Cheryl Broom (00:00.11)
Hi, I'm Cheryl Broom, CEO of Graduate Communications. What does guided pathways, TikTok, campaign refreshes, and career educational toolkits have in common? Well, these are all the projects that Graduate Communications team tackled this past year. And as I'm recording this introduction in August,

We have officially hit our one-year mark as a higher education agency. And in this past year, we have worked on absolutely amazing projects with colleges and universities across the country. And I'm just so proud of the work that we've done. And I thought that it would be really fun to explore some of our.

favorite projects and to have my listeners meet the amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing group of people that I get to work with every single day. So on this podcast, I actually talked to five of our team members here at Graduate Communications and I asked them each to pick their favorite project that they worked on this year and explain what we did and then also share with you some lessons that they learned and some good takeaways.

That I really hope that you can use as you embark on exciting projects this next year as well. So I hope you enjoy meeting the members of my team, and I'm sure you are going to get some great ideas and some amazing inspiration. Right. Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. My pleasure.

I am working downstairs in our home and you are working upstairs and yet we're still recording this over Zoom. Yes, as we should. We are the modern family. I wouldn't be able to do a podcast with you if I just had to gaze into your gorgeous eyes. well, for people listening to our podcast right now.

Cheryl Broom (02:15.32)
Chris and I own graduate communications and are married. So some people may not know that since we have different last names. So that wasn't a sexually inappropriate comment. That was actually a compliment. So thank you. Well, the project I wanted to talk to you about is a big campaign in Orange County that we call the FutureBelt campaign. So tell me a little bit about that campaign and

Where it's going and where it's been. All right. Well, I obviously that's my biggest and best client. So the Future Built brand was developed a few years ago for the region of Orange County. So that makes up nine community colleges and one continuing education center. So they pooled all of their strong workforce funds.

into promoting career education throughout Orange County. And so the the Future Built brand was developed and it produces content and ads, media campaigns, etc., talking about pertinent industries and the career education programs that are available to potential students in Orange County to promote their career growth. And so we came in

In year four of the campaign. So it had been managed by another agency for a couple of years. And, you know, we went through bid process and won the business. And the client really wanted something fresh. They wanted kind of a fresh eye, a fresh approach. so what have we done this year to take a campaign that's been a couple of years old and to breathe new life into it?

Yeah, you know, the first thing that we really wanted to do was start with the fresh base of research. So we did a couple of research projects where we were examining both internal and external audiences' perception of the brand. And then with that data, we actually refreshed the future built brand itself. So it got a new logo, it got kind of a facelift. It we brightened it up a bit.

Cheryl Broom (04:38.06)
And it's just got kind of some new, I like to call it breathing room because the brand appears a bit more open. And so that was really kind of the start was freshening up the brand. And then of course, getting new creative with that new branding was a pretty big undertaking. And then we've also been able to produce some really cool new videos for them, some video content.

You know, we shot a video of a young woman for a really cool TikTok video. so we've opened up our media by to include networks that are appealing to younger parts of the population. and we're using that in Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram. And then we also filmed a broadcast quality feature spot that's actually running on Spectrum television right now. And that was a lot of fun. We shot it on the campus of Saddleback College.

And we had seven or eight actors and two video producers and a camera and sound team. And they wrote this great script. And we have the in both English and in Spanish, which is really cool. And you know, we've just been producing a lot of new web content, updating stats, and just kind of freshening up the brand.

Really cool. And I have had a lot of colleges ask about TikTok and ask how you know you create content for TikTok. And we decided to not just run, you know, a standard ad. We actually use TikTok tools. So the woman in the ad is puts a helmet on and a and the torch is actually like embedded in the TikTok ad. It's like animated.

it really turned out fun. And the engagements on that ad just are through the roof. It performed amazing. Yeah, you're absolutely right. It was a lot of fun because you know, we wanted to do something that is really on trend in the platform. You know, like we're not really in the demographic. So we need to think about what's popular in TikTok and what types of videos are these students, potential students, watching. And so we have this really cool blend of

Cheryl Broom (06:53.76)
An attractive woman, she's the right age. but we're able to use that live footage that we shot, but then implement it into TikTok and use some of the native parts of that application to get those effects that you saw. So she actually had a welder's mask with her and a culinary outfit and a tray and things like that. But then they were able to through the TikTok platform.

Put graphics for, you know, the welder's blowtorch and like a chicken on the platter and some of those, what you would almost consider an after effect in a way, but they're just kind of kitschy graphics that made it native and look organic, even though it was actually an ad. I love that it tells a a story where she's exploring different career options and the editing shows her.

In these different careers, like she's a welder and she's a nurse, and she's a business person and she's a chef, and and she's kind of like dancing and having fun with it and trying on careers. And I don't know, it is, it's very on trend, it's very catchy. Even the song that our editors chose was a song that was trending on on TikTok. So I I loved it. It's one of my favorite ads of the year. It's really great.

It was a lot of fun, you know. The guys who shot it, Miguel and Andres, who you know well, they had a blast. And it was kind of the first one. And that's what's great about the region is that, you know, they've got resources and they've got, you know, us as an agency. So they have fresh ideas and they have the space to do some of these innovative things to serve kind of as a model for the other colleges or the colleges in their region.

Know so now everybody's talking about how do we do TikTok and should we be doing this and all of that? And and you can make a case, yes, you can make a case no as far as serving ads goes. And we won't necessarily get into that here unless you want to, but of course they should have a TikTok account. And you know, if you've got students with

Cheryl Broom (08:59.17)
Cell phones and you know they're already making content. There's no reason why the colleges can't engage some of their biggest fans to, you know, to produce content for them. So that's kind of what we're trying to do is A, you know, obviously create a new creative and adopt a new platform and start to advertise in it. That's you know our job as the agency. But they were most excited about it because nobody's really doing it yet and they get to be that model. Yeah, really cool. And if you go to futurebelt.org.

You can visit the TikTok channel and click on that. And the YouTube channel also has the ads that we ran during the Olympics, which have the actors and tell a in 30 seconds tell a really great story. Yes. And I think this new fresh creative and the fresh look, it's worked, right? We've seen improvements in campaign performance. Yeah, we have actually, you know, the the campaigns historically performed pretty well, but

I wanted to kind of take a different approach with it. I felt like we needed to be doing some heavier lifting and prospecting students earlier in their path. And, you know, the job of the brand is to connect potential students with programs that will put them into careers. And so we've made some pretty big changes into how we're targeting and

The messages that we're putting out there. And so far, you know, it's been, I think, four months or so now. The numbers have looked really, really good. You know, the pay-per-click numbers are down, which is a good thing. Their costs are down per click. So that means there's more volume coming through the Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat campaigns. You know, the way that we're doing this now is where we've got kind of a general message out there about the brand and about its position in that market. But then we also are

Pushing specific industry sectors each month. So they're all getting a lot of really good coverage and a lot of eyeballs. And people are really showing a lot of interest. And we've noticed, you know, our effective CPM rates, essentially, our costs have come down, which again gets us more traffic volume. And of course, we're running on spectrum television. We've got billboards up off the 55. We've got bus tails running around Orange County. So there's a lot of really, really great.

Cheryl Broom (11:23.956)
messages out there. And of course we know that this is a very critical time for for colleges to recruit and enroll their students. Well great. Well as we wrap up our conversation, any lessons you've learned or tips you can give to colleges who kind of are at that turning point with their own campaigns. Things have been going pretty well for a couple of years, but they're ready to kick it up a notch or to maybe pivot. Any advice you can give them? yeah. So

Your newsletter this month actually was a really interesting piece where you're talking about what's in it for them. You know, a lot of the colleges talk about themselves and their great programs and their faculty and their facilities and whatever, and that's all great. But you know, the messages that we see that are really performing the best are the ones that are talking about students and their successes, and they're positioning the students' hopes and dreams and goals as

kind of critical mission of the colleges because these students, as you rightfully stated, what's in it for them? They're making a sacrifice, they're, you know, making a financial commitment and a time commitment to pursuing their education, making that investment in themselves for the future. And so we really, you know, the messages we see that are performing the best are really just kind of calling to those goals and dreams and encouraging them to, you know, to fulfill that part of their passion.

And then on the more kind of technical side is just the more specific you can be in your demographics, the better. We have in-market education audiences that we use, plus age and gender and other interests and things like that, language spoken, et cetera. And what that does is it gives us the ability to allocate based on data that's coming in, right? So none of this is really new in doing pretty sophisticated segmentation.

But if colleges are just kind of out there and they're running ads to a pretty big demographic, even though they're all potential students, it's good to kind of divide those up into sub-segments so that you can see how they perform against each other. And it could lead to some changes in how you spend your budget, you know, like if one specific segment is performing better than another.

Cheryl Broom (13:45.696)
Maybe you want to appeal to them more because you're getting, you know, a better response. but without having those segments really defined and set up in ads manager, you don't really know. You'll get some demographic data, but you don't have the dials to turn in order to optimize your spend based on the data that you're getting. So those are kind of the two things. There's a creative side, and then there's the more technical side. And I hope that is helpful. Very helpful. Well.

I appreciate you taking the time to talk about the campaign. And like I mentioned, people can can see lots of cool things. I mean, you didn't even start to touch on what we've accomplished in the last couple of months. We've got a accessibility widget on the website that is amazing. We have a translation widget on the website. So now people can read content in multiple languages. We have a pop-up that's asking.

People who've been served an ad and come to our website from an ad. It asks them how they heard what ad they saw and enters them in a drawing and were able to collect information that way. And then we've also put on a chat feature, an online receptionist. So it's like, well, we've done a lot in the last couple of months or in the last eight months. So I encourage people to go to futurebelt.org and see all of that that we've talked about today. Yeah, that's a great point. And perhaps at some point we should.

You know, talk about some of that. I mean, any one of those things could be its own podcast, but you know, we could talk about league generation efforts. Everybody that I talk to about what we're doing with Saddleback and with Future Build is very interested in just getting data that they can bounce up against their enrollment data to measure the efficacy of their marketing efforts. And so we should talk about that. And if anybody listening is interested in uncovering some kind of

you know, 501 level lead generation tactics, we can definitely talk to them and and maybe you and I can do a podcast and specifically talk about that. And you know, the nerds will like it. I like it. So we we've been talking for 10 minutes. And in the 10 minutes, you now have to make updates to the website. And you just booked yourself on another podcast. Yes. And by the way, with a lot of dirty dishes in the sink.

Cheryl Broom (15:59.566)
Don't remind me. I know that's on me today. But yes, so thank you for having me. And if I'm more than happy anytime to talk about the future built, is the client I have to say, it's most near and dear to my heart. They're doing a lot of great work. They're giving and enabling us to do a lot of really creative things. And as much as we talk about our successes, I just really want them to know how much we appreciate them and the opportunity to work in such a great market. And

You know, we're we're very happy to to have the privilege of working with them. Right. Well, thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you. So my next guest, Liz, is a really dynamic communications and public relations leader. She was the public information officer for Antelope Valley College.

And has also worked for Stanford University and manages a lot of great projects for graduate communications. I worked with her on a really unique, challenging project in which we mapped out a full communication strategy centered around the guided pathways model. And she shares some of her invaluable expertise, some really great takeaways from my conversation with her.

I wanted to start off by giving you a chance to talk a little bit about your background and the expertise you bring. Sure. So I'm Liz Diachin. That's the hardest thing to know about me, is how to pronounce my last name. I have a background in business and journalism. Have a 20-year-plus career focused on really communication and new media strategy. So I've spent a lot of that going back and forth between sort of the high-tech startup world.

And higher education, which is fun for me because I like to take what I learn when I'm working with high-tech startups and put that in higher education. And then I like to take what I learned in higher education and move it back and forth. I just really am passionate about creating cool media strategies for colleges to be kind of innovative to get new students. Great. And speaking of innovation, the project that you and I worked on this past year.

Cheryl Broom (18:17.342)
I really felt was like a one-of-a-kind project. It was research-based, it was specific to a college's internal goals, and it's really revolutionized the way that they've organized and executed some of their communication strategies. So I invited you on to talk about one of my nearest and dearest clients, Reidley College, and the work, the guided pathways work we did with them. So tell me a little bit about.

That project? So I would imagine most people in higher ed, especially in the community college system, have heard at the very least about guided pathways. Many people are in the middle of a guided pathways implementation right now. I think the really important thing for those people that may not is the idea that guided pathways provides this clear path and course structure.

For students. So it promotes better class decisions and it really prepares students for success. They're the four pillars about ensuring student success and creating those pathways. For those of us who work in the system, we know that it takes a lot of work on the back end to create a system that works with this idea of this sort of guided, simplified pathway. I used the analogy of like, you know, the duck underwater, like.

It looks so smooth on top of the water, but we're really working hard underneath. So the thing that makes guided pathways implementation tricky is that we go in, we come up with how we want to make this work as a college. We've done a lot of complicated work internally to get this working for students. And then when it's time to communicate that to students, how do we back it out and how do we simplify that? What our goal is.

From the beginning is to simplify this process and this pathway. How do we pull back out of all of the work we've done and communicate that really simply to future and current students? Yeah, and I loved this project because when I was at MiraCosta College, we had started the Guided Pathways model, and everybody wanted me to get the word out before any of the work was done. And I remember being like really

Cheryl Broom (20:31.234)
confused like how do I explain this because like it's not in place and why do students even care about it right now? So it was challenging. And then Reidley College had done so much work. They have their pathways developed. They have pathway coordinators, pathway counselors. And so they've done the work and now the challenge was how do we explain this new paradigm, this new model in a way that makes sense to students who've never heard of this concept before.

Exactly. And I think that that's the part that sometimes gets missed is that if you're doing a good job of communicating pathways to students, you don't even have to talk about pathways that much. They're not going to care about all of the committees that have put in all of this work and effort and time.

They care about the fact that, I can go meet with a counselor. They understand my needs. They're helping me make sure I get the right classes and the right support system that I need. And it becomes this seamless process that I think is, you know, potentially the holy grail of the community college system is this seamless, easy transition for students so they can focus on what really matters. Students are able to focus on their education, on what's going on in their personal life. They're able to focus on what their future goals are.

And because we've done so much work, sometimes we get a little, well, but we've done all this, we need to tell you about it. No, we don't necessarily need to. We need to sh tell you about the end product. And I think that's what was really fun about Readly is that we got to say, great, you've done all this, let's let's focus on that end goal and how we make this so simple for students because you've already created that framework for them. Exactly. And when we started this project.

I had been speaking to the college president and vice president and had come to a couple of guided pathways committees. And everybody was so excited about their work and they really wanted to start just having the work be part of their everyday communications. And then some of the ideas that came out were like, let's have a podcast, let's put lawn signs on people's lawn. This was all these like crazy out there ideas.

Cheryl Broom (22:43.222)
And you and I came in and were like, wait, hold on a second, before we do all these like huge big ideas, let's really look at how you're communicating to parents and students from the very beginning of their their college experience. And how are we integrating this vernacular and encouraging people to see a counselor and talking about where resources are? So we kind of made them take a step back and then developed this entire communications matrix.

That has touch points all the way through a student's journey from application through the first semester. So I remember when we went to a lot of meetings and talked to a lot of people, and then we presented this plan in the matrix, and we were like, how do we do this without completely overwhelming everybody? Absolutely, absolutely. Well, because there were so many ideas. And I get this, having worked as you know, a public information officer for a community college, you get excited about.

a new initiative and you want it to succeed. And so the thought is, I'm gonna throw everything, including the kitchen sink, at this. I'm gonna do it all. But guess what? You don't have the budget for it and you don't have the staff or time to do it yourself. So how are you strategic about that? How are you thoughtful about making the best choices? What I really like is that at Graduate Communications, we've worked with other colleges. So we know what generally the best practices are.

We can do the research and look at what programs across the country are being successful with guided pathways. And then we can match that with targeted surveys and research of the colleges, specific students, to know what will work for them. We can see these really subtle nuances in social media preferences, mass media usage.

How they're using the college website. Are they there to ask questions or do they just go when they're first interested in applying? Like how exactly are they using all of those resources? And then based on that, we can say, here's what we think is going to be the best bang for your buck. And quite frankly, probably more important, your staff time. Cause I think that's really becoming the tighter resource these days. Yeah, and that's a great point, because we wrote a recommendation document.

Cheryl Broom (25:00.396)
We surveyed 880 students. So we had a lot of student input. I think we ended up going to 22 committee meetings. It was a lot. It was a number of committee meetings, but you know, it reminded me I like those committee meetings. Some of them, you know, but I I generally like them. You get some really interesting and engaging input in them, but there are a lot of committees. They were so positive. Like nobody complained in the committee meetings. Everybody had great ideas. It was just

It was wonderful. I actually enjoyed it. Did I think you and I had a little bit of nostalgia going to the committee meetings? Like this used to be your life, was living in these committees. You know, I think the interesting thing, and this is maybe broader about California community colleges in general, is that when you take a traditional, and why I might like community colleges and working with community colleges a little better, when you take a traditional four-year college, it creates this great melting pot of people coming from all different locations.

But I think at community colleges, while you do get some of that external input, you get the flair and the flavor of the local community. and so whether that is a college in you know, downtown Los Angeles or out by the beach where you are, Cheryl, like you get these sort of this real sense of community. And I think Readley is just one of the coolest examples of that. I mean, I I think I know California pretty well, but like.

Probably the first three meetings, I had to quickly pull up a map and remind myself of where it is in the state. And then when you talk to them, you get this homey community vibe. I remember in one of the community meetings, them talking about how they would hang a banner up on their like downtown street.

To remind people that school was starting. And I just found that so sweet and endearing. And as California grows and communities get bigger and bigger, you don't see as much of that sense of community. And that was really one of the things that made them special to work with. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, you you really hit the nail on the head with that. They really had a great community. And the communications plan, I think, is gonna help make that even stronger.

Cheryl Broom (27:09.294)
Because we they even asked us to focus on high school parents. So we wrote a whole sector on touch points for high school parents just to involve the community. so I I was really excited and I just told you this right when we got on the call to learn that they've hired somebody to implement the communications plan. So sometimes as consultants, we come in and we do all this research and work and make recommendations, and then you wonder, what happened? Is it on a shelf in someone's office? Like what happened?

And they've hired a wonderful young man who is now taking these ideas and making them even better and doing implementation. And I can't wait to check in with them in a year and see what's happened. Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic takeaway. This idea of a communications plan being a year-long strategy. You know, too often we see these sort of

Bulk, my gosh, the fall semester is starting in a month. We need to send all of this stuff out. But the reality is that college decisions and future goals and life decisions happen slowly over time. And so as colleges, if we create that sense of community, like they're able to do at Reevely by touching in with potential students and parents and community members throughout the year on this really consistent basis, we

continue to develop that sense of community. And that's what makes students end up at your college, not just some flashy mailing that they may have gotten at one specific time. Excellent takeaway. One year plan, please people think in longer increments. Well, Liz, it was wonderful to work with you on that project. And like I said, it was one of my favorite things that that I think we did in the whole year. And I'm really excited to see what the college does with it now.

Absolutely, me too. Well, thank you so much for your time and I guess we'll get back to work on the next big project. Next big project. It's always around the corner. My next guest is Michael Maehan, who has a PhD in American literature, which means he's a fantastic writer and really good at critical thinking.

Cheryl Broom (29:28.586)
And he has more than 10 years of experience writing and managing communications within the higher education space. And he and I worked on just this fantastic campaign to recruit more Hispanic students to a college here in Southern California. And Michael was in charge of putting together the strategy and making sure that our messaging really hit the mark with our target audience. He has some really, really, really good tips.

for you to consider, especially when you're maybe targeting an audience through your media buy or your marketing channels that you haven't ever targeted before. some ways to set up those campaigns and to really make sure that your messaging resonates. Enjoy the conversation with them. So, Michael, thank you so much for joining me today. Happy to be here. Yeah, and you are our newest employee, our newest team member.

More than an employee, you're a team member. Yay. An important team member. And you have been hard at work at a project that I'm really excited to share. But before we go there, I wanted to give you the opportunity to tell everyone about yourself and your amazing background. Well, I'm so excited to be here and so excited to be part of the graduate team. My name, for those of you that know me, my name is Michael Mahan. For those of you that don't know me, my name is still Michael Mahan.

I've got a PhD in English and American literature. I had dreams of becoming a professor one day. I studied American studies, critical theory, and American lit last 50 years and along my way moved into writing and marketing writing, especially for colleges and advancement. And so that's kind of what I've been doing for the last 10 years and really, really love this kind of work. I feel like it's important work. I feel like it's

makes a difference, you know. I've won a couple nice awards from NCMPR and Case, including a gold paragon from NCMPR. And in my spare time, I'm also a traditionally published children's author. So I've actually won something called the Robert F. Seibert Honor for Nonfiction Children's Books from the American Library Association, which is pretty cool because that's the same group that gives out the Caldecott and the Newberry.

Cheryl Broom (31:50.846)
These for nonfiction picture books about musicians that I write. So again, I'm passionate about that in the same way that I'm passionate about writing for community colleges. And that I hope this work makes a difference and impacts and helps people make their lives better, whether or not they're eight years old or they're 18. So that's a little bit about me. Well, your amazing creative background was the perfect fit for a project that we were hired to do this year. And when you

joined our team, I was like, I've got the perfect thing for you to start off with because it required a lot of creativity. It required some thinking outside the box and it was so fast moving. Like we had to get things done so quickly. And this isn't going to come to surprise for any of the listeners who work at colleges. We won the contract and it took a long time for procurement to execute it. So we lost a lot of valuable time.

That we could have used for creative development to impact fall semester. So everything got condensed, but you jumped right on it and you took care of it. So I want you to kind of introduce the project. What am I talking about? It's like a game show. What is behind the curtain? What am I talking about? Tell us about the project and what your approach was. Sure. This is a really cool project. so like Cheryl said, we had like three weeks, three to four weeks to kind of get it off the ground once we were up and running.

Basically, this was for Irvine Valley College here in Southern California. And they were looking to just do a better job of reaching Hispanic and Latinx students, ages 18 to 26. So this is an important, very large demographic, especially in Southern California. And IVC has larger goals of eventually securing their Hispanic serving institution designation.

But I think this is kind of one step before that, which is just their internal realization that maybe they weren't doing as much as they could to talk to and speak to this very important and very hungry audience, hungry for education. And so the question for us was how do we craft a campaign that speaks to this audience in a way that is authentic, incredible? Because I don't come from a Spanish speaking or Hispanic or Latinx background myself. So

Cheryl Broom (34:10.732)
The first step was to involve stakeholders who could provide insight into Hispanic culture and specifically Hispanic culture in Orange County. And the more that we do stuff like this, the more we realize that it's not just speaking to Latinx students, it's speaking to Latinx students where you are in regionally, because regionally cultures change. We kind of have this big umbrella for Hispanic culture, but

As we get more specific, Orange County is different than other places. So we had Frank Rivera, who is IBC's outreach manager, and he's provided really invaluable insight. And this is something that I'd recommend to any marketing department targeting a culture that may be outside of one's own frame of reference, is to just look around yourself and who is the closest person to you that might have insight into.

the cultural practices or the language of the group that you're trying to target. So not only did Frank give us insight into direction, but he was also a great sounding board for ideas and especially language. And the premise that sets this campaign apart is that we adopted a kind of mixed language approach in which we're basically mixing English and Spanish. We're using Spanglish, right?

In the campaign language, in the same way that our prospects do in their everyday lives. Frank and having his insight really allowed us and helped us to do this in an authentic way. That wasn't, you know, just us pandering or trying to find the right idea. And just that idea of using mixed language captures the essence of the campaign, which is basically to communicate to these prospects that.

IVC is a place where they belong. And that has really been a big goal of this overall. One of the extra bonuses of involving stakeholders like Frank is that we weren't just able to authentically write in this mixed language style, but that he and his wife were able to offer colloquialisms that we could use, which further created this sense of authenticity. And then that insider knowledge also helped guide our rhetoric.

Cheryl Broom (36:31.33)
To focus on those things that this audience is specifically concerned about. So Frank sent me, you know, articles talking about the immigrant experience. For example, how students from working class homes are often raised in an environment where family comes first. And when you think about it, this makes perfect sense. This is a kind of tribal survival tactic. We're all in it together. And so

You kind of have to speak to that, or you have to address that, or at least be aware of it when you're crafting campaigns for an audience like this, because you want to speak to how higher education benefits not just the individual, but the whole family. So these kind of insights are really critical because they help you craft your argument, right? So it speaks specifically to the needs of the students that you're trying to reach.

Another key piece of insight was he suggested I had read it before, but I hadn't really thought of it being applicable. But the let's see, the title is the report and recommendations from proving black and African American student outcomes, which was a report that came out from the California Community Colleges Black and African American Advisory Panel. And Frank's insight was that Hispanic first generation students.

endure a lot of the same issues and concerns that the report had pointed out. So the point being, if we can better understand the barriers and challenges being faced by our prospects, we can better craft messages to speak to those concerns. And so that was another great piece of just insight that having a stakeholder like that involved in the process really helped us kind of guide as we developed the campaign. And this campaign was crazy.

Cheryl said this was three to four weeks where we needed to get postcards done for like a 15,000 person mailing that was going to happen. We have digital ads, of course. We have bus shelter ads, a lot of moving parts, but a lot of great insight that helped craft the language and rhetoric of the campaign itself. And finally, it kind of all comes together in our video work.

Cheryl Broom (38:44.15)
Which is not complete yet, but we're looking at it being done in just a couple of weeks. And this is really cool because this is going to feature IBC president, Dr. John Hernandez, who came from a working class background, is of Latinx and Hispanic descent. It's an ad, so it's not just a profile, but it'll be crafted in a way that we get to see pieces of his story that kind of authentically make a case for.

You know, why higher education can be a life-changing investment of time and family resources. Another excellent opportunity to tell an authentic story from the culture, not to the culture. You know, and I think that's an important difference that this campaign is kind of, you know, making and trying to take in terms of its approach. So anyway, as you can probably tell, I'm super excited. It's just getting launched. All the pieces are just going live, you know, this week. So

Like I said, I'm just excited for how everything has come together to tell an authentic story that positions IBC as a welcoming home for for Latinx students. So this is an important message. Yeah, it is a great, great campaign. The messaging is spot on. The use of English and Spanish together is really creative. It sends a a very welcoming message.

The spotlight on the president and on a graduate who, you know, both are extremely successful people, tells a compelling story. And one of my favorite things about the campaign that you didn't mention is that we wanted to use a tagline to tie all of this together. Yeah. And our and the director of communications was completely open to it. She said, Yo, I love that idea. Let's set this campaign apart from what we do, you know, with the rest of our college marketing. So

So we chose a the tagline adelante, which in Spanish means like, let's go forward, let's move forward, like it's very positive, like we can do this type of feeling. And they loved it. And now I've been seeing like the college president on LinkedIn and Frank and Diane, our clients on LinkedIn, like using the tagline. So it's like caught on. It's it's catchy. Yeah.

Cheryl Broom (40:55.018)
It really encapsulates, I think, all the ideas that IVC wants to communicate in this campaign. It's a great lesson too, why taglines are so useful because it it really helps us tie all the collateral together with this overarching theme, right? Of forging ahead, of making progress and improving ourselves. Great message.

Yeah, and we're like, we're in this together and let's all move forward. And it's just really positive. So sure is. Yeah, it's a great campaign. And I hope that we'll have time. I as I'm talking to every single person on this podcast, I'm like, we have no time to talk about our work. I'd love to put some samples of this work up on our website. So maybe when we get some results in and the videos are done, we'll build out a page so people can come and see the wonderful work that you do. Yeah, that's great idea. Yeah.

Well, thank you, Michael, so much. I'm so happy that you're part of our team. Yeah, me too. you know what? If people want to check it out, they can visit adelanteiv. That's the land one of the landing page that we created that contains some of the messaging, contains some of the stuff that we pulled together. But you know, we're using that as a landing page for the for the campaign. So hopefully it doesn't screw up our metrics. But be like, why are people from I we have listened from flooding flooding to it now?

Yeah. Thank you for having me. Great, thanks. My next guest is the wonderful Jamie McNech. Jamie and I met when she was the marketing director for Western Nevada College and she now works for Graduate Communications as one of our communications strategists. And this past year she oversaw an incredible job in which we produced

Hundreds of pieces of really strategic collateral in a record-breaking time. All right. Well, I'm excited to have you on the show today to talk about one of my favorite projects of the year. But before we do that, tell me a little bit about you and your background and where you worked before working with graduate communications. Sure. Well, I'm a career-long marketing professional, which sounds incredibly

Cheryl Broom (43:13.57)
Boring when you say it that way. But I like to think that I'm a creator and an innovator in that marketing space. I've spent the past 11 years in higher education. And most recently I was the director of marketing communications for Western Nevada College. Great. And you made a big career decision in COVID to leave that position, right? I did. I did. You know, for a long time, I think balanced being a mom and a and a wife and

Just decided in the middle of all of this that being at home was where I wanted to be. And it was lucky for me because I was able to ask you to come on board and manage a very large, very complex, very aggressive, aggressive timeline project. And you did fantastic. And I was just thrilled with how it turned out. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about this project and have you tell us what was it all about?

I just finished up a project for California Virtual Campus that focused on telling the story about immense success that they had with one of their grants. Right. And their grant focused on allowing community colleges across the state of California to develop short-term online certificates so that students could earn a certificate quickly in a career education field of study and then get a job. So the grants were

Perfectly timed, I think, with what students wanted during COVID. They wanted something online and something fast. Right. And I think a lot of people realized that the online space was where they not only needed to be, but wanted to be and liked to be. And COVID had a lot of us really thinking about changes, changes in our career paths and changes in what we wanted to do. Well, and as you said that, I just thought to myself, wow, what a perfect marriage with you on this project because COVID.

Had you make a major change. And now you're communicating to students across all of California on how they can make a major change as well. So right. And so that, yeah, that worked out really well, I think, just by coincidence. Yeah, by coincidence. And one of the things I liked that you had done because beyond just managing this project, you were the lead writer on it. So you wrote a magazine, you wrote a video, you wrote toolkits. And one of the things I really liked with the approach you

Cheryl Broom (45:35.906)
Took was you didn't talk so much about the programs themselves, but you focused on the needs of the local community and the type of jobs that were available. So thinking about like the videos, I really loved how they said like the Central Coast needs preschool teachers. And so you were able to weave kind of a story into the messaging that you developed. Yeah. So I think during my time at Western.

you know, Western Nevada College is a really small college up here in the capital city of Nevada. And because it we're so small, the marketing people wear a lot of hats. And so we would be in involved in enrollment, we would be involved in student engagement, we would be involved in all of these things. And we focused a lot on just being, you know, real and kind of stepping out of that collegiate speak, sort of say, to to try to be.

know what our students need us to be and say things in a way that's very conversational, that's very welcoming. And so I really tried to bring that to what this project had as well. And I think that's a really good reminder as we work on creative collateral and try to tell, you know, the story of grants and the stories of like short-term certificates. Like we even talked about like what does short-term certificate mean? Like what does that mean? Do people know what it means? How do we define it?

Right. and to keep that in mind as you write. Yes, because you know, two years or three years for this generation of younger people right now seems like a very long time. So short term, where it's a semester or six months, seems more attainable for for this kind of generation that wants everything pretty quickly. So in this massive project, I don't think we've really touched yet on the size.

Tell the listeners what exactly we helped CVC develop. Sure. This project was big. So the first thing, and you talked about it a little bit, was we developed a magazine style impact report that talked about different colleges that were a part of the grant, that talked about the big wins of the grant and really helped for their stakeholders capture the success that the grant had.

Cheryl Broom (47:47.576)
To complement that, we had a short whiteboard animated video that really called out those numbers again so that people could in a very short amount of time, 60 seconds, see the impact that the grant had. Then we developed 21 toolkits. They were regional and they were pathway specific. And that's where you talked about, you know, the South Central Coast needs educators or business professionals or whatever the industry specific.

Pathway was we did 21 toolkits. And the toolkits included a 60-second video, radio scripts, and Spotify scripts, social media content, digital ads. we did posters, brochures, and a press release, regional press releases, and we did them in English and Spanish. And how quickly did we do all of this?

This this was so fast. Like three to four months. I think you had already kind of started the project before I came on board, but yeah, three to four months were my side of it from start to finish. Yeah. And I remember you saying when we were when we were completely done and we met with all of our stakeholders, you said, like, I've worked at a college for a decade and we would have never been able to do this so quick. No, you know, when you're in that

role with your tiny little marketing team and you're managing all the priorities of a college to complete a project of this size, which I think colleges really need is nearly impossible. And a lot of times you have a lot of people at the table, right? You have, you know, approvals by committees and things like that that was really draw out that process. So the fact that we were able to deliver on all of these pieces in that amount of time was

was just amazing. It was amazing. And of everything you did and you wrote and you worked on, did you have a favorite piece of it? I mean, it's always really cool to see what you've written kind of come to life and because it's really tangible and you can say, you know, those are my words. So I I like that project just because that is my writing. But the whiteboard animated video is probably the coolest piece of this project for me because it's something I hadn't done before.

Cheryl Broom (50:09.018)
And it just looked really cool and not boring and just was a little bit different. So that's probably my favorite in terms of like the cool factor, but in terms of the Brad factor, like the impact report looks really great. Yeah. Well, all around you did an amazing job. And I was wondering if you had advice for colleges who maybe want to embark on something like this where they want to create.

you know, consistent collateral across departments or across programs. Like how do you how do you bite off a project of this size and and actually get it done? Well, I think having partners like us is really important because and I didn't do it alone either. You know, we had somebody who did the videography for us. We had somebody who did all the design work for us. So within our toolkit we have, you know, experts in these different pieces of marketing who

could come to the table and help us out. So I don't know if this is advice. I would just say like finding partner. That's it. Find a partner. Don't keep all the work for yourself. Sometimes it is nice to have somebody organize and tackle things for you. Right. And I think we also pushed the timeline along because we knew we had to get it done by June 30th.

So, you know, we were like, this has to get done. You have to approve this. Look at the pictures, approve the content. What do you think about the writing? so it kept it moving. When you hire an agency partner, you have a project manager and you have somebody who's gonna keep you on track, keep you on schedule, make sure all the deliverables are met and that you can you can meet your timelines. Great. Well, you did an excellent job. And I think people who are interested in seeing the work, we're gonna

feature some of it on our website and then the CVC I was gonna be putting some of it up on their site as well. So I encourage people to check it out because it's really, really amazing. And Jamie, I know you're off to your next project. And I'm not gonna ask you about it because it is a secret. It's actually Jamie is going to be secret shopping some colleges across the nation. Well I just told everybody. So you but

Cheryl Broom (52:24.91)
I know you're supposed to make secret, but hopefully next year if we when we do this podcast again, that's something that you can talk about because you had amazing insights with that project as well. And it's been great having you on the team. Well, thank you. Thank you for reaching out to me. Thank you for believing that I could be a part of this team. I appreciate it.

My next guest is Kirsten Riley, who is probably the most organized, detail-oriented project manager I have ever met. And this past year, Kirsten helped me with a really large media buy for a client here in Southern California and just did an amazing job keeping track of hundreds of moving pieces, lots of different strategies across a whole bunch of different platforms.

And at the end of the day, the campaign just crushed it. So she has a lot of great advice on how to manage your own media buying campaigns and ways to make sure that they are a success. Well, Kirsten, thank you so much. I know how busy you are, so I'm so happy you can join me today. Yeah, well, thank you, Cheryl, for having me. Well, I wanted to start off by having you tell us a little bit about the expertise you bring to the graduate communications team and what your role is.

Absolutely. So I have been a project manager through and through, through all of all of the different places that I've worked. I just love taking a project, taking all of these different pieces of the puzzle, putting them together, attaching a timeline to it, and then making it happen and just really moving it forward to completion. Well, and and that is really your area of expertise. So I have been so impressed by how well you can keep things moving and keep these like really complex media buys going.

So that's why I wanted you to come on today and talk about one of the projects that we worked on this year, which is a fantastic college here in Southern California called Net San Yesento. And you managed probably our most complicated media buy of the year. So tell me a little bit about what it was and the goals and some of the statistics. Sure, absolutely. So it was a media buy through Facebook.

Cheryl Broom (54:48.48)
Instagram, YouTube. So we had a couple different videos. And then we did a full digital marketing campaign as well. And so we just ran it for the summer enrollment and the fall enrollment. So we started in, I think it was May for summer enrollment and ran all the way through June and then did a pause with all of the ads and people engaging with it. And then we picked it up again in July for the fall enrollment. And really the whole

Purpose and goal of the campaign was to first of all increase enrollment, especially with some of the dropouts from COVID and you know and other external circumstances. And then also Matt San Yacinto rolled out four brand new programs in aviation, culinary, engineering, and GIS, the info systems. It was a really fun campaign to work on. We had so much engagement. Our engagement was like through the roof.

so that was that was just really exciting to see and really, really rewarding as well. What when you talk about engagement, what did you find that people were engaging the most with with all these ads running? What did the best? The YouTube video about all of the programs that did really well. We would have thousands of views every week. we ran a text campaign, and so we were provided the cell phone numbers of the students.

And we we included a bit.ly link within that text campaign going to the schedule of classes pages on the Mount San Yacinto website. And we had probably like over a 10% click-through rate on that text, which is pretty remarkable. So that did really well. People loved the ads, and I feel like we did a good job with getting the ads to speak to prospective students.

We just made it kind of blend into the Instagram feed. So you really had to look up at the top to see like the sponsored content. otherwise it just looked like a photo promoting classes and then getting people to engage with Mount San Yacinto. I really like that idea of the bit.ly link because when you do text messages, first of all, not a lot of colleges will let us do text messages. So this was really an exciting.

Cheryl Broom (57:02.254)
Tactic to use because clearly everybody's on their phone all the time. And they opt into receiving messages when they apply to the college. So we were getting people who have applied and not enrolled for the last couple of semesters, just these huge lists of like 20,000 people to text. And we can tell who opens a text. And like everybody opens a text. It's that was like 98% open rate, but we really wanted to see are they actually engaging with the text with the content?

And by using that bitly link, we were able to tell like how many people were opening it. And every time we sent a text message, it was like what eight to twelve percent open rate, which is phenomenal. Yeah. And with that, the text platform is really powerful because potential students can reply just as they're texting their friend and it goes directly to us and we can answer their questions like one on one. And you know, 90% of the questions is.

Talk to a counselor, you know, here's the phone number for the counseling services, admission, but it really gives that like one-on-one personal touch of texting, texting your your friend or your your colleague. I love it. It's the human touch of marketing, and that's what we need more of. Okay. You need more of it. And that was really helpful for the college. I know you also did a lot of email marketing as part of this campaign. And how did that go? That went really well. yeah. So we had, I think.

Six different emails going out for for each summer and fall. We saw our open rates. one of the highest open rates we had was like 28%. It might have even been 29, which is phenomenal. You know, and the click-through rate on that one was like 13%. So clearly people wanted this content, you know, they they were really engaged with it. they wanted to take classes, which we saw is really exciting and and really motivating. So email went really well. And then also summer was all.

virtual. And so and Mount San Jacinto is going back in person, at least a a hybrid schedule for fall. And so that was exciting as well to be able to announce back in person, you know, safely in person. And we're taking these these preventative measures to keep everybody safe but come to campus. Right. Were there any speed bumps? Anything happen along the way that that made you pause or Yeah, I mean at every every single project I've worked on on at this scale

Cheryl Broom (59:27.806)
As some sort of speed bump or hiccup or somebody says, wait, wait, pause, stop. And that's normal, especially when you're doing something at this level with this many stakeholders. And like Cheryl mentioned, we we sent the email to, I think it was almost 28,000 students, and the text went out to I think about 22,000 students. And so at one point, we you know we just didn't loop in the correct stakeholders from an early enough standpoint.

Which was a great thing to have because the college started getting tons of email and phone call questions about the campaign that we were doing, which is a great marketing problem. Like too many people are contacting us about enrollment. And so we just kind of had to take a step back and then loop in all of the admissions and enrollment folks to make sure that they were on par with the messages that we were sending and to give them the schedule of when we were sending messages.

So that they would know, okay, staff. They just sent a message we have to staff up, you know, for the next six hours to field all of these questions we're about to get. Good problems, definitely, but just something that you have to work through. I love those problems. Yes, those are good problems to have. Well, any other advice? I mean, you talked about making sure that you involve the stakeholders, especially the people who might be inundated with phone calls or emails, but any other advice you want to give to colleges who are

Going embark on large complex media campaigns? First and foremost is set a timeline. It's nice when you have classes start date. So, you know, classes start August 16th, work backwards. You know, what needs to happen the week before and how many emails are you gonna send? And you just build everything backwards from your start dates. And also with when you're building that timeline, build in buffer. Cause like I said, if you need to get stakeholder approval and it usually takes one day, give yourself

Two or three days to get that stakeholder approval because you know they get busy, they have other things going on. so really timelines would be my my number one piece of advice for these colleges. And second, I mean shameless plug is work with experts in your field like graduate communications. you know, Cheryl and the team does such a great job at knowing the community college system, knowing what potential students want and how to

Cheryl Broom (01:01:40.642)
get the messages in front of these potential students like what we talked about, like the text messages and the email and the the Instagram ads. and it's it's really paid off a bit a big return for MSJC. Well awesome. I love the shameless plug. Thank you. But it is true. I mean there's so many moving parts. So many moving parts. And having a plan, having a timeline and having help is great advice. It's going to make your life better and your campaign more successful.

Absolutely. And then it gives the colleges the time to focus on what's most important to them, you know, because I I would guess media buys aren't the most highest priority for what's going on within the college. Yeah. Especially now with all, we know with COVID and going back to school. Yeah, exactly. Thank you so much. Thank you for your amazing work. I can't wait to give you another huge project. I love it. I'm in for it. Good. Well, Kirsten, and thank you for being part of our one year journey.

Yes, absolutely. I'm so happy to be here, Cheryl. Thank you for listening to Higher Education Coffee and Conversation. If you like the podcast, please leave me a five-star rating. And to discover more great higher education related content, make sure to visit us at graduatecommunications dot com. And with that, I'm gonna say thank you for listening. Thank you for the hard work you do for students each and every day.