The Integrated Marketing Team (IMT) has been working to advance the colleges strategic marketing efforts on several fronts over the last few months. Those efforts have included the following:
- Defining a resource team we’re calling the Brand Management Team to lead our efforts in implementing the redefined Hope brand throughout the campus.
- Beginning to define goals for the next 18-24 months
- Providing some tactical help on specific college marketing initiatives.
- Considering the makeup of the IMT and looking toward expansion in 2013.
Brand Management Team
With a presidential transition in the year ahead, we believe an interim approach for the next 18-24 months makes more sense than committing to a structure that will undoubtedly change. We’ve asked four persons who have been involved in this process to dedicate up to fifty percent of their time to the marketing effort while also maintaining their current roles and responsibilities.
To sustain our current program, we will be providing resources to backfill for close to fifty percent of the team members’ current job responsibilities.
That team includes: Carol Fritz (Admissions), Becky Robrahn (CIT), Scott Travis (Alumni & Parent Relations), and Jason Cash (Advancement Communications).
The team will co-locate. A space still undefined will provide time and space to work collectively on departmental and college-wide initiatives while also staying connected with the ongoing work in their departments. This structure will allow for logical bridges between the Brand Team, Admissions, Advancement and CIT. This will allow for time to build bridges with other college departments and divisions.
The Brand Team will be led by Carol Fritz and will report “formally” to Bill Vanderbilt but also maintain seats on (and accountability to) the college’s Integrated Marketing Team (IMT). The IMT makeup will slowly evolve to include other key areas of the college over the next year. That evolution will most likely begin in early 2013.
Brand Management Team Goals
The Brand Management Team and the IMT are working to draft project plans, goals and time frames for activities over the next 18-24 months. Much of this activity will be driven by listening to the campus needs and reacting both tactically and strategically to those needs. Some initial activities that will be included are:
- Establishing a resource center and space to prioritize and address campus needs.
- Creating and conducting a variety of brand education programs to assist the campus in understanding how to share the Hope story.
- Equipping and enabling college-wide content experts to implement the brand in their web and print materials.
- Selecting Content Management and Digital Asset Management software to provide the infrastructure platform for our future web development.
- Hiring/training student workers to provide additional campus support.
- Working on tactical and maintenance projects
Tactical Projects
Over the past two months, the team has assisted on a number of tactical projects ranging from athletic branding to Orientation messaging focusing on the freshman class cohort and external communications. The team will develop a triage and prioritization process to continue these types of efforts going forward.
More to Come
Please be patient as we live into this structure as a campus community. We believe this will help us improve our internal and external communications, impacting the experience of our students, faculty and staff and presenting a more coherent identity of the college. This will not happen overnight but will be an incremental change that will move us in a positive direction.
If you have thoughts on how we can improve this along the way, please share those with us so that we may benefit from your ideas! You can reach out to team members individually or email us at marketing@hope.edu!
Sincerely,
Integrated Marketing Team
Carol Fritz
Lynne Powe
Becky Robrahn
Jason Cash
Carl Heideman
Andrew Meyers
Tom Renner
Scott Travis
Dave Vanderwel (co-chair)
Bill Vanderbilt (co-chair)