Xavier University Story Continues: Creating the Most Distinctive Home Page in Higher Education Last week I presented the first two answers to questions I sent along last year to Xavier to learn more about how they decided to position a “Search” box and the dominant feature of the university’s home page. Here today are the […]
Xavier University’s “Search” Home Page: A Clear Path to Top Task Completion Higher education marketers often discuss how a college or university can differentiate itself in a crowded marketplace. That differentiation almost never takes place on the first contact many potential students have with a school: the home page. Last year when searching about for […]
June greetings from Houston. I am here at the Academic Impressions conference on Improving Your Student Recruitment Communication Plan that starts today.In April I started a new secret shopping project to continue reviewing how colleges and universities are responding to an online inquiry. My potential 2016 freshman selected 5 schools. All were in the private sector.The response […]
Higher education marketing: overly focused on “branding” This morning I’ve been working on my last presentations for the Academic Impressions conference on strategic recruitment communications in June: “Future Trends in Higher Education Marketing.” And so just before the Memorial Day weekend I’m sharing some points that came to mind today. The Monsters University website: funny, […]
Blowing the doors off university website design: innovation run wild at Bucknell A couple of weeks ago someone posted a request on a higher education listserv… Could anyone recommend a firm to create a website design that would “blow the doors off” other university sites? One of the first people to respond used a new […]
Marketing strength in website design: don’t try to “Blow the doors off” Last week on a Listserv for university web developers someone asked for recommendations for design firms whose work would “blow the doors off” typical higher education websites. The request caught my attention. What were university websites that fit the “blow the doors off” […]
St. John Fisher College… Collegiate Learning Assessment test leads to the Wall Street Journal front page How does a “small liberal arts school near Rochester, N.Y.” that’s ranked #151 among national universities by U.S. News and World Report make it to the front page of the Wall Street Journal? When I opened the August 26 […]
Higher Education Marketing Notes from eduWeb13 Just back on Wednesday from the latest eduWeb conference in Boston. And here are some notes important to higher education marketers that linger in my memory from various keynote talks and presentations. A disclaimer: order of presentation doesn’t equal order of importance, just the way my memory is working […]
Finances, Brand Strength, Sustainable Economic Models… Grinnell Struggles with Brand Position Grinnell College is one of the rare residential liberal arts colleges with an endowment of more than one billion dollars (nearly $1.4 billion in 2012). And it also has, the president has recently admitted, an unsustainable financial model. What’s up with that? The answer […]
Measuring Brand Strength of 7 For-Profit Universities Here’s a confession that will not surprise most of my friends… I’m a survey junkie. Call me on the phone, send me something by regular mail or email and I’ll complete your survey. And so I subscribe to a frequent series of email surveys from YouGov. The surveys […]
Higher Education… Cost Pressure Continues to Drive Change “Higher education” will always exist. How long it will exist in the present format is another question. The higher education “brand” is still valued as a credential to success. But increasingly, colleges and universities are losing control over how education is delivered and priced and how long […]