn a lot about what you do and what IEC stands for. So thank you again for joining me.

Brad Phillips (1m 52s):
Well, thank you, Cheryl.

Cheryl Broom (1m 54s):
So let's start off with, tell me a little bit about yourself. Who are you?

Brad Phillips (1m 57s):
So, first of all, I'm old, but in this business for 32 years now, in fact, I'm filling out retirement paperwork for the California community college storage system tomorrow.

Cheryl Broom (2m 9s):
Congrats.

Brad Phillips (2m 10s):
So I'm very excited about that, even though I haven't worked in the system for 12 years directly, I am actually trained as a social psychologist with an emphasis in research methods and statistics. Although some people call it statistics, I, I never planned on going into education. It's, it's really kind of strange. I was working in physical medicine and rehab as a researcher, and it was part of the work that I was doing at Claremont graduate university. When I was working towards my doctorate and I was one of the students and they send one a year to go to the GAO, the government accountability office.

Brad Phillips (2m 52s):
So every year Claremont sends one student. I was the guy and I was going there because I was working in physical medicine and I was going to work on tertiary facilities for aging and look at research on that, that the government funded. So it's kind of a funny story. I went to the GAO and, you know, because they send one student a year from Claremont, the interview with the director, Eleanor Chimpsky at the time, I think I said 10 words in the entire interview. She had a grand piano in her office. I've never seen anything like that in a government office. So of course I was hired and my wife was pregnant at the time. And I said, okay, honey, we're going to go to DC.

Brad Phillips (3m 32s):
And she said, and I'll never forget this. If you think you're going to be hobnobbing with senators while I'm stuck in the snow with Baltimore, with a new baby, you have another thing coming. So needless to say, I freaked out and thought I can't do this. This is not going to happen. So I was teaching as an adjunct at Chaffey college, and I was in the break room, reading the Chronicle of higher education, desperately looking for a job, hopefully in California. And I came across this job and it was fascinating. It was at Yuba college and it was for an institutional research and assessment director.

Brad Phillips (4m 12s):
I have to tell you, no one ever told me what this job was. I never trained for that at Claremont. But when you read the job description, that was me. That was how I was trained. And so that's how I got into the business of higher education in the community colleges 32 years ago.

Cheryl Broom (4m 30s):
And looking back, do you think your wife is grateful, you made that decision?

Brad Phillips (4m 34s):
Well, you know, it's really funny because she thought, you know, I was getting my doctorate. She thought, you know, I'll get a teaching job somewhere and you know, we'll be fine. Just work in the teaching realm and enjoy that. But that never came to fruition. I mean, you know, I met my wife previous to attending graduate school. We were both mental health therapists. So we were working with what's called axis one diagnosis patients, which are folks that have major depression, schizophrenia, you know, pretty heavy duty illnesses. And she was a brilliant therapist. I was a terrible therapist. I knew I didn't want to do therapy because I was bad at that's. You know, how it all started is we just came into this and you know, now the joke is we focus on screwing up our children.

Brad Phillips (5m 14s):
So we're only mildly successful

Cheryl Broom (5m 17s):
Don't we all

Brad Phillips (5m 19s):
Therapy jar, right?

Cheryl Broom (5m 25s):
Well, y ou've had quite a, quite an amazing community college career. So you started up at Yuba college and then you worked down here in Southern California for a long time as well. And then went on to F did you found you're the founder of the Institute for evidence-based change? How did that come about?

Brad Phillips (5m 42s):
I did. Well, that's also an interesting story. So I worked for three years at Yuba college and, you know, we're Southern California people, right. We really enjoyed Southern California. So it was looking for a position. I ended up at the Grossmont Quia maca community college district. And I entered there as the director of research and planning and then move to the director of research planning and academic services for the district. So that's how I kind of made it to Southern California. But at the time I was working on the system where we brought schools, colleges, and universities together to track students from segment to segment. At the time we called it, the San Diego data sharing consortium.

Brad Phillips (6m 23s):
And what we had done was brought in San Diego schools and all the other school districts and the community colleges and the region and the universities and this system later became Cal-PASS. So I'm the founder of Cal-PASS way back when started in 1998, then to 1990, it grew to the largest data sharing system, really in the world with hundreds of millions of records. And the idea behind the system was to track students from segment to segment, not just because, oh, it's great. We have data, but we give that data back to faculty so that we could look at stop-out and drop out. And so what happened was that system got really large and we started seeding that system and other states around the country and the district felt, look, this is growing too big for us.

Brad Phillips (7m 11s):
So how about going on your own bread? And that was fine with me, a little scary, but that's how the Institute for evidence-based change got started.

Cheryl Broom (7m 20s):
Fascinating. So all of that data, I mean, what were some of the things that you learned from it?

Brad Phillips (7m 25s):
Oh, we did great work. So what we learned was, you know, in faculty, while we say this, if you talk to the folks in higher ed, they'll say, well, you know, those high school students, they just didn't learn what they were supposed to in order to be successful in our segment. And I don't care if that's the community college segment or the university segment. And then guess what the high school faculty will say, you know, those teachers in middle school, they're really not prepared to do dry school. You get the drift, right? Middle school says the same thing about elementary. And in the end we blame the parents, right? That the students aren't prepared, which is totally not true. The issue is what we learned is that there's very little communication between the segments about what exit skills are needed and what entrance expectations are required.

Brad Phillips (8m 10s):
And so what happens is you get a disjuncture. So one segment thinks we're doing everything we need to do to prepare them, but they're not. There's lack of alignment. And I'm not saying they're not doing a good job. The issue is we're not communicating. So one of the things we did was we made sure to hold meetings across segments, to learn about what the expectations were, what the entrance skills are. And we did great work on alignment. There's even news stories about how one district in south county of San Diego, they were finding that students entering chemistry who had received a C in algebra, because actually chemistry is really just algebra in a chemistry form.

Brad Phillips (8m 55s):
They were finding those C students were failing chemistry. And so what they did was they just, just a short bridge course. And those C students ended up outperforming those high achieving algebra students. So what we did was we brought faculty together from the segments. I mean, could you imagine a high school teacher sitting with a university instructor sitting with a community college instructor talking about curriculum. And so we did a lot of good work around really the country seeding these meetings with data so that they could have not a, you did something wrong conversation, but how can we work together to ensure that the students we all share just at a different point in their life are well-prepared to succeed at every segment.

Cheryl Broom (9m 40s):
I love that example of looking at the chemistry at the grades and getting a C and then determining, you know, what needed to happen next, based on that data point, I think we use data so much, but not everybody really understands how to use it to make changes. You know, we can look at it, we can study it, but then how do you know what to do with it? Where does it go?

Brad Phillips (10m 1s):
Yeah. What did we talk about here at IBC? And this really comes from my colleague. Who's my chief operating officer, Jordan Horowitz is the idea that data has to be useful, usable and actionable. And so what do we mean by that useful means it applies to the problem we're trying to solve. So oftentimes folks will request data, but it's not the right data in terms of usable. We have to understand it. And so often data is put in such a format that important understands what it means. And then finally, we shouldn't collect any data unless it's actionable. You know, we don't at IVC believe in nice to know. We believe that data has to be actionable, meaning you're not going to collect anything that you're not going to do something with.

Brad Phillips (10m 47s):
I remember I was working with Dana Quinner at Grossmont Quia maca, who is a former public information officer at the district. She's now my public information. Officer Dana is a wonderful, we talk, I always say, everybody needs a Dana. And they asked me to generate some data on who's coming to Grossmont, Acquia, maca. And before I generated the data, I would say to them, how do you think you're going to use this data? Because I needed to know if I was producing that data, the form to give it to them in so that they can make decisions about policy, practice and procedure. And she said, no, one's ever asked me that question before. And I said, well, they should, because I don't have the time to do this work unless I know you're going to use it to make a difference in people's lives.

Cheryl Broom (11m 33s):
It's very true because it doesn't just exist in a vacuum. I mean, it needs to be looked at and, and useful to people. And so those are the great questions that I think need to be asked. What's the point of this? What do you hope to get out of it and what are you going to do with it?

Brad Phillips (11m 48s):
Exactly. And in fact, this work was so important to me, that Jordan, I wrote a book, creating a data informed culture and community colleges, which was published in 2017 by Harvard education press. And they came to me because they had seen my work somewhere and thought people really need to see how this all works. And this book came about because of an interaction I had at U of a college. So I went to UBA. I wasn't finished with my doctorate and I was about to present data to the counselors in terms of how they can better place students in basic skills, in English, mathematics, and English as a second language.

Brad Phillips (12m 31s):
And here, I thought I was hot stuff, right? I was at Claremont high-end school. I was producing all this high-end data. And I ran into a friend of mine, a counselor on the way to the meeting and her name was Celeste. And we're walking there and she looks at me and she goes, where are you going? I said, well, I'm going to the meeting. You're going to, I'm going to share with you this data on placement. And I develop these overlapping ranges based on their placement test score. And she stops me, Cheryl. She puts her hands on her hips and she says, you're not going to give us a bunch of data. We don't understand again, are you, it devastated me. I was really upset. And ever since that time, and this was in 1990, right?

Brad Phillips (13m 12s):
Ever since that time, I've really dedicated my work to helping practitioners use data so that they can help students at least using data as a reference point to make a difference in their lives.

Cheryl Broom (13m 26s):
No, you have a lot of tools. You have workshops. You, do you have your book for the listeners of this podcast? Most of whom are our Dana's are communication professionals. What are some tips to help them, you know, better use data maybe from their institutional research office or, or even when looking at campaigns and how they perform. I mean, there's just so many data points. It's, it's hard sometimes to know what you're looking at.

Brad Phillips (13m 52s):
So our first rule is always don't get data. That's nice to know, right. Data must be used for action it's decision-making. So when you think about data, you know, oftentimes a researcher will present data as part of the meeting and it will be an agenda item. And what will happen is they'll present the data and people go, Hmm. Yeah. Okay. And the last question, and then they'll go, okay, let's move on to the next item. So no action is ever taken. So one of the things that we always recommend, especially from the public information side, because what you're trying to do is highlight the great work that the district, the college is doing. You have to think about how can that data best be used to inform something, whether it's a campaign you may be going for a bond, whatever it is, what is that key piece?

Brad Phillips (14m 39s):
And I also advise don't use a bunch of data. You know, we are barraged with data every day. And our wife, we see data, we have access to more data than any generation before us. And when you're in the public information field, and by the way, we do workshops for public information folks about how to use data. It's really important that you pick just a couple of key data points and focus on telling a story, using the data and the key issue with telling your story is the very first thing. And look, I don't have to tell public information officers, this who's your audience. You know, too often, the IRR folks who are my brother. And I like to say, I are one, we have all this great data and we share it, but we don't necessarily tie it to who we're sharing the data with.

Brad Phillips (15m 26s):
It becomes a generic report. And the idea is you want to make sure who that audience is and what decisions they need to make based on that data. And just a real pedestrian example. If you have data that says, gee, this program, this service is really good. Then what you want to do is focus on how we do more of it. So this is data used in a positive light. If you're interested in sharing data about something that maybe isn't going so well, that's when you show negative data and talk about why the data is important and why we need to do better at this particular work. And so the key is you always have to have a hook.

Brad Phillips (16m 8s):
You have to know who that audience is and what they care about and how that data supports it. But in the end, well, human beings don't remember numbers. What they remember is how they feel. And so you always want to think about how do you want to make people feel about the information you're presenting and data, just buttresses that word. There's a very famous evaluation researcher. His name is Michael Scriven actually comes from Australia. He even taught at Claremont, although I wasn't there at the time. And one of the things Michael Scriven always said, and always stuck with me as well. If you don't have good numbers, quantitative data, tell a story. If you have really good numbers, tell a story. So that that's the best piece of advice I could give.

Cheryl Broom (16m 50s):
Yeah. I actually just read a statistic that if you tell a statistic within the context of a story, people are 20 times more likely to remember the statistic. And I think that's so true, right? Because numbers, they can be overwhelming. You know, there are so meaningful, but if you don't have them in the right context, they can really be meaningless. They're just a bunch of numbers. So tell me about the workshop, the story workshop that you teach, what is that like? What do you focus on?

Brad Phillips (17m 20s):
So as part of our data use work, we have a number of workshops that we focus on. And for the public information folks, we focus on how to build that story around data. And in fact, we use Disney's model. And the reason we use Disney's model the house, the mouse built is because they're the best data. You know, a lot of people don't know this, but Disney has a whole consultation function. They've helped design the white house situation room. They've helped the design NASA control center. And so the idea behind this is one once upon a time, what does that mean? It's setting context. And then you say, oh, the princess was whatever, right?

Brad Phillips (18m 0s):
What's the problem. So the idea is first context, next problem. And then you have to say, what did you do about it? Right? The prince came, right. Disney's very misogynistic, but at least in the old days, and then they lived happily ever after. So it's context, problem, efforts, intervention, whatever that is, policy change. And then the outcome of that. So it's a very simple model, but human beings very much respond to those four aspects of that model. So that's kind of the core of what we do with the storytelling workshop.

Cheryl Broom (18m 34s):
That's so fascinating. I mean, yeah. Stories need to have a person who is challenged by something who has to overcome an obstacle. I mean, that's the type of thing that we respond to. And if you're able to take your data and tell a story with it, then I could see people really getting hooked, you know, really being persuaded. And I can't tell you how many times I was at a college. I come armed with all my data, you know, you know, measured this campaign or we've done, you know, these focus groups. You've asked students these questions and then somebody would come in with a story. Oh, that's great, Cheryl. But yeah, my student dah, dah, dah, and then like every, all the work that I did is now out the window.

Brad Phillips (19m 14s):
Exactly. Right. What are the things we do is as a psychologist, I will tell you, first of all, you used some interesting language. You say armed with data. So when you arm somebody, that means you're ready for a fight.

Cheryl Broom (19m 26s):
You're ready for a fight. Yeah.

Brad Phillips (19m 27s):
So what we do is we break that down and one of the ways to do that, and this is a psychological principle is we call this buildup breakdown. So when that person comes and says, well, I know you said all this stuff, Cheryl, but I have a student who, right. That's how it starts. And you say, you know, I hear you. That does happen. So you, you validate and then you break down and then you say, and the majority of students, however, are reflected in this data. And let me tell you a story. So what we try to do is at times we'll use personas. If you're familiar with those where we actually profile a typical student, you have to give them a name.

Brad Phillips (20m 8s):
You tell their story, you talk about what age range they're in their background, what they want from the college, right? What their needs are. And then you talk about how the college can move forward to support that person.

Cheryl Broom (20m 22s):
I love that. And I encourage my clients to do that with marketing too, is create a persona before you go book a bunch of ads, you know, this is Brad and he's a returning student. And it's really important to him that he has flexibility in his schedule. And his barriers are the time he has. And it really helps you start thinking about what are the messages I need to put together to convince Brad to come to school. And where am I going to find Brad, what's he doing right now? You know, he's on a podcast, maybe. So it really is helpful.

Brad Phillips (20m 53s):
Well, I love that you said that Cheryl, because one of the things we do in the workshop is we actually have the audience as reviewers and we give them a proprietary form. And one of the aspects of the form is what do you feel were the key messages? So we have the audience as the receivers, that information is sharing back with the presenter, what they thought the key messages were and what we're seeking is alignment. Okay.

Cheryl Broom (21m 19s):
Right. Exactly. Well, it sounds like a fantastic workshop. I might have to sign up for it myself. I think you always have to be, you always have to be learning. And this is something that I don't know. It's just such an important skill to have. And as somebody who loves like persuasion and communication, if you can weave the ability to tell a story in with great compelling data, I think you can, you can be unstoppable. You be very persuasive,

Brad Phillips (21m 48s):
Right? And there are techniques to like, if you go to like the workshop 2.0, what you do is you ask the audience to, but you tease them and you tease them about thinking about, okay, what's next. And then that's when you give them data. And you may all be wondering about what happened to Brad, right? Are Cheryl and well, let me tell you, well, we know that people who are like Brad, 38% of them ex so you kind of set them up because human beings are inquisitive Ms. Part of our DNA. And we want to have conclusion to that story. I mean, we start the workshop by asking people, what's your favorite kind of story? You know, boy meets girl hero story. Girl meets a boy or girl meets girl, boy meets for whatever it is.

Brad Phillips (22m 31s):
We want people to tell us what's their favorite kind of story. And everybody has one.

Cheryl Broom (22m 36s):
I mean, we all do. And speaking of stories, I mean, another part of what your institution does is help colleges become more caring. So I think it's interesting. These two ideas, you have this, this idea of, of data, which is not caring, right? I mean, you don't think of like numbers as caring, but you're able to use that to help colleges become more personable and human and help individuals. So tell me a little bit about that initiative and what that does.

Brad Phillips (23m 5s):
So our Karen campus work, it just, it's blown up. It's really fascinating. And the way I'd like to preface it is, you know, I'd like your audience to think about their own relationships and what they value in those relationships. And my guess is if they think about it, it's all about how that person supports them, how they care about them, how they've gotten to know them. That's the basis for our caring campus work. Think about the students that come to your colleges. You know, most of them, I would argue, feel like they don't belong. They have imposter syndrome. They may be the first in their family to go to college. We have a great story of a chancellor of a community college district who grew up in a family, one of seven children whose parents never graduated high school.

Brad Phillips (23m 53s):
And you know, it was a pregnancy in high school way back when, and it was the first in his family to even try college. So we actually went over to antelope valley college, right. And of course he doesn't know what he's doing. And look, let's be real. Our buildings have terrible signage, right? If we had to fix one thing, that's a big thing to fix. They may be the person that donated to the building's name, but we don't know what's in that building. So he walks into a building and it turns out it's the administration building and he needs to go to the admissions office. So the person behind the counter could have said, oh, you're in the wrong building. And you have to go over here and you know what he said, he would've done. He would have left school. He would've said, look, I'm obviously stupid.

Brad Phillips (24m 34s):
The school is not for me as confirmed by. I already went to the wrong building, but that person got out from behind their desk and they walk them over to the admissions and records office and just ask them a few questions about themselves, what they wanted to go to school for. He said, if that never happened, he would have never gone to college. So those interactions, even though sometimes you think they're really small, they're huge. And I'd like the audience to think about in their own educational experience. Was there a faculty member? Was there a staff member that they remember that really inspired them? So what Karen campus does is it takes that inspiration and it puts it into behavioral commitments behaviors.

Brad Phillips (25m 15s):
If you will, the 10 foot rule for staff going up to a student and saying, hi, I'm Brad Phillips. And I work here and we're talking to all students. I just want to know how you're doing. Is there anything you need help with for faculty? It's getting to know students outside of class so that gosh, an adult and authority cares about me. So there are very specific behaviors. We're working with 72 colleges now across the U S most are in California, actually 42. And we just got a contract to work with 30 more in California. So 72 colleges, it's our largest state, Texas just signed up for 10. We'll be in over a hundred by spring of 23. So we're really excited. But the way this unfolds is we bring staff and faculty groups together to learn about these behaviors and the staff have a list they can choose from the faculty.

Brad Phillips (26m 5s):
They're fairly codified. We asked the staff and faculty to make them their own, what works for your culture, your institution, and in no way, are we saying that your college is not already a caring college, but what we're doing is we're actualizing that caring into specific behaviors. And then what we do is we work with the staff and faculty on how do we encourage everyone to engage in this work? And you know, the reality is when you think about your relationships and the connection you have with people, it feels good. And there's actually a basis for this behavior. And it's a hormone called oxytocin. And this is often called the love hormone or the connection hormone that occurs when we feel like we've made that connection.

Brad Phillips (26m 47s):
It just feels good. It just spreads like wildfire because it feels good to do this work. And in fact, on the faculty work, one of the things that we asked faculty is tell us what the most rewarding part of your work is. And often they will say, when a student comes back, six months later, a year later, I've even had 30 years later to say you changed my life. I mean, think about the impact we as educators have on our community. And you know, what we do is we start by saying, I want you to pretend that your children, your friends, your family are going to your college. How would you like them treated? And that's essentially our caring campus work. And it's just growing faster than really we can keep up with,

Cheryl Broom (27m 30s):
Well, I have a caring campus story myself and I had secret shops, a campus in Southern California and our researcher who was assigned to be the secret shopper showed up on campus, parked in the wrong spot. And, and his, you know, as a secret shopper, you're trying to act like a student, right? Like you don't know where to park. The signage is terrible. He parked in the wrong spot. He got lost on campus. Nobody helped him. He finally found admissions. People were Curt. He felt very unwelcome. He went back to his car and he had a parking ticket. And so it's secret shopping report was just like dismal.

Cheryl Broom (28m 11s):
It was really bad.

Brad Phillips (28m 13s):
Trying to graduate more students too.

Cheryl Broom (28m 18s):
So I had, I presented the report to the college president and student services staff, and we never looked picked on names or identify anybody, but just talk about the experience ways that we felt that improvements could be made. Well, this college ended up becoming part of the caring campus initiative hired you and your team. And I think it was maybe 18 months later, I was invited back on campus to a new welcome center. So I come in and immediately somebody with a name tag comes up, asks me my name. I was like, wow. I felt like I was warrior LT. You know, she walked me to my meeting room.

Cheryl Broom (29m 1s):
She asked if I like wanted water. If she could show me the restaurant, I felt so welcome. And I felt what, what a turn around, you know, it was clear that the culture had been changed on this campus and it was really special to be there and to experience that

Brad Phillips (29m 17s):
Let's wonder, I'm so grateful to hear that story. One of the things that, you know, we know is that when students who may not have ever had an adult in authority care about them and they do that student works their tail off to please that adult and you know, this work is not, we didn't invent this way back in 1993, Vincent Tinto published a book called leaving college. And it was the reason students weave. And a lot of it, most of it was feeling disconnected, disconnected from faculty disconnected from staff disconnected from their fellow students. And so what we're seeking to do with this work is to cement that connection right away to make students feel welcome a sense of belonging and that yes, they can be successful.

Brad Phillips (30m 5s):
I mean, you look at our vision for success goals in California. Most of them are about completion in some form or another. But look, we can't, you know, keep a student who doesn't feel welcome at our colleges. And so this work is really based on our data work. As you were saying before, how they're intertwined on leading a lagging indicators, and that is the ability to control what we can control or influence what we can influence and then understanding there's not everything that we can influence, but we can influence how we treat our students and look, a lot of colleges, 50% of their students are gone after one year name, one other business that could get away with that and still be in business.

Brad Phillips (30m 45s):
There isn't one.

Cheryl Broom (30m 47s):
No. So why do you think that some colleges lose that human touch? Like what happens because people get into the business to change lives, to make an impact, but something, I don't know, maybe after years of service they get, they forget.

Brad Phillips (31m 2s):
I'm not so sure it's that? I think it's a few things. One, we become incredibly complex. If you've ever gone to try to fill out an application to enroll in our colleges, it's not easy. My youngest daughter, very, very smart ended up going. She was accepted to all these universities with full rides, ended up going to Boston university on a partial scholarship to sing opera of all things. And she came home over the summer and she wanted to take some classes. And I said, oh, no worries. I'll fill out your application. So you can go to the local college and look, it's a statewide application. I have a doctorate and you know what? This thing was near impossible for me to complete. It was really tough.

Brad Phillips (31m 42s):
So part of it is the complexity. This is the other part of it, I think is we are trumping the human connection for convenience. Oh, you just do that on the internet. Oh, you just do it this way. I think we've lost a lot of that human connection because we are saying, oh, it's convenient to do it this way. That's too bad. The other thing is we often view, especially in the staff side, our work is transactional. We complete this paperwork or that form when we really should be viewing our work as relational, the transactions, what we already have to do, you know, I heard a great comment from a colleague just the other day on a zoom call.

Brad Phillips (32m 24s):
I was on. And he said, you know, we are working people incredibly hard in fact, harder than ever, but we're under leveraging them. I mean, that's an interesting statement. I loved what he said because yeah, people are feeling burned out. They're tired. COVID is just, it's been so hard on all of us feeling isolated and all the extra work, but yet we're under leveraged because we're not using their expertise in ways that helps us better connect and support students to achieve their goals. So that's kind of my, I guess, medium long answer to your question.

Cheryl Broom (32m 56s):
No, and it all makes perfect sense. It really does. I'm working with one institution right now that does a non-credit education and they will not get rid of their paper schedules, which there's a lot of debate, you know, whether should we get rid of it, but people want it. They want to fill them out that way. And they don't mind helping them. And because of that, they've had, you know, great enrollments and good success because their staff is like, look, this isn't convenient for us, but the population we serve needs a little bit of help. And if they need the help, this is the way we're going to do it. So it requires some commitments.

Brad Phillips (33m 34s):
Exactly. And I want you to, one of the things about look, a lot of our students grew up in bad situations, whether it's poverty, whether it's gangs, whatever it is, think about this home away from home that we can create at our colleges where they feel safe, they feel cared about, and it may be the only place in their life where they feel safe and cared about. And so our ability to do that for our own children, our neighbors, our community, we should be doing this, this work. I mean, it's kind of a big duh, but it's not because we don't engage in this way.

Cheryl Broom (34m 11s):
Yeah. And I think it's sometimes uncomfortable, right? To be kind and giving it's much easier to have your checklist and check things off and get them done. But it takes time and some vulnerability to go up to somebody and extend that. Welcome. So

Brad Phillips (34m 28s):
I love that you said that because one of our coaches was doing a session with folks and some of the staff said, look, I'm not so sure I'm the right person to do this work. And so she said, you know what, on our break, I want you to go out. And I want you to introduce yourself to one student and just say hello and see how it feels. They were good. They did it. And they came back and they said, you know what? This isn't so bad. I liked it. And in fact, we have situations where even pre COVID, where someone has connected with a student and the student will see that someone, you know, 50 yards away and say, hello, Ms. Brown. You know, it's just, it feels good. And the students love it.

Cheryl Broom (35m 8s):
It's great. I love it. I love work. That makes you feel good. Maybe that will be the title of this podcast. Data can make you feel good.

Brad Phillips (35m 19s):
Connection.

Cheryl Broom (35m 20s):
Yes. Debit data connection. Well, it's been so wonderful talking to you. And if people are interested in your workshops or applying for a caring campus, where can they find out more information?

Brad Phillips (35m 31s):
So our website is very comprehensive. It was just redone. I E B C N O w. So iec.org. If you go ivc.org, you're going to get the Kenyan election bureau. So please don't do that. They're really struggling. So IVC, N O w.org. We also have a YouTube channel that we urge you to subscribe to. We have 93 subscribers. If we get seven more, we have our own channel. So we're really excited about,

Cheryl Broom (35m 58s):
Oh, well, I've got something out of my to-do list. Now you need six more now, wonderful NTU. You go to conferences, any conferences plan this year to speak after.

Brad Phillips (36m 10s):
So actually just this morning I spoke at the week four innovation conference. Joining me was the community college research center. That's evaluating our work. They have a very large grant to do so from the Ascendion foundation. So we're grateful for ascend diem and the ECFC foundation and the chancellor's office, the California community colleges and the greater Texas foundation. All of these folks are funding us, but we also had Amy Hunter of Irvine valley college, who is a huge proponent of Karen campus. And by the way, in 2021, she was the state classified professional of the year. So congratulations to Amy. And she was the hit of our presentation.

Brad Phillips (36m 50s):
We're also presenting for nice VOD, the national Institute of staff and organizational development. And we do presentations all the time around the country. And last month was keynote season and I was traveling to four different places to do keynotes. So we do a lot of this work around the country.

Cheryl Broom (37m 5s):
I encourage our listeners to check out your website, check out your YouTube channel, and hopefully we'll be able to see you present at a community college marketing conference.

Brad Phillips (37m 14s):
I would love to do so. Thank you so much for inviting me today.

Cheryl Broom (37m 18s):
It's been great having you on. Thank you.

3 (37m 25s):
Thank you for listening to higher education, coffee, and conversation. If you liked the podcast, please leave me a five-star rating and to discover more great higher education related content, make sure to visit us@graduatecommunications.com. And with that, I'm going to say, thank you for listening. Thank you for the hard work you do for students each and every day.