tom@concordia
Director of Digital Communication*
*Paradigm shaker-upper, credibility booster, inspirer-catalyst, holistic thinker, truth-teller
Concordia University – Portland
1905-2020
Officially hired to bring my search and social advertising experience from my years working in the tech sector to university marketing, to lead the web team, and to develop a campaign forecasting strategy that worked. My unofficial role was to elevate the marketing department’s own brand with university leadership to overcome years of marginalization.
This story outlines my contribution to effectively communicate the value of our product to the audience, and (part of) why it wasn’t enough.
A Work Story
2 things about this chart ➡️
2 things about this chart ⬇️
- Regional undergraduate enrollment in our market (small, private, nonprofit liberal arts colleges) had been trending down for 5 years, but we stopped the slide in Fall 2016, and 2017 was our 3rd biggest freshman class ever, only to be bested by 2018 (#2) and 2019 (#1)
- I was able to adapt the strategy and tactics we created for our undergraduate campaigns to accurately forecast necessary budget for enrollment targets for our traditional graduate programs and new law school
Undergraduate Enrollment, 2014-2019
(Source: National Center for Education Statistics)
% YoY Enrollment Growth (US vs. them)
(🎉 Concordia was the only university in our market that posted consistent growth in undergrad enrollment 2017–2019.)
% YoY Enrollment Growth (US vs. them)
(🎉 Concordia was the only university in our market that posted consistent growth in undergrad enrollment 2017–2019.)
⬅️ What changed? (we’re the blue line)
What changed? (we’re the blue line) ⬆️
Behind the Curtain
My role, really.
I said yes to a beautiful 111 year old university willing to explore new ways of doing business while staying true to its core mission of educating students who might not otherwise get the opportunity; I said yes to an experienced leader with love in her heart and creative, pragmatic ideas flowing from her mind, to a smart and talented team, and to a product with the potential to change the trajectory of the customer’s lives (and the communities in which they live) for generations.
The in-house marketing team had been sidelined by Silicon Valley VC-funded agencies promising stratospheric growth for our graduate programs via black box methods and big budgets. My boss needed my years of experience with online advertising to figure out how to improve undergraduate enrollment. She also wanted to use my tech sector street cred as a wedge in the door to leadership-level meetings she wasn’t being invited to. She also liked my willingness to ask hard questions to dispel the mystique of those agency-protected black boxes.
I bounded in the door every day filled with the can-do/will-do attitude I brought with me from startup culture. My penchant was (is) for knocking on doors to introduce myself in person rather than trying to find my way into someone’s Outlook calendar. I would ask questions and get excited when I figured things out, and my enthusiasm was contagious, helping stoke the notion that we could do more and better, especially if we all worked together.
My unwillingness to accept how things worked in academia was at first frustratingly refreshing to my colleagues, but they grew to tolerate, appreciate, or even embrace it.
By my third anniversary, I had met my original goals: undergraduate lead gen campaigns were successful, sustainable, and adaptable, my team had a place at the leadership table, and the institutional belief that we must rely on expensive and inexplicable tactics of outside agencies was fading as the data rolled in. We also managed a complete rebranding campaign, a total website overhaul, and the promotion and the successful launch of a new law school.
The Bitter End.
The university relied on a Lutheran church-based financial organization for backing. There’s a long story, but the short version is that the cashflow-challenged church canceled the university’s 114 year old charter because the land upon which the university was built became more valuable than the aegis under which it was founded.
Most of the C-level officers had built their entire careers at Concordia, successfully shepherding the Concordia Academy & Junior College of the 1980s into the liberal arts and teacher-training university with a Portland neighborhood named after it by the turn of the century.
That’s when Silicon Valley came a-knocking.
Concordia leadership opted to place a big –and early– bet on online graduate programs as a way to grow without requiring big investments in staffing or physical infrastructure.
For the few years when Concordia Online was the only game in town, enrollment and revenue boomed. Leadership doubled down, rushing more online graduate programs to market, and went on a spending spree – expanding the campus, building satellite campuses, and hiring new teams to manage the imminent growth promised by the new online-only cash cow.
But…[cue dramatic music] about the same time as ribbons were being cut in front of the new buildings, the rest of higher ed joined the online party: institutions across the US began offering the same programs, some much cheaper, and some with glossy, trusted brand names behind them.
The bubble that was the promise of big growth popped just as the bills for the expansion projects came due, and at a time when the university’s Missouri-based landlord was reckoning its own future of declining cash flow. Also, there was a widening dogmatic gulf between the Portland’s Lutherans and those at headquarters in St. Louis, so cutting our funding was likely influenced by more than just financials.
3 to PHD: The best of Concordia
(and what I wanted to contribute to most)
3 to PhD was the moniker for Concordia’s partnership with Portland Public Schools, specifically the PPS K-8 neighborhood school across the street from our campus that was scheduled to be rebuilt from the ground up.
The big idea we presented to PPS was that school should be the center of the community it serves. We spearheaded a multi-year effort to include –inside the new school’s building– onsite day care for pre-school age children, a health and dental clinic offering services free to students and their families, mental health services, a small grocery story selling healthy foods at discount prices, and Concordia’s Graduate School of Education classrooms. We worked with Kaiser-Permanente, Trillium Family Services, and local grocer Basics as partners, and raised $15m to support development.
During the opening day festivities I watched a 2nd grader, eyes sparkling with eager anticipation as he looked into the maker space, the wood shop, and the beautiful classroom he would inhabit for the school year.
“What do you think so far?”, I asked.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “I think I’m going to have to step up my game to match.”
Links
BORA Architects (great photos of the site, most taken by my team)
OregonLive
KOIN
Chronicle of Higher Ed
MJ Murdock Charitable Trust
The project was under way when I started at Concordia, and supporting it was not explicit in my job description.
I built and managed the website, created and curated the social media accounts, and worked closely with the fundraising team, publicists, leadership, and our partners to help the effort succeed.
Another story?
Jorvik Press is a small publisher with an eclectic collection of titles. I redesigned and built the website, and have loved watching organic discoverability grow as a direct result of a fresh design and intentional white hat SEO; launching pinpoint-accurate social media campaigns to the most eager audience at just the right time, and training the team to maintain, plan, update, and launch their own new titles going forward, with minimal oversight from me.