Blended structures
Robert Massa arrived at Dickinson College in 1999, recruited by the college's equally new president, to serve as vice president for enrollment management and college relations. The college was facing several crises at the time, including a $5 million deficit, defaulted campaign pledges, a 52 percent tuition discount, and consistently underenrolled classes. Dickinson had to reorganize to meet these challenges, Massa says, which he did by combining admissions and the traditional advancement responsibilities of marketing, alumni relations, publications, the Web, and media relations. This year, as the institution heads into a campaign, Massa also serves as interim vice president for development.

"I don't care who reports to whom. You need to have a management team in place that understands that an institution's brand and the leadership story that supports that brand are one and the same for every audience," Massa says. "To say that the functions of admissions and advancement are not both advancing the institution is shortsighted. Organizational structure aside, it's a cradle-to-grave concept," he says.

University of California, Berkeley, public policy professor David Kirp devotes a chapter to Dickinson's turnaround in his book Shakespeare, Einstein, and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education. Kirp reports that three years after the institution's new integrated marketing team was in place, the tuition discount rate dropped to 33 percent, enrollment grew as SAT scores rose, giving increased by 40 percent, and the campus came out of the red with million-dollar surpluses, even after investing capital in physical plant reserves.

A change of place
At Dickinson and other institutions that are moving toward more blended structures, the first step often occurs when officials start mulling over where communications should report—advancement, enrollment, or directly to the president.

"It can make good sense to move communications to enrollment," says Jackson, who also served as director of development at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, and as vice president for professional development at CASE. "In terms of actual market share, most institutions still get more money from tuition than they get from gift support, including endowment interest." Often in these cases, Jackson says, "spirited discussions" ultimately result in communications reporting directly to the president.

Some campus leaders suggest that senior-level decision making is most productive when the chief communications officer is at the leadership table. "As long as communications was seen as a function that 'we have to have because we have to deal with the news media and have some brochures,'" says Barbara Petura, associate vice president for university relations at Washington State University, "then it was very easy for the communications and marketing staff to be at a somewhat lower level professionally than the fund raisers." But when an institution shifts to a more sophisticated process of conducting substantial marketing research and crafting plans that act on that research, she says, "you have indeed created a different kind of profession than the old days of a news office and a publications office."

At UCLA, "we've all acknowledged that the role of external affairs is revenue generation writ very large," says Rhea Turteltaub, assistant vice chancellor for development, "whether that means legislative advocacy and lobbying for the best budget we can get, raising private dollars through development, or [generating] tuition dollars through admissions. The side that brings in private dollars (development) and the side that accepts students on merit (admissions) are kept very far apart here," she says. "But through university communications, brand management is happening in a way that we in development have bought into completely because we know that the way in which students first experience the university will ultimately affect their affinity and affiliation long term. And so at the earliest stages of campus involvement, it's communications that drives that bus. We are active passengers, but they're in the driver's seat."

Once advancement officers start thinking like that, says Larry Lauer, vice chancellor for marketing and communication at Texas Christian University, then everything about the marketing process becomes more sophisticated. "[Marketing] isn't just promotion or materials or the logo—those are all things within it." Instead, he says, "it's a way of thinking, a way of bringing program design, pricing, and the distribution of those programs together with communications and promotion to help the institution survive in a changing world."

CONTINUED: Leadership, partnership, ownership