Cheryl Broom (00:00.11)
Hi, I'm Cheryl Broom, CEO of Graduate Communications. Colleges and universities across the country know that much more needs to be done to meet their goals of equity and inclusion, including doing a better job marketing and telling the stories.

Of people from diverse backgrounds in order to create more diverse campuses. But how do we, and by we I mean communicators, marketers, graphic designers, anybody who's telling stories or is in the business of storytelling, how do we authentically target these important audiences when the audiences and their experiences may be well outside?

of our own. More importantly, how do we as storytellers and marketers avoid such common pitfalls as inauthenticity, tone deafness, and bias when we're telling stories that aren't necessarily our own or we don't have a lot of experience with? Well these are some of the questions that I wanted to talk to our own Graduate Communications own communication strategist about. Dr. Michael Mahan

Has done work for hundreds of colleges across the nation, and also can draw upon his own experience as an award-winning copywriter and as an Asian American children's author of cross-cultural books about Carlos Santana and Muddy Waters. We take a deep dive into practical tactics and strategies that we all can use to navigate the often murky waters of writing about race and culture.

It's an awkward conversation, an important conversation, and a conversation that I thoroughly enjoyed. I think that you're gonna take away a lot from it as well. Enjoy. All right, well, Michael, I'm so happy to have you on the podcast. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I get to see you every day at work. And I didn't get to see this presentation that you made last year at a conference, so I thought this would be a perfect opportunity.

Cheryl Broom (02:25.208)
To relive this great message that you have and to learn a little bit about you and and your work. Well, thanks for including me. And you missed out on the the presentation. I can tell you that right now. I got a lot of compliments back at the booth. It was a great presentation. You know, I had a great group of people that were honest and authentic and excited to have kind of a

I don't know, it's a tricky conversation, right? The whole title here, writing for diversity when you're not. It kind of it's kind of asking for trouble in some ways. But you know, I think that I was lucky. I had a great group of people that were excited to have this kind of hard and difficult conversation. And that that's where it comes from, I think. You know, this deep desire to get it right. Talking about DEI can be tricky, right? Because it matters to us. It's not just a buzzword, it's something that we believe in and something that

we know is important to creating the kind of world that we want to live in. And, you know, I think the irony is that the danger of saying the wrong thing increases exponentially if we don't talk about it. So hopefully today we can talk about it and create a forum for people to or at least you can listen to me get it wrong in the hopes that other people can get it right as a result. So yeah, there's a lot of vulnerability, I think, when we're

when we have to talk about things that we're not comfortable or we haven't been taught how to talk about. And there's so much, I think, fluidity around the right way to talk about diversity. It just changes so often. So yeah, you're right. Sometimes it's easier just not to do anything. Just not say anything. It is. But that's exactly the wrong thing to do. Exactly. Right. Especially when it comes to this kind of tricky stuff. So

Happy Well, before we dive into our conversation, you know, for the listeners out there, Michael is our strategic director. So he is in charge of a lot of our strategy work and writing for our clients, coming up with taglines and brands and conducting research. And like everyone on the team, you actually do a little bit of everything, right? So we're all Jack and Jills of all trade.

Cheryl Broom (04:42.346)
but beyond that, you're also a published author yourself. So tell us a little bit about you as Michael, the author. Yeah, you know, it's kind of a funny little side gig that I have going on. I'm a traditionally published children's author. I actually won an award from the American Library Association a couple of years ago. this is a pretty decent award. It's called the Robert F. Seybert Med honor, and it goes to the top five or six.

nonfiction children's books that are published in the United States in a given year. So a fantastic honor. And the stuff that I've focused on is related or are related to this conversation. You know, I write about musicians and in particular I've tried to focus at least initially on diverse musicians. So I have a book about Muddy Waters, the famous Seminole Blues musician, Carlos Santana, of course, who everyone knows, and a couple others that are

in the works as well. But as an author who writes about culturally diverse people, I'm very aware of kind of the dangers and pitfalls that go along with talking about people outside of your cultures and you know, aware of just the need to be sensitive and to be thoughtful about the way that we have these conversations so that we're not, you know, perpetuating the same cultural biases that our work is trying to kind of overcome or help undo.

Yeah. So how do you when you're writing about something, you know, about a culture or there's a cultural element to what you're writing that isn't something that you're familiar with, where do you start? I think that's a great question. And I think that you start in kind of the same place that you start with as a marketing writer who is trying to write copy to an audience that they're unfamiliar with, right? You start with research. You start with looking into

this culture and this human being and to try and understand them on a a deep level. I think the thing to remember is that because just because I'm outside of a culture doesn't mean that I can't or shouldn't be writing about it. It just means that I have a greater responsibility to get it right. And I have to do my homework. I have to beware of buying into the majority culture stereotypes and biases that we've been fed since we were kids. Right. And

Cheryl Broom (07:11.254)
Know when it comes to copywriting, there are certain tactics that I think we're gonna talk about here in little bit that give us a way to kind of make sure that we're being honest and authentic in the conversations that we're having. As a children's author, it's all about surrounding yourself with people who can read, read your books for you. you know, we call them diversity readers or sensitivity readers. Many of the most all of the big publishing companies do that now is they have people on staff who are paid to vet.

stories about different cultures to make sure that they are being fair and accurate. And these sensitivity readers don't just read books by majority culture authors who are writing about marginalized or minority cultures, but they read the books that are being written by minority authors about minority, their minority cultures as well. Because we can all screw things up. It doesn't matter if we're

insiders to a culture necessarily. There's lots of examples of this in children's publishing that where books have been published that may not have been as sensitive to certain issues as they needed to be. But it kind of, you know, starts with surrounding yourself, giving yourself the opportunity to do the research and dig deep, but also to surround yourself with experts who can be a frame of reference for you to help you help you get it right. Ying you were talking about these people who are reading, you know, reading books to make sure

that they're culturally sensitive, that they're reflective, that there aren't stereotypes in them. I was just thinking like for colleges, at least for when I worked at a college, like no one ever looked at our work and we just like we just published it and just hoped that it was okay. And I'll never forget one campaign we worked on, a professor became upset at a photo and it was a woman sitting down and a white man standing behind her.

Which we had interpreted as him assisting her in class, but she had interpreted as an aggression, as an act of aggression of coming up behind somebody and standing over them was like an like an authoritative, almost abusive posture and was a microaggression. And once that was pointed out, I was like, yeah, now you can't unsee it.

Cheryl Broom (09:32.704)
Now in in in all of our work, I'm like, is there ever a man standing behind a woman? Like we need to get that out. But without having somebody with from a different viewpoint and a different lens look at that, it would have just gone out in the world, you know, and and who knows, it could have offended someone or maybe it wouldn't have. But it was a good lesson, I think, to pay attention to things like that. I think like I think a great lesson for two reasons too. One is because you have the best of intentions with your work.

You are not a racist. You are not a bigot. You are not trying to perpetuate any sort of, you know, microaggression. But that doesn't mean we can't do it unintentionally. And that doesn't make us bad people. It just makes us outsiders to a culture or in need of, you know, more understanding. And so having the courage to create a frame of reference to go and ask somebody else for direction, I think is part of one of the big steps here.

for people is to understand that as professionals, we get it wrong, right? We can get it wrong. that the way that you set yourself up to get it right is by surrounding yourself with people who can help guide you. And you avoided getting it wrong in a big way by kind of vetting that image with somebody who could who could help you or provide perspective, you know, and I think that's a that's a great lesson.

So conversations and research, a very good way to start anything. I mean, really anything, whether or not you're writing about another culture or or trying to include diversity in your writing. I mean, really in anything you're doing when it comes to writing and marketing, you should be having conversations. But it just seems like there's something really difficult about this particular conversation. Yeah, I think that you're right. I think we're all scared of getting it wrong.

Yeah. and I think it kind of shuts the conversation down. But we have to you have to risk risk getting it wrong to get it right. You know, there's a fundamental lesson in creativity there is you kind of have to stumble your way two steps forward, one step back. But hopefully again, if you're surrounded by the people who can help kind of guide you, you can get it wrong less or without hurting anybody initially as you move forward. So beyond those conversations and initial research, what are some of your other kind of tips and tricks for people?

Cheryl Broom (11:53.548)
I think that well, okay. I'm gonna so let me position myself first. So Dr. Michael Mahan, PhD in English and American literature. I actually study literary theory. So this like my specialization was post-colonialism, African American criticism, feminist criticism, Marxist theory, all these interesting perspectives on how to read and understand culture. So I come from a background of studying this stuff.

But not necessarily living it. So I am the son of a Chinese, courageous Taiwanese, actually from Taiwan, a Taiwanese immigrant who came to the United States in the early 70s, and a American, European mutt of a father who's Irish and Scottish and all those good things, and do not look necessarily Asian American. So I have kind of an interesting background that.

brings these two cultures together, but not in a way that's necessarily reflected in my appearance. And so because of that, I'm very kind of American and white looking and or like I'm kind of a a brown mutt of some sort. You don't really figure it out when you first look at me. But because of that, my I've never experienced overt racism. And so I'm very fortunate in in that regard. My upbringing is very middle class, very suburban, but that doesn't mean I can't write about these cultures, right?

Or that may mean that my background is very different from the cultures that I write about. And that just means that I need to think, like we said earlier, more deeply about the subjects when I am trying to write about them. I think one great way, perhaps the biggest thing that we can be doing is to be diversifying the people we work with. And I say this not because we're checking boxes and we need to have a certain amount of

you know, Hispanic or African American or Asian American people on our team. But because cultural insight, we need to start understanding it as an expertise in and of itself. In the same way that you look for somebody who has an expertise in graphic design and an expertise in Adobe Photoshop, people who bring cultural perspective bring expertise. just the same way that somebody who speaks Spanish

Cheryl Broom (14:15.488)
Is an asset to your team if you're working with largely Hispanic populations. So is somebody who has a background in the culture that you're looking for. So anytime that you can diversify in a way that improves the level of your team's ability to be experts in many things, I think is a fantastic way to kind of you know move yourself forward.

I I know that hiring people is, you know, difficult and not always an option. interns and student workers are a great way to connect to the very audiences that you're trying to reach, both age-wise and demographic-wise or culturally. And another way I think is to invite staff members who share experiences that are relevant to the audience that you're trying to reach. So maybe there's an African American counselor or

A puente advisor who grew up around your college. You know, what a fantastic asset they would be to a team that's trying to put together materials targeting first generation students or, you know, local African American kids. They all bring expertise. They don't just bring the color of their skin. I think that's like a critical like distinction. They bring expertise by knowing the culture. And that knowledge is critical to your ability to.

be not just successful, but super successful, right? And to talk authentically to these audiences. I had a great experience for a campaign that we did for Irvine Valley College. it was a Latinx slash Hispanic campaign. They wanted to target Hispanic students in the area. And as I explained, I'm not Latinx. So the big question for me was how to craft a campaign.

That would speak to this audience in a way that was unbiased, authentic, and likable. And last thing I wanted to do was to misrepresent or at worst insult the audience I was trying to reach. So we were fortunate enough to have IBC's outreach manager, Frank Rivera, who is Hispanic, as one of the project leads. And not only did Frank give us great insight into language, but he was a critical sounding board for ideas and helped us craft a campaign that ultimately mixed English and Spanish.

Cheryl Broom (16:37.204)
into this wonderful pot, you know, stew pot called Spanglish here in Sully, California. and and it gave us like the perfect way to speak authentically to this audience that we wanted to reach. And we really we would not have been able to do that without Frank's insight and guidance. So that was that was a critical opportunity, I think, and a great lesson for me to learn just about how to incorporate and use people that are around us again to kind of improve

Our own expertise. And I think also for that campaign, so that particular campaign that that we worked on, the goal was to increase awareness of the college among the Hispanic population in urban. So we had a goal of raising awareness and then ultimately applications and enrollments. But but the goal was we want to increase awareness for this particular population.

And you did have someone on campus that you worked really closely with. But I remember when we first even started working on the project, we s we were reading about marketing to the Southern California Hispanic population. And I remember coming across research that showed that most Hispanic teenagers consume media in English and Spanish. And that we have always had this, at least in Southern California.

Hesitation to market in Spanish because credit classes are taught in English. Or we will only market in Spanish to parents and influencers and not to the actual potential students themselves. But research has shown that these students are speaking English and Spanish, and in many ways, they're intertwining them. They're speaking them at the same time. So that particular campaign was based off, you know, market research.

presented to the college, like this is the direction we want to go based on actual consumption of the population, media consumption of the population. And then having someone at the college that can then anecdotally validate that and say, yeah, this is a great approach, and then assist with the language itself made it an amazing campaign. That's right. You know, I want to get back to this research idea, but one one cool thing that having Frank, one of the many cool things is

Cheryl Broom (18:59.638)
Like you said, someone to anecdotally vet it, but he helped us with the language in a way that allowed us to bring in regional Spanish idioms that you know I don't I'm not familiar with, and but that are, you know, characteristic of his time and place and culture. And we were able to integrate those. He actually took some of our campaign copy home and was speaking to his wife about some of our phrases and taglines and

His wife had insight into using certain kinds of phrases and idioms. So that was a fantastic like addition. Just it just made things better. You know, you can get things so good, but having something extra like that really can make the difference between a campaign that fizzles and a campaign that drives tremendous traffic, like the Latin Hex campaign did for IVC. Research to get back to that particular idea.

is critical. And like you mentioned there a second ago, you were reading reports, and that's a fantastic place to start, right? Doing your baseline research because there's a lot of demographic research being done into specifically Hispanic audiences, but audiences of all cultural types. And those are fantastic ways to broaden your understanding of the needs, of the desires, of the obstacles, all those kind of core things that go into helping you understand.

who an audience is. And then if you get all the good stuff, you can start building personas, right? You like personas, don't you? yeah. I love them. And and I found that when we put together a marketing plan, the personas excite people more than the plan itself because we'll f we'll look at the data from a college and then we'll ask who who do you want to target? Like one of the problems I think with community colleges is that

We just try to please everybody. Like we just are everything to everybody, you know, and when you're everything to everybody, it's really hard to speak to certain populations the way that they want to hear from you. So creating the personas lets you really hone in on, you know, we have a goal of better serving our disproportionately impacted populations. And

Cheryl Broom (21:21.634)
You know, maybe those populations in one area are African American, Latinx, and and Desi American students. So now let's create persona for each one of those groups. What's important to the people within these groups? You know, where do they, where do they consume their media? What do they want to hear? What's the value propositions that would be the most persuasive to them? That work up front then helps you build the tactics of your campaign.

Yeah, you know, and I always think of personas are basically like character studies for marketers. So coming from a fictional background, this is something that writers do all the time is they do character studies. They try to understand what a particular character is. And this starts with like filling out, well, where do they shop? What kind of car do they drive? Are they married or do they and do they have children or are they single or how old are they? All these things are good details to help us understand, you know, and

To really build a picture, right? Personas help us bridge kind of the gap between real data and real people and help us kind of construct who's our ideal audience. And so I mentioned focus groups, right? I guess I want to emphasize holding focus groups with your target audiences is as easy as offering a

You know, free pizza for dinner and inviting students to come in and to use them. You have a built-in audience, right? at community colleges. Those are the people you're trying to reach. You should be talking to them, not just for like cultural perspectives, but in general to understand, you know, to make sure that your marketing is reaching who it's supposed to reach. But combining then that you have this, you know, we've done our our

Big research. We've read the big, you know, California community college reports, you know, from the chancellor's office. You temper that with focus groups into your audiences. You talk to them, you talk to real people. And those, you know, all together can build some really insightful and useful personas. What's nice is that a persona, you don't have to go back and read the research report all over again. You can go to your list of personas after you've done them, if you've done them well.

Cheryl Broom (23:33.474)
they become this kind of gift that keeps on giving that helps you kind of just a reminder. We have so much stuff going on. It's so hard to remember, you know, all these different things and all these moving parts with all your campaigns and your the kind of institutional work you have to do. Having personas as a reference point is I think a fantastic place to start for sure. Yeah. We we just wrapped up a a year long project with Miracosta College College. I used to

work at where we developed a sub brand for their continuing education classes and we held focus groups and you talked about pizza so we did them virtually and we offered $25 Visa gift card and we had like a hundred people sign up. I I had to I you can't have a focus group with a hundred people. So we got it down to 15 and it was the most insightful focus group because you know we're trying to market these free

Non-credit ESL classes. And what I found in this focus group that just fascinated me, so we had students from all over the world, from South America, from Mexico, from Asia. And the students from South America said, you know, we don't go to call like in our country, you don't go to college unless you're rich. Like it's not, you don't even think about going to college. So we didn't even have any idea that A, we can go to college in the United States, but that B, that

College classes were free and available to us. So it made me take a step back as a marketer where it's like, your ad can't just say, like, come to college. Like, that's not even in their like realm of possibilities. It's nothing that they've even considered before. So the marketing had to take a step back and say, we offer free classes so you can learn English. It doesn't matter what your education level is, it doesn't matter about your citizenship.

This is part of what we do as a college for for our community. And so they've just launched, you know, this campaign and it's doing really great. But the folk I would have never had that like epiphany, like, wow, we're like a step ahead of these students. Like they without that conversation, we would have never been able to take a step back and look at things with a different lens. Right. And I think such an overlooked resource, you know, maybe it's, you know, it there's it's right there for you.

Cheryl Broom (25:58.25)
It's an opportunity. It takes time, but it's easy to do, you know. And But there's that word, Michael. It takes time. It takes time. It takes time. And how many clients? It's like July 15th and classes start August 23rd and we gotta do an ad campaign and there's no time to talk to anybody. So yeah, that that should be the big takeaway. Writing for diversity when you're not, it takes time. It takes time. It's an investment.

I think I always think it's the same way, you know, I would sell education to somebody, man. You gotta invest in it. You gotta if you want it to if you want the reward, yeah, it does take time. Yeah, it does take hard work. but this is hard work that makes us better, you know, not just as marketers, but as human beings. So worth it. Definitely worth it. So we've you've given some tips, building personas, involving

real people having discussions. I know you're also a really big proponent of doing diversity audits. Can you talk a little bit about what that what that is and what it means? Yeah. I think this is a fantastic first step for people that are starting to have this conversation on their campuses who want to be more sensitive and more aware. and a diversity audit is just simply looking at what your collateral is and

Tell asking yourself, is this diverse or not? The general rule of thumb I look for is that your materials should generally reflect the demographics of your community college. So if you've got 50% Hispanic students, 50% of your images should should reflect that audience. And diversity audit goes for not only checking out your images.

And making sure like your example from from earlier about the white man standing behind the the woman. when you do a a search on shutter stock for kind of stock photos, they typically come up with a very similar format in which like a white or Anglo, you know, looking European person is centered or foregrounded, and then you have the kind of diverse people around them in the background.

Cheryl Broom (28:17.026)
Which is great for some images, but not all of them. And I think a diversity audit helps you kind of get that into under control and put that in perspective. It's it's very easy to lose track of all the collateral you create because there's so much stuff that comes in and goes out. and many of it maybe you have departments that are building their own stuff and you know, you have that kind of chaos of communication going on, which is so kind of typical at our community colleges.

Sitting down and taking you know the time to kind of collect what you've been creating and to look through it is just a very simple way to say, hey, are we doing a good job of representing and speaking to our diverse audiences? many campuses now have DEI officers and directors whose job is to do stuff like this. And if you don't have time, you know, ask them, ask them for guidance or at least

You know, seek their input and participation. In addition to looking looking at the way that your collateral represents people, I think it's important to think also to make sure that you're not just featuring diverse students, but a diversity of stories. And what I mean by this is that the danger of stereotypes is that they reduce entire cultures to single iterations. So when telling diverse stories.

Make sure you're telling a diversity of stories, which is to say that not all Hispanic students come from low income backgrounds. And not all white kids are middle class. So in addition to telling the fantastic story of a low income student, you know, Hispanic student rising through the ranks and graduating at the top of their class, which happens all the time.

And it use those are stories that you need to be telling, but also tell the story of the middle class Hispanic kid who thought he wanted to go to was on track to go to UCLA and chose instead to start at, you know, their local community college and is now going to Harvard or something like that. Right. I think that that gives us a way to avoid falling into just telling one type of story, which is again.

Cheryl Broom (30:39.086)
Where stereotypes and the danger of those stereotypes kind of, you know, rear their ugly heads. So diversity audit and the diversity of stories, I think, are good and easy places to start. Yeah. I think storytelling is it's another thing that ta takes so much time, but is so important because especially for marketing, is people want to see themselves at your school. And that's the best way for them to do it is to see others that share commonalities with them.

Whether that be their background or the high school they went to or what their educational goals are. And I always liked one of your clients too that we work with a lot, Santa Anna College Foundation. I've always liked her advice of telling diverse stories is to try to focus on where the person is going rather than where they are from, so that you don't boil their

experience down to these stereotypes of you know being born on the wrong side of the tracks or you know but instead setting them up as a person with goals and hopes and dreams and and starting your stories there. I I was I always thought that was great advice. I think that's great advice because it speaks to kind of the universal how do we make stories universal right and it's by making them specific on one hand

But we all share all of your students share the same types of aspirations, even though the aspiration may not be to go to Harvard. That aspiration is what we connect to, right? It's not necessarily the end goal, it's just the thing, the wanting, the desire for more. you know, and those are wonderful stories. And those are community college stories. my gosh, I tell so many of these kinds of stories, and they're always inspirational. They need to be told. They need to be told for sure.

Well, diversity audits are are wonderful things that marketing departments I think can take the lead on. And I know that our clients are always looking for ways to showcase the talents and skills of their departments. And I think this would be a great way to do that is to look across the campus to see how how is your communication going, how is it being perceived, and not just from what the marketing department's putting out, but from what's being put out across campus.

Cheryl Broom (33:02.06)
You know, your catalogs, your images, your language choice on websites, that's all important to your overall image. And so this would be a great place, I think, for you to to dive in and people to get their kind of hands dirty and getting in these discussions going. Yeah, absolutely. You did something like this, didn't you, Cerritos? Yeah. So it interesting. Talk about vulnerability. So we were asked, we were asked to help market.

to their disproportionately impacted three groups that they had identified within their community and also to help them better explain their own DEI initiatives. And I felt very vulnerable and almost like imposter syndrome because like I'm not a diversity expert. So I had to do a lot of self-reflection working, I was working with the DEI committee. So I came to them the first day and I said, you know, you've hired

myself and my firm to help you with marketing and communications, we are not diversity experts. I am not an expert in these three disproportionately impacted groups, but I can help you learn how to best communicate and get you positioned for success. So I was really happy that I said that because it was really weighing on me getting in this meeting with these people who are experts. I mean, they're like,

This is what they do for a living. And I am not part of that community. So I think that was a great way to start the conversation. And then we we did focus groups and we came up with some camp with a campaign and I loved it and it did really well and some specific collateral. But I think what we did that was the most satisfying for me and the college was.

We created they had all these pages talking about what they were doing in terms of DEI efforts. So HR had created a page, payroll had created a page, student services had stuff all over the place, marketing had some campaigns. So it was all fragmented. It was like these little pieces. Everybody was just doing these little pieces. Clearly, the institution had a commitment to telling diverse stories, to creating safe spaces.

Cheryl Broom (35:21.784)
But it wasn't able to talk about it in a un it was like they were trying to create unity, but they were not unified at all. And so our work was to come in and to create a central place where they could talk about their diversity efforts, they could showcase the equity efforts that they had been doing. we could have a place where people could feel included. So we centralized all of this material.

onto one page and we wrote it in a way that students could understand. So it then became a a place that even students were invited to come. So they could take the look at look at all this HR stuff and understand why it was important. So that was a really great project. And it and it began with the with an audit. It was like, when I came back and I'm like, okay, you've got like 60 random pages. Here's like reports and charts and pages and

Everybody was like floored. They had no idea that all this was going on behind the scenes. So that was a great place to start. And what was the you guys had a great hashtag campaign for that? What was it? One campus for all. yeah, that's great. The beautiful thing about this hashtag was they were already using it. They were already and they were it was like on their, I think it was on one slider on the home page.

It was like we are one campus for all. And I was like, that's your message right there. That's you're trying to talk about unity. Like you're already using this. Like, we don't need to go out and reinvent the wheel. And it was great. And for our materials, we would develop like a shell, like a we developed brochures that we mailed out to the community. And we had the same content in each one, but they were targeted to each group a little bit differently. So

For African American students, when we had the panel on support services, you know, we had include academic counseling, and and the type of things that every student would like. But then we also included the different types of clubs that you could join. You know, there's Emoja, there's the historically black college association that that they had an affiliation with. So then there were examples of things that were culturally relevant to each group.

Cheryl Broom (37:41.45)
In addition to all of the other great things that were available. And I think that was a really good approach to the material. It really, it really did a good job accomplishing what it was set out to accomplish. Yeah, fantastic project. And and you know, it's it gets back to kind of that holy grail of marketing, which is this persona. It's like the more that you understand your audience, the better you can reach them. And so this from a purely practical marketing, you know, standpoint, you know, the

The difficulty when it comes to DEI and marketing is that marketing is necessarily reductive. We have to reduce things to like generalizations, right? But we have to be careful, of course, how we come to those generalizations. But you know, the path that you took in that particular project, which started with research and digging deep and, you know, talking to people, I think really speaks to kind of the central kind of what we're trying to accomplish here. Cause ultimately if you can better

understand your audience, you can better speak to their needs and their challenges, right? And our goal is to help them overcome those challenges. So if you know those challenges, then you can speak to those messages that help actually get to that core mission that we have, which was to get more students into college. Right. One of the before we wrap up, one of the cool takeaways from that project too was

In one of the focus groups, a student had mentioned that she had wished. We always we always like to ask the question, what would what do you wish you would have known before you became a student? And this always gives us really good insights on things that marketing can maybe touch on that students wish that somebody had told them. And one student said, Well, I wish that somebody had told me that I could get free mental health support on campus. And so this, by the way, this was

Done in twenty early 2021. So we're still like in the throes of the pandemic. I mean, everything was Zoom. And so students were struggling with mental health, like many people were. And so the focus group actually became this like discussion around students sharing all these services that they had been using. I mean, from mental health and counseling to the food pantry to all these things that they were like, God, if we had known that we could have.

Cheryl Broom (40:03.618)
had access to this, maybe we would have become a student sooner. And that was really valuable because marketing, we always want to do this like shiny big like dog and pony show, like, you're gonna transfer, you're gonna transfer. Well, some of these students are like hungry, or they have like they they have mental health problems or issues that they're struggling with. And so some of those messages need to be like, we're here for you. We're we're gonna help support you in these ways that you don't even haven't even thought of yet. And it all came from from from talking.

Good place to start. Good place to start. Well, Michael, I was gonna ask you where else you're speaking this year, but I know the answer. Nowhere. Because Michael's been too busy. Not yet. Not yet. Not yet. But you will be at at NCMPR District Six, I know, in October. And anybody interested in speaking.

with you about this or even bouncing ideas off of you, I'm sure you'd be open to that. yeah, I love that. I'm always open to spitball marketing, no matter what what it is. It's it's fun. It's fun. So yeah. Please reach out. Come say hi. And if anybody's interested in your books, do you have an author website? It's called Amazon.com. I'm allowed to make a shameless promotional post. Of course. Literally

type my name into Amazon and it'll come up with all my books. So Michael Mahan, A H I N. You can see it. I I'm world famous. All right. I do have an autograph copy of one of the books. I gave them out at the last talk. I gave some out at the last at the diversity at the my N C P R talk. There's some more out there.

There's some more out there. So good. Well maybe if somebody contacts you after this podcast, you can autograph one and send it along. Always happy to sign my own books. That never gets old. All right, Michael. Well, thank you so much. It's always a pleasure to talk to you about this. Thank you so much for having me. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for listening to Higher Education Coffee and Conversation.

Cheryl Broom (42:16.896)
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 Graduate Communications.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.

Yeah.