In my last column about my search for a new position in college marketing, I confessed that I didn't feel like job-hunting; I wanted plum opportunities to come to me. Well, two of them did.
A search firm contacted me about an internal-communications position at a top college across the river from where I now work, and administrators at a graduate school that I am familiar with were happy to learn of my interest in interviewing for their marketing-director opening.
Before actually applying for either position, I spent a few days gloating over the good fortune that had landed those possibilities in my lap.
But I ended up withdrawing from both searches. In less than a year, I have declined one lucrative job offer and withdrawn my candidacy from three searches. What, you may be wondering, is wrong with me?
For one thing, personal obligations required me to leave my job early a few days each week; naturally, I was loath to take off even more time for interviewing.
I would have done so, however, had either of the two recent job openings remained as promising as it had seemed at first blush. But I realized that all of the jobs I had lost interest in shared the same flaw: the absence of sufficient or properly placed resources to get the job done. In each case, the college had underestimated what is required to establish and run an effective marketing or communications department.
In one instance, an institution wanted to revamp the communications issued by its large undergraduate college, so that they would share a consistent look and messaging style. Eventually, the college wanted those communications put online. It also wanted to streamline internal communications, condensing the thick stacks of documents that were circulated among deans and faculty advisers.
To accomplish those tasks, I would have one person reporting to me. I recognized this as big-goals/small-staff syndrome.
In a discussion with a consultant working on the search, I found out that even if I somehow managed to figure out how to do so much work with so little help, I would have to rely on persuasion to convince the many departments of the college to go along with my plan for a unified style since they held the money to produce the communications. To me, that made as much sense as allocating money for elevator maintenance to the departments located nearest to one, rather than to the facilities department.
The other college I turned away was looking for a marketing director to strengthen a graduate school's brand. I have experience in that area, so I perked up when I learned of the opening. The marketing staff that would report to me consisted of an assistant director who produced and placed its advertising. Reluctantly I reminded myself that a graphic designer does not a marketing department make.
Those disappointments prompted me to consider the reasons why my current institution's collegewide marketing effort has been so successful. I believe it's because our president and senior administrators, having decided to create a marketing department, made the financial sacrifices required to sustain it. That was accomplished, in part, by diverting money from the other units of the college that would become the marketing department's clients.
Those units didn't give over their money lightly, and why should they? How could they be sure that a central marketing department could create promotions superior to those that they had been producing on their own? And why should they believe claims that better marketing would deliver better enrollments or stimulate increased alumni donations? We in the marketing department had to prove ourselves.
My college administration, urged on by our trustees, took the risk, even though developing a professional marketing department would involve an uncomfortable shift away from the reliance on students somehow divining that we were more attractive than the competition and begging for admission to our college. But without the risk, there would have been no change.
The trustees and the president had a pretty good sense of the problems they wanted the department to solve, and of its mission and goals. But those were not too firmly defined until after the new vice president for marketing had reliable research in hand. (It's shocking how often institutions are off the mark in what they think their audiences need and want.) With research results informing her decisions, the vice president was able to work with admissions departments to help them strengthen their search, application, and other processes.
The marketing department was also given enough flexibility to respond to crises. A mere month after it was established, undergraduate applications suddenly plunged. The vice president for marketing analyzed the problem and applied innovative tactics to solve it. Applications went up. As I wrote in my first column, in the four years since the marketing department was established, the quantity and quality of our undergraduate enrollments have improved dramatically.
A marketing department must be allowed to define the strategies needed to achieve the goals that senior managers and trustees have articulated. Frequently, worried administrators who lack relevant credentials insist on the strategy and tactics that they want their marketing and communications professionals to pursue. They might claim that producing more brochures will attract more students (for some reason brochures often are suggested as the cure-all for any ill), when fewer brochures aimed at the right audiences might well be the solution.
Finally, establishing an effective marketing or communications department requires the allocation of enough money to hire sufficient staff members, who are as expert in their fields as faculty members are in theirs.
When money's tight, it's fine to start small and invest more resources in marketing as successes mount. You can always expand. (It's been my experience that people will come to appreciate what marketing can do for them and begin clamoring for the department's services.) But it's a mistake to expect to achieve major goals without adequate resources.
The job that I want to find is one that comes with whatever it takes for me to help the college to be successful.
