A New Breed
Leadership, partnership, ownership
Turteltaub says getting UCLA's leaders to see communications in the context of revenue generation was a watershed moment for the university. Indeed, practitioners who have experienced this institutional epiphany agree that leaders who "get it" are essential to success. A strong belief in communicating a cohesive brand across related operations isn't enough—without committed leadership, there will be real turf issues. "You're going to tap into some natural concerns," Lokman says. "Admissions folks may think, 'I'm doing my job fine. Are you here to criticize me? We understand students better than you do.' Conversely, it's natural for communications professionals to want to own the message and believe they know best how to reach an audience because that's what they do." And anything new means more work, at least initially. "Those are real issues," Lokman says. "That's why leadership support is critical."
Equally critical is respect for the expertise each area's practitioners bring to the partnership, beginning with a discussion about the clearly defined benefits, what success will look like, and who's going to do what, Lokman says. "It can be a rocky road, but then as you do the work, you develop camaraderie and a better overall perspective that informs your own work. The relationships get better and you discover new opportunities for further collaboration," he says.
Massa says everyone involved has to understand that integrated marketing means integration on two levels. Not only do brand marketing, direct marketing, and customer relationship management need to merge effectively, he says, there also must be integration of the staff responsible for each. Even so, "You can have an organizational structure in place and still not achieve buy-in," he cautions. Dickinson officials intentionally made the college relations and development departments the only two occupants of one building. This kind of arrangement creates a breeding ground for collaboration based not only on organizational structure but also on proximity. Massa says he doesn't know if the current structure—"with college relations reporting to the enrollment guy"—is going to be useful for the institution five years from now. But it doesn't matter, he says, as long as staff members have a sense of ownership of the brand and the management team understands that the brand and its supporting story are the same for every constituency. "It's just that different constituencies must be on the same page of the story," he says.
Integrated marketing for an integrated audience
ALauer doesn't think there is a single advancement office model that works for everyone. The traditional model (separate fund raising, communications, and alumni relations divisions) might make sense for some campuses.
Carving out marketing as a separate entity might be the statement a campus CEO needs to influence different thinking, he says, or leaders might depart from traditional models entirely to create a structure that will work. That can mean that advancement merges with student recruitment. "Some may leave admissions where it is but create dotted-line relationships or task forces or action committees to come up with ways to bring the recruiting function into collaboration with advancement," Lauer says. "But I see admissions gradually moving under our umbrella at least in the way we think and plan and function."
Advancement is moving front and center in the management of institutions, he says, and marketing is moving front and center within advancement. It's not that marketing is going to overtake every function, he says. It's that marketing as a way of thinking will influence these functions and overtake the way they serve their constituencies.
At UCLA, such a model—one that focuses broadly on external relations—already exists. In the past, various advancement areas, development in particular, guarded their volunteers, but university leaders now are "trying to make the pieces of external affairs—advocacy, communications, and philanthropy—a much more seamless experience for both staff and donors," Turteltaub says.
The key word is experience. In the same way a competitive environment has raised the marketing stakes in terms of providing an experience, so too will such an environment raise the experience stakes for donors. To keep donors from giving to art museums or symphonies, institution leaders will seek new ways to get donors caught up in the life of the institution, Lauer says.
Last spring, UCLA and UC Irvine organized a legislative-press visit for three of the university's leading donors who are corporate CEOs. They went to the state capital to talk with legislators about how they rely on the university to help ensure corporate success. After that visit, Turteltaub says, the delegation leader met with a reporter from the Sacramento Bee during which the reporter suggested that if the University of California isn't all the CEO wanted it to be, he'd just recruit from other universities. The CEO said that in fact he'd pick his company up and move to where the talent is. That was a shocking revelation to the reporter, Turteltaub says, and sent "a powerful message about the importance of funding we could never deliver. We're making better messengers out of constituents who have never been asked to be advocates before," she says. "The experience of being engaged in all three external relations areas builds a better donor."
Such new thinking will be required of institution leaders as they continue to launch aggressive capital campaigns, which also means they need to find innovative ways of cultivating and engaging more donors. "Until now, many colleges and universities have feared getting donors too involved in the academic programs they support," Lauer says, "but I think this will change." He predicts that institutions will invite knowledgeable donors to lecture in classes and help recruit specific kinds of students as ways to cement donor loyalty.
CONTINUED: Recruiting partners
