[00:00:00] Cheryl Broom: Well, Rachel, thank you so much for joining me today. I am so happy to have you here. [00:00:04] Rachel McClelland: Great to be here, [00:00:05] Cheryl Broom: well, I'm really excited to have you here. You and I have actually not met before, but you presented at NCMPR National and the title of your presentation caught my eye. And then in our pre-interview we talked about. [00:00:21] Cheryl Broom: That you've only been at Pellissippi State for under two years, but you've achieved so much what would take a normal campus, like a decade to achieve in that time. So I wanted to start off by asking you to tell us a little bit about your role and how you came into the position at Pellissippi. [00:00:41] Rachel McClelland: Sure, sure. Well, I think, you know, understanding my background in print media kind of puts everything into perspective for what I do and how I roll. [00:00:51] Rachel McClelland: I was a print news reporter for a, a local daily in Indiana. For, six years through college and then after college, shortly after that, raised some kids and took some time off, but came back to the profession as a instructor of journalism at the college where I had graduated. Many years in student media background. [00:01:14] Rachel McClelland: So I advised student newspapers and student news organizations and hopped in and out of communications offices. So at Indiana State I was in their communications and marketing office. Also advising student media. Came to Tennessee as the, uh, student media advisor for the University of Tennessee Student media operations left that went into communications and marketing again at the University of Tennessee in the college of law. [00:01:40] Rachel McClelland: and then popped over to Pellissippi in the last couple of years. So my background, really troubleshooting students problems in newsrooms, and then really holding down the fort in communication and marketing. I. Efforts at the College of Law at the University of Tennessee established who I am and how I work, within the framework here at Pellissippi State. [00:02:01] Rachel McClelland: I think my, my people here that I oversee would tell you they were concerned when I came in because I knew how to do their jobs because I had done so much of that kind of work. So I think I come to this position with a background in a lot of areas that my, office supports. So I know how. How my, what kinds of challenges my people are facing. [00:02:24] Cheryl Broom: Yeah. I was gonna say, I think that gives you such insight into how each different person in your department's feeling and the overwhelm I think they were feeling when you came in. Right. And in fact, the, the title of your NCMPR presentation really came from something that one of your designers said, right. [00:02:43] Rachel McClelland: Yes, yes. So, you know, one of the frustrations that he had, and he voiced pretty quickly in in my role here, I feel like a subway sandwich shop. They just come in and they place their orders and some of 'em want pepperoni with. Pickles and ranch dressing, and some of them really want that beautiful tuna salad sandwich, but, we just have to give them whatever it is they want. [00:03:09] Rachel McClelland: And that's where, uh, we kind of started talking about. But do you really so that's what kind of drove the, the background and the inspiration for that session that I offered at NCNMPR. [00:03:21] Cheryl Broom: Yeah, and really I think your point is, I mean, when you're the subway shop model, you are an order taker, right? Yes you are. [00:03:29] Cheryl Broom: You're taking orders and however they want their sandwich, you're gonna make it. [00:03:32] Rachel McClelland: Right. You are not, you are not the professional sandwich maker that knows these ingredients go together and these should never be on a sandwich at the same time, you are just responding to the needs of the masses and giving them whatever they ask for and sometimes. [00:03:48] Rachel McClelland: It corresponds with the philosophy of your institution and sometimes it does not. And sometimes we deliver them what we would consider big messes of a flyer, that has all the bells and whistles they wanted, but really isn't good marketing. [00:04:04] Cheryl Broom: Yeah. And I think too, when you're, when you are this subway sandwich shop model, the focus is on speed, right? [00:04:12] Cheryl Broom: Like how Yes. Quickly can you get things done? Not whether is this strategic, is this working, is this taste good? Absolutely. Are these high quality ingredients? And we had a lot, we just making a 6 99 sandwich here. [00:04:27] Rachel McClelland: We had a lot of tuna pepperoni with peppers and pickles. Um, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so, so [00:04:34] Cheryl Broom: when you came in, how, how did you change the focus from being this like just production house to being more strategic? [00:04:42] Cheryl Broom: What was that like? [00:04:44] Rachel McClelland: So one of the things that really was important to me was to sort of regain some. Focus for our office. I think the folks that had been here, a lot of 'em, lots of really great folks that, that preceded me in this role. And I don't mean any disrespect to them in any way but they, lots of 'em had been doing this for a while and kind of gotten a rut. [00:05:08] Rachel McClelland: So I think, I think that that idea of just get the work done, give people what they want and, and don't argue about it, was kind of the framework that that developed by, maybe by mistake, but that's where they found themselves. And so my, my talks early with my staff was, you know, what's important to us? [00:05:30] Rachel McClelland: What are the areas that we really need to focus on? And they. Sometimes we're lost in that conversation. Didn't, you know, hadn't really held on to marketing from that perspective for a long time. So we really took a, a hard look at what's the college's mission statement. If, if in the absence of any other direction, what does the mission statement say that we do? [00:05:55] Rachel McClelland: And the focus of that mission statement was that we really work to, address the needs of our students and that we do it in a careful way that involves our community. and that serves our community in ways that, , we, we sit in the shadow of the university of Tennessee, so. We have a niche that we need to fill, that the University of Tennessee can't. [00:06:19] Rachel McClelland: So it's give everybody opportunity to get the education they need. So by looking at that mission statement, we really landed on three principles. Recruitment, retention, fundraising. So those are the priorities for our office, recruitment, retention, fundraising. And if our folks aren't doing work that aligns with those three precepts, then we had to have hard conversations with our [00:06:42] Rachel McClelland: colleagues and say, look, these aren't going to be priorities for us. These are what we need to focus on. This is what is important to the college. Getting students here, getting them happy in their work and moving them on into successful careers and, and transfer pathways. [00:06:58] Cheryl Broom: And how did people on campus take it when you made this like strategic shift? [00:07:04] Cheryl Broom: Mm-hmm. Was it difficult to say no or, yeah. I think there's a big fear at a lot of colleges about saying no. [00:07:12] Rachel McClelland: Yeah. I, and I, that exists still with some of my group. You know, we'll have month, our weekly meetings and my folks will say, you know, well, I know we're not supposed to, but I did this for this and I. [00:07:26] Rachel McClelland: By, I, I still have to remind them. By doing those things in the old ways, we're not going to move ourselves forward and we're gonna stay in that rut. So it's really best to learn to say no and saying no. we have hard conversations. We have folks around the table. I try to get folks in and say, look. [00:07:45] Rachel McClelland: Tell us again what you want. And lots of times through those conversations, what they think they want is not really what they want. And so we can turn more toward, a common strategy that suits all of us and gets the materials looking better. [00:08:01] Cheryl Broom: That's great. Yeah. I think that's, people in marketing and communication tend, you know, they love people, they wanna please, like, that's kind of the personality I see a lot of. [00:08:13] Cheryl Broom: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So it's hard to say no, but having this framework, at least at, at the very least I would imagine, would help you prioritize. [00:08:22] Rachel McClelland: Absolutely. Yeah. So even [00:08:24] Cheryl Broom: if you can't say no, you at least can give whatever needs more priority that space in your workflow. Without trying to jam everything in because not everything is top priority, [00:08:34] Rachel McClelland: frankly. [00:08:35] Rachel McClelland: Exactly, exactly. So the, you know, the Teddy Bear fundraiser, that the HR staff really feel passionate about at Christmas time. Is it recruitment, retention, fundraising? And if, if we have time that we're not focusing our efforts on those recruitment retention funds, raising goals and products then yeah, we can help you. [00:08:56] Rachel McClelland: But if. If that is a priority for you, it's not necessarily a priority for the college. And here we have an alternative for you. and I could talk to you about some of those alternatives we created too. [00:09:09] Cheryl Broom: Yeah, I would love to know. So I was gonna say, you know, one of the things that I've always loved is saying like, no, you know, no, but like, here is a solution, right? [00:09:20] Cheryl Broom: We may not be able to do this for you, but. Here's something you can do. So what are some of those things that you have developed or created to help? Health departments or people on campus that maybe can't use your services. [00:09:32] Rachel McClelland: Yeah. So, templates, really have become a tool for us to, to say to folks we can't, but here's an alternative for you. [00:09:42] Rachel McClelland: And those templates have taken up. We are, we're flyer happy here at our, our college one is with colleges and flyers. Everybody loves a flyer. Everybody loves a good flyer on a boat board. And, So, and let me give you a little history here of the college too that will help with context of this. So we, right after COVID, we went through a ransomware attack. [00:10:02] Rachel McClelland: Mm-hmm. And that wiped out our website, wiped out so much of our history of our school. And so. People were just trying to promote things like the department of admissions and disability services with flyers. Students would come, our poor students back several years ago would come to our orientation and they get handed thousands of flyers to promote the different organizations because the website had not caught up with where it was before the ransomware attack. [00:10:32] Rachel McClelland: Right. and so that put different demands on our offices, our on our office, which I think also. Kind of sent us down this bad road of the subway sandwich model. Just tell us what you need and we'll give it to you. So back to the tools. So we created some tools for this, for our folks to use that really are like certificates, name plates for your office doors, because who knows what those are gonna look like across campuses. [00:10:59] Rachel McClelland: The, uh, flyer, just standard flyer template. And, and in creating those we gave them flexible areas within the text, but created the rest of the framework. So they couldn't mess with our logo, they couldn't mess with the things that we knew we wanted to have on those flyers, and we're still working through those. [00:11:18] Rachel McClelland: our, our best efforts, we first created a word version, didn't work, because it broke the formatting. Then we created an editable PDF. It's better still not the best. But what I want to work into is a campus-wide canvas subscription so that we can create those templates and people can, still have something that looks professional with minimal expertise in design for those who may not know how to do that. [00:11:45] Rachel McClelland: So, we're still developing those tools. We have a new graphic designer on board that's gonna share some of the weight of that. So that's really gonna be a focus for us in the next few months. [00:11:54] Cheryl Broom: Great. I wanna talk to you a little bit about just changing your campus culture and how that, you know, how that has, has helped or hindered your progress. [00:12:06] Cheryl Broom: But first, let's take a a little bit, let's hear a little bit from our sponsor. All right, so before the break, we were talking about the templates that you had made that has really kind of helped departments that you can't assist in the timing that they needed, develop their own material and still be on brand. [00:12:33] Cheryl Broom: But I envision that this, especially with the ransomware attack and everything that was going on this shift from this subway sandwich, let's get it done. Let's give people what they want to kind of empowering them to help themselves when it doesn't fall within the strategic. Goals of the campus was a big change. [00:12:50] Cheryl Broom: I mean, that's a culture change, both for your department and for your campus. How did you still maintain trust in your department? How did you and not have people mad at you? I think when I talk to colleges, I hear a lot like they're afraid that if they don't help x, y, and Z faculty or this department that, that the trust will be lost or people won't like them anymore. [00:13:14] Cheryl Broom: Like how, how have you dealt with that? [00:13:16] Rachel McClelland: Well, there've been some tough conversations. So we had, within one of our departments, they had adopted an acronym for their department, APE, audio Production Engineering. that was terrible. And they would call their students aping and it was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. [00:13:35] Rachel McClelland: We can't do this. and so we had a really long, hard heart. Heart to heart talk with the folks that had developed that, and asked them, you know, where did this originate? Why was this important? And it was really a matter. They wanted to set themselves apart. They wanted to give some prestige to their students. [00:13:55] Rachel McClelland: They wanted to, to, um, make them feel special in lots of ways. And so the conversation started revolving around, well, how can we help you feel special in ways that don't support an off color? Acronym, that may be offensive to some folks, who have an interest in policy B State. So, gradually we featured them more on our social media accounts. [00:14:19] Rachel McClelland: We told stories about their students. we started developing products specifically for them that could help them with recruitment. and so they started to see, you know, Hey, this is a better way of doing this. And so now when I talk with that professor who was so, against letting go of his old offensive logo, he now writes me glowing, flowery messages and shares those wonderful things that he thinks about our department with others in the college. [00:14:52] Rachel McClelland: And, and it's really kind of snowballing. It's been a word of mouth kind of, you know. May, maybe you need to go to marketing and ask them if they can help you through this. 'cause they helped me in this way. So I think in some ways we've, we've created some poster children for our efforts that have become ambassadors for our office and, and kind of talk us up, because they are selling the message of marketing can really assist you. [00:15:21] Rachel McClelland: and that's been really beneficial and a game changer for us. [00:15:24] Cheryl Broom: Yeah. I think that you brought up something that a lot of marketers, when they're so busy, tend to forget and that's asking the right questions. Mm-hmm. Right? Like a lot of times people do things that maybe are offensive or, but they don't, they don't realize it. [00:15:42] Cheryl Broom: Right. Or they do things that clearly are not gonna work. Right. And but they're coming at it because they care or they think they're doing something special. So get asking those questions. What is your goal? What do you hope to accomplish? You know, why do you need to nickname your department? Right. [00:15:59] Cheryl Broom: Right. You know, getting at the heart of what they're trying to do makes you strategic. Right. That helps them. [00:16:06] Rachel McClelland: Yes. And, and how can we do that more effectively in a way that makes all of us look good? That, that's the thing that I think, and let me backtrack. So, so we did a, a, a rebranding pretty early on in my history and created a new logo for the college. [00:16:26] Rachel McClelland: Our logo was using times New Roman font [00:16:29] Rachel McClelland: times, new Roman lovers. I love you. and there's a place for it, but it's really not in the. Top level logo for your college? Right. Because it just, it looked dated. It just looked dated and, and it, it set, it told the world. I think, when I look now at the comparison, we're tired and. We don't have much energy to do much different. [00:16:56] Rachel McClelland: Um, so, you know, just really reinvigorating that. Yeah. And it was, it, it's been a huge transformation for us. And I'll, I'll share some photos of, of it with you if you, if you want. I would [00:17:08] Cheryl Broom: love, I would love that we could put that in the show notes for people to look at. Yeah. [00:17:11] Rachel McClelland: Um, but [00:17:12] Cheryl Broom: it's funny, like you fonts do have personalities. [00:17:14] Rachel McClelland: Oh my Lord. Yes. It just, it, it refreshed us. It made us look younger. It. It's more appealing to the target audience we're going for. So, it just really has, has it, it, it was the starting point I think for things are gonna be different to our office. [00:17:32] Cheryl Broom: So. Well, you have to, and you have to remember your audience too, and I think that's another important thing to ask people. [00:17:37] Cheryl Broom: I, when you were telling the story about, the airplanes, that made me think back to my days. When I was in your role at a community college and we, we had special funding in California 'cause we had a very wealthy area. So our community college actually was able to keep all of its local property tax revenue, and not have to get state, give it back to the state to be reapportioned. [00:18:01] Cheryl Broom: So we were very wealthy, comparatively to other colleges. Well, our vice president of instruction and institutional researcher had formed. A band that they called the Koans. And at a conference they sang a song they made up called Bad Finance. And it was all about how the college was overfunded. And apparently at this conference it got, everybody thought it was funny 'cause this, our college was, everybody was jealous of our college 'cause of the financing. [00:18:33] Cheryl Broom: Like every other college wanted the same financing. Well. They weren't aware that the finance model that our college was under was constantly under attack at the state level. There's five colleges in California with this model, and the state wants the funds back. Yes. Of, so they post, post this bad finance video that they think is so funny on YouTube. [00:18:55] Cheryl Broom: And I'm like, I'm like, you can't. You can't post this on YouTube. Yeah, I took it down. Yeah. Yeah. And they went to the president and I had to explain like you might think that this was fun and funny. Yeah. But if our local legislator sees the vice president of instruction singing about our finances, [00:19:15] Rachel McClelland: yeah. [00:19:16] Rachel McClelland: You know, that's, I think that's an important piece of the work that we do. Right. In marketing communications offices. You know, I see myself, and it goes back to my reporting days because it's kind of the philosophy that I had there. You know, I, I'm here to safeguard the reputation of this. Yes. And, and if the things that you want to do within your program or your areas are, are going to be viewed maybe slightly differently than how you might view them, you, you have to keep all those perspectives in mind and understand that just because it's cutesy or it's fun or you think it's kind of neat, doesn't mean that it's gonna land in the same way with people who are not in our world every day. [00:19:59] Rachel McClelland: And, and I, you know, I take pretty seriously that role of, you know, I, I need to leave this place better than I found it. I need to make sure that, that what we're doing is, is appealing, on all levels, not just on the level that's of interest to this faculty member or this department. [00:20:17] Cheryl Broom: I think it's just a really good reminder that, that the role of a college marketing department, oftentimes is to bring an outside perspective. [00:20:25] Cheryl Broom: It's everybody else is working at the college, for the college, in the college, and you're really the bridge between the outside world and the inside world. Yeah. And so sometimes that perspective, it's invaluable. Nobody else thinks that way. And you have an obligation to, to say something like. [00:20:44] Rachel McClelland: This [00:20:44] Cheryl Broom: isn't gonna land. [00:20:45] Cheryl Broom: Right. Let's take a step back, [00:20:48] Rachel McClelland: you know, in addition to the, the things that you have to face as the, as the head marketing person for a, a college with, in dealing with, you know, problematic professors who may go off the rails on social media or, you know, all of the, all of the. Crisis communication moments that you can have. [00:21:07] Rachel McClelland: I think you have to keep those in mind as you're, you're moving forward and try, try to focus on how to keep us in the best light with our community. [00:21:16] Cheryl Broom: So you've had to have some really tough conversations, but you also made some. Kind of tough decisions, right? You changed some staffing models, changed some things that were outsourced. [00:21:28] Rachel McClelland: We did. We did. Yeah. So tell me a little bit [00:21:30] Cheryl Broom: about that. [00:21:31] Rachel McClelland: Absolutely. So we have, we have here in our offices, staff of nine, including myself, so there are eight of us. So we're pretty. We're pretty meaty staff. I'm well aware of that in college, in community college circles, that you're the [00:21:45] Cheryl Broom: envy of like half of our listeners right now. [00:21:48] Rachel McClelland: We're blessed. We're blessed, and I feel you, as I said at the University of Tennessee College of Law, I did it with one other person, and took photos and built magazines and wrote copies. So I, I understand your pain. and I also understand how. How fortunate I am to have what I have. But we had, we had some issues to address one of those. [00:22:09] Rachel McClelland: We had a, a internal print shop, that I was very happy to have internally because it meant we could do those last minute things on a, in, in 15, 20 minutes and have what somebody might need when they had planned poorly and made it my emergency. but with our internal print shop, the, we, we don't. We don't have tons of money here at Pellissippi State. [00:22:32] Rachel McClelland: So we had very old machines and we had very poor printers that didn't reproduce color quite right. So a lot of our colors are blue and gold and, and a lot of our backgrounds on our materials were white because we couldn't reproduce the blue quite right. So, you know, we made a lot of concessions for. For poor equipment. [00:22:53] Rachel McClelland: we had a retirement in that position. And so what I looked to do pretty quickly was outsource that print jobs, our, our print work. and we had some print contracts, so our bigger jobs had to be outsourced. But I, I looked to the University of Tennessee again where I had had a history and, and knew their. [00:23:13] Rachel McClelland: Print quality, and said, Hey, can you all look at pricing for us about what pricing might be for some of these jobs that we need to get done? And it turned out that they were going to charge us. They ended up charging us what they charge for in-house printing across their campus. So we got a really great deal. [00:23:32] Rachel McClelland: And now we have incredible. Access to this wonderful equipment that can really do some slick finishes and things that we never would've been able to accomplish before because we outsourced that printing. What that also did was free up my print shop. Job to funnel back into our staffing. And invaluable hire, I cannot tell you enough. [00:23:58] Rachel McClelland: I will help you argue this for your community college presidents. If, if you call me and ask get yourself a social media person. Somebody that can invest time and effort in social media. Our, our social media in a year has grown 400%. Wow. I mean, it's amazing the analytics. It's also a thing of beauty to be able to show month end reports to bosses that show extraordinary growth in social media, which is where our student recruits are living. [00:24:28] Rachel McClelland: Yeah. So it's so much better than the advertising dollar to get some organic traffic through social media. [00:24:34] Cheryl Broom: Wow. And then well, and even if you go back to your strategic, the strategic goals you have with fundraising, retention, and recruitment. Like social media hits all three of those we're printing. [00:24:47] Cheryl Broom: You know, that's a more difficult argument to make. So that framework, I think, has really set you up to make some of these decisions. Yes. Yeah, yeah, for sure. There's gonna be, a lot of retirements in upcoming years. So in, in the last couple minutes we have together, I was hoping, you know, you being relatively new to the position and all that you've been able to accomplish. [00:25:09] Cheryl Broom: What advice would you give to someone who's looking to step in to this role? I think I see, you know, even our clients, over half of them are planning to retire in the next two years. There's gonna be a lot of opportunities and, and opportunities to change. To change the way that things have been done traditionally. [00:25:28] Cheryl Broom: Right. But what advice would you give to someone who's looking to step into this position? [00:25:33] Rachel McClelland: Yeah. Well, as I outlined earlier, you know, I think my varied experience through lots of different areas of media, you know, I, I could have started my career as a writer and still be writing and end my career as a writer. [00:25:47] Rachel McClelland: But when I learned to manage photo and learn a little bit about InDesign tricks and Photoshop editing, and I learned a little bit about website management and how to code a little bit. I tell you all of this, not to toot my own horn, but I'm, I'm a, I'm, I'm one of those who knows a little bit about a lot of things. [00:26:09] Rachel McClelland: Because I, I, I had to it was, it was fight or flight, in some situations to learn the, the, the work of how to do website management. And if, if I didn't learn those things, then my. My area was gonna suffer. So, so, back to your original question, learn as much as you can about all of the things that we do. [00:26:30] Rachel McClelland: Take photos learn how in, in the last couple of days, we've, we've decided here at the college that we're going to move towards SharePoint for our intranet. I didn't know much about SharePoint. I've watched. Hundreds of hours now of SharePoint and how to create a SharePoint site so that I can be a key person in that intranet charge that's important to my college. [00:26:55] Rachel McClelland: So, learn as much as you can about everything that we do. If you don't know how to audio. Record audio for podcasts. Dip your toe into it, figure it out. if you don't know how to, uh, set up your, your system so that when the podcast lady calls to get it started, run out too. But just, I think just learning the technology is the best thing that you can do to make yourself well-rounded in this profession. [00:27:19] Cheryl Broom: I think that's great advice, and that's one of the things that I love the most about marketing as a profession is you're always learning. It's always different when you figure something else. New technology comes. Yes, right. It's always learning and and I think that's great advice. I know one of the things I did early in my career was get a certificate from my college in graphic design. [00:27:40] Cheryl Broom: Just three classes I just did in design, Photoshop, and Illustrator. And I am not a graphic designer, but earning that certificate gave me such insight into what our designers did. Like I could supervise them so much better. And be a better colleague and and boss because I got what they had to, to do. I understood it. [00:28:01] Rachel McClelland: Exactly. You know, and I, I would say for those, those folks who, you know, don't know how to dip their toe into that, ask your boss if you can tag along. You know, ask your designer if you can. Sit with them a bit. Ask your, you know, photographer if you can go out on the shoot with them, carry their equipment for a day. [00:28:19] Rachel McClelland: You know, just get yourself exposed to some of those areas and you find yourself in the thick of it. And by golly, you gotta sink or swim. I, I, I always am one that's determined to swim no matter what. So. [00:28:32] Cheryl Broom: Well, Rachel, it's been so much fun to talk to you. Well thank [00:28:35] Rachel McClelland: you [00:28:36] Cheryl Broom: and congratulations on moving past being a Subway sandwich Shaw. [00:28:43] Rachel McClelland: Knock, knock on wood. Where's the wood? yes. I, I hope we are moving past that and can stay firmly in that can stay firmly in the past. But, [00:28:52] Cheryl Broom: and I know you're active on LinkedIn and you made a great, a generous offer to talk to people about Your college and your staffing and I know people can probably connect with you on LinkedIn. [00:29:02] Rachel McClelland: Absolutely. Absolutely. Pellissippi State to pstcc.edu is where you can find more about our little college and I am available through that website. You can find us if you take a look for the marketing folks, you'll find me there and can connect that way too. [00:29:16] Cheryl Broom: well thank you again. [00:29:18] Rachel McClelland: Absolutely. Glad to do it. [00:29:20] Rachel McClelland: Thank you.