Brain Waves Blog

Collegiate athletic programs exist for a number of reasons; namely, they’re a huge revenue generator, taking advantage of conference-affiliated and national television broadcasting contracts and merchandising to market their teams and universities.

You scour social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for updates about your institution. And you receive Google alerts when you’re mentioned in the news. But are you keeping up with Reddit?  

When I founded Campus Sonar, I wrote a blog post about the need for data-informed marketing in higher education. It’s been almost two years now and the industry has made progress, but I feel like we still have a ways to go. Recently, I contributed to a blog series for Adapt about data-driven marketing and current trends—and I realized I had a lot more to say (most of you won’t be surprised about that). So here’s part two of my thoughts on data-driven marketing, marketing trends, and the impact on higher ed.

With graduations across the country this spring, universities gained thousands of new alumni. But as soon as students graduate and leave campus, it becomes harder to engage with them and continue to build a relationship. One of the keys to connecting with new alumni is to not wait until they’ve graduated, but to engage with them before they become alumni. The more engaged and connected students are to an institution, the more likely they are to become engaged alumni. This speaks to Dr. Jay Le Roux Dillon’s idea of alumni identity—the measure of how deeply a graduate associates their own self-identity with their alma mater. The closer alumni feel to your institution, the more they’ll feel compelled to give—both time and money.

A key outcome of social listening is the ability to identify real-time opportunities to engage with your audience groups when they’re talking to your campus or about your campus.

In higher ed, reputation is an institution’s number one priority. The problem is, it’s not totally in your hands. Public perception is reality and anyone who has an opinion can share it online for the world to see. There’s a trust problem in our country, especially in higher education.