MEASURING ADVANCEMENT

Like many marketers, Gossen checks his dashboarddaily, especially as the calendar nears UMSL Day, theuniversity’s spring and fall open house events for prospective students. Those who attend an UMSL Dayare much more likely to matriculate, thus addinganother conversion.But in late February 2013, with the spring UMSL

Day just a week away, Gossen was getting nervousabout the daily registration numbers, which wereabout 50 percent lower than at the same time in2012. He decided to increase the radio ad buy. Thenext day, the line on the registration chart began asteep ascent. The result: Gossen and his team broketheir 2012 record.“We measure, deploy, and readjust our resources

to a big degree on where things are at the time,”Gossen says. “If you don’t use metrics to make yourdecisions, then you’re going to make decisions onthings that you don’t know.”

MARKET FORCESThe movement toward measurement is driven notjust by new tools but new realities: a schizophreniceconomy, tight budgets (both governmental andinstitutional), changing student demographics, contracting enrollment, increased competition for students, rising tuition, and escalating student debt.Add in the pressure to prove the value of a collegedegree, and institutional leaders and stakeholderswant more accountability and transparency.“For many years, marketing has always been sort of

PUTTING DATA IN THE DRIVER’S SEAT. Want to learn more aboutmarketing ROl? Secure your spot at the Conference for CommunityCollege Advancement Oct. 2—’+ in San Diego, where Kathi Swansonwill co-present the session “Data-Driven Marketing: How to MeasureYour ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment).” Swanson, presidentof the community college marketing firm CLARUS Corporation, willoutline and define the key marketing metrics every community college marketingdirector should be using to measure ROMI, explorethe obstacles to data-driven marketing and suggest ways to overcome them, and demonstrate how to communicate ROMI to internaland external stakeholders. Learn more and register at www.case.org/cccal 3.

hammered on: ‘Well, how do I know if spendingthose dollars is really working?” Swanson says.“There’s an internal push to really understand what’sworking and to look at it from a return on investment standpoint.”In this changing landscape, professionals are increas

ingly tying the value of their work to the bottom lineand their outcomes to the institution’s strategic goals.“Marketing is an investment, and like any invest

ment, institutions have the right to expect a reasonablereturn,” says Robert M. Moore, president and CEO ofthe marketing communications firm Lipman Hearneand co-author ofNet Proceeds: Increased RevenuefromEnrollment andAdvancement Guaranteed’, which willbe published by CASE this summer.Moore co-wrote the book, with Lipman Hearne

Chairman Tom Abrahamson, to help marketersdevelop strategies that best serve their institution anddemonstrate their contribution to the bottom line.Too many institutions still have a tendency to viewmarketing as nonessential—a place to cut duringtough budgetary times, Moore says. DemonstratingROl shows leaders that marketing has a direct effecton the institution’s health and vitality.“I almost sense that there’s a groundswell,” says

Terry Flannery, vice president of communicationat American University in Washington, D.C. “Allof us feel the need to be accountable for provingthat we are being good stewards of these [marketing]investments ... by proving that there is a bottomline to them.”

PRINCIPLE LESSONS. After implementing the Barcelona Principles(see sidebar on p. 28), Joe Brennan, associate vice president ofuniversity communications at New York’s University at Buffalo,came up with five takeaways for getting started: 1) Focus on the bigpicture. Help staff understand the benefits of measurement, suchas improved effectiveness, greater respect, and better resources.2) Build consensus. Your effort should emerge from a thoughtfuldialogue between management and staff. 3) Create some quickvictories to prove to staff and colleagues that measurement works.‘+) Phase in measurement. Start by measuring activities, then effects,and finally, impact on organizational goals. 5) Don’t make metricspunitive; use the results to celebrate success. “Make it a chance toslap high-fives with everyone,” he says.

Through her work with CASE’s Commission onCommunications and Marketing, Flannery is a primary player in helping the profession determine anddefine some reasonable approaches to marketingRO1. During the past year,a handful of commissionmembers used and refineda template Flannery developed to find the marketingcost per student at theirown institutions.“There was a shared

sentiment that ifwe didn’tdefine this issue, it would bedone for us—and in a waythat we didn’t think wasappropriate,” Flannery says.“Even if they’re relativemeasures, they are a morerefined, analytical way ofunderstanding the best use of marketing resources.”To prove that metrics could be used effectively

in a higher education environment, the commissionchose the strategic measure of marketing cost per student because the resulting data can clearly and quicklyshow marketing’s implications across the institution.That’s particularly true on campuses with more centralized operations, where a chief marketing officeroften has easier access to marketing expenditures andenrollment information.“When people in leadership positions can actually

DASHBOARDS DELIVER. A growing number of advancementprofessionals say they struggle to measure social media’s ROl,according to the fourth annual CASE/Huron Education/mStonersurvey of more than 1,000 CASE members about their institutions’ use of social media. In this year’s survey, 38 percent ofrespondents came to that conclusion, compared with 33 percentin 2012 and 32 percent in 2011. But perhaps most interestingis the link between using metrics and finding success. “We seea relationship where those who say they were most successfulalso talk about a dashboard of metrics that they look at weeklyor monthly,” mStoner president Michael Stoner reported in hissurvey findings. Review the survey results at bit.Iy/SMCsurteyl3;read Stoner’s presentation at bit.Iy/SMCsurueyreportl3.

see the relative value of the marketing investment, itputs it in much more reasonable terms,” Flannerysays. Investing $1 million in marketing may soundlike a large and potentially prohibitive expense, but

presenting the same investment as, for example, acost of less than $100 perstudent—plus the resultingrevenue—could alter thedecision-making process.The commission’s next

step is to establish someguidance and possibly aset of tools to help marketers measure ROI at theirown institutions. Since anyresults will hold meaningonly within each institution,the project’s value comesfrom the possibility that

professionals will be able to measure the effectivenessof their marketing efforts from year to year and makebetter decisions about acquiring and stewarding theirresources.Of course, getting data on marketing costs is easier

on some campuses than others due to decentralization,the degree of marketing integration, and departments’willingness to share data. If you work on a large,decentralized campus, prepare for some political conversations when negotiating access to the informationyou need. Properly framing the request is essential,

WHAT’S THE STORY BEHIND YOUR DATA? Tracking metricsand measuring goals produce lots of data points, but what do theymean? Nothing without people who can interpret the informationin ways that help organizations make smart decisions, arguesthe Hart.’ard Business Review blog article “A Data Scientist’s RealJob: Storytelling” (bit.Iy/HBRdatastotytelling). Whether choosing the most effective subject line for an email or determining acampaign’s purpose, organizations need to “humanize’ the databy turning raw numbers into a story” about their performance.Finding a visual way to present your data can help your message.For a look at how Procter & Gamble has made data visualizationa priority, read the HBR blog article “How P&G Presents Data toDecision-Makers” (bit.ly/HBR-PandG).

A.

When people inLeadership positionscan actually see

the relative vaLue ofthe marketing investment,

it puts it in muchmore reasonable terms.

—---,-

26 JULYAUGUST2O13 CASECURRENTS 27

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Flannery says, particularly since units may see it as athreat to their resources.At AU, Flannery framed it as a way to look at the

data together. “If we determined that anything was orwasn’t working, the agreement was that funds wouldbe reallocated to something within the unit that maywork better,” she says.

EMBRACING THE “M” WORDPolitics and the fear of losing resources aside, ROT canbe daunting for another reason: math.“If you’re not familiar with statistics and simple

quantitative methods, you might have some wariness,” Flannery says. But ROT at least involves sim

ple math, as Moorewrites in Net Proceeds:“It’s no more complicated than addition andsubtraction, multiplication and division, and arudimentary calculationof percentages.”Math is also a path

to the upper level ofleadership, according toClaire Brown, directorof student recruitmentand admissions at theUniversity of Liverpoolin the U.K“Marketing has much

more of a seat at the toptable now in universities,” she says. “And it’sa seat that’s talking a lotmore about strategy,about understandingmarkets, dynamics, competitors, positioning, andvalue propositions. Theseare conversations thatweren’t being had at thelevel that they are now.”

Swanson agrees, citing a marketing director whobelieved that a New England institution’s expensiveprinted student recruitment publication wasn’t effective. She couldn’t cut it, however, because campusleaders liked it. After attaching some metrics and

tracking the piece for two years, she calculated its ROTand showed that it wasn’t working as well as some ofthe campus’s other marketing activities. Leaders eliminated the publication and reinvested the funds elsewhere in the marketing budget.“When you can show return on investment, man

agement appreciates that,” Swanson says. “Marketingis sometimes viewed as real frizzy, especially whenwe get to longer-term measures like branding andawareness, so being able to put a dollar amount onit gives a marketing director incredible power in theorganization.”

BACKING NEW BENCHMARKSIn communications, ROT is a tricky subject since,strictly speaking, it’s an accounting term. When ROTis used in communications, professionals are usuallyreferring to something more oblique, such as the reputational value that communications activities generate.“We don’t calculate the value of a story,” says

Camille LePre, AU’s assistant vice president for communications and media. “We haven’t done that, andwe don’t do that. You really can’t get an ROT becausewhat’s the value?”Measuring communications outcomes by trying to

assign a dollar figure to media coverage hearkens backto the use of advertising value equivalency—whatmedia placements would cost if they were purchasedas advertisements. Although AVEs are a discreditedPR metric because they don’t account for the contentor tone of the media coverage, they are still used insome circles (although not always willingly). Instead,the discussion has moved away from counting newsclips, AVEs, and other kinds of audience multipliersin favor of outcome measures that demonstrate howcommunications drives business performance—or inhigher education’s case, how communications helpsan institution achieve its strategic goals.That measurement standard is known as the

Barcelona Principles, a set of seven guidelines thatestablish global benchmarks for PR measurement.(See sidebar at left.) If you haven’t heard of themyet, don’t worry. Two-thirds of PR professionals areunfamiliar with the Barcelona Principles, accordingto a March 2013 survey of more than 1,400 communicators—including in higher education—byRagan Communications and NASDAQ OMXCorporate Solutions.

But awareness is growing. As associate vice president of university communications and an adjunctmember of the communications faculty at New York’sUniversity at Buffalo, Joe Brennan is well-versed inPR measurement. After a few changes in campusleadership, a period of reduced budgets, and moreattention being paid to assessment and accountability, Brennan wanted to ensure that his staff wasinvesting its energy andresources in ways that produce the best results. Heput the Barcelona Principlesinto practice to determinewhat was working, to helphis unit and staff becomemore efficient and effective,and to relate their outcomesto UB’s strategic goals.Unlike development col

leagues who can report onthe millions of dollars theyraise, “I think we’re at riskof being seen as overheadbecause our work is not astangible,” Brennan says. “I can’t say that a portionof those millions was related to the donors’ perceptionof the institution as effective, exciting, and worthy ofinvestment, but I know I contributed to some degree.Well, I don’t know it, I believe it. I’d like to movefrom believing to knowing.”UB is implementing the principles in three phases,

the first ofwhich includes determining what to measure and how. By the end of the year, Brennan wantsmetrics in place that track and relate his division’sactivities to institutional outcomes.“Just talking about it, just deciding what to mea

sure is a moment when you can be better focused onyour strategy,” Brennan says. “You can make sureyour tactics are aligned with your strategies and thatall of it is working together to achieve goals.”In deciding what to measure, Brennan and his

team focused on 10 goals and outcomes for 2012,which are published on the division’s vebsite (bit.ly/UBmeasurements) in an effort to be transparent. Eachof the areas contained different variables that couldhave been tracked, but not everything you can measure really matters, he says.One focus is increasing national news coverage by

placing more stories that highlight UB’s strategicstrengths. In re-evaluating the university’s mediastrategy, Brennan’s team also adjusted its objectivesfor success in local news, deciding to aim for onlyfront-page coverage of institutional priorities.Brennan and his team settled on metrics that

would offer the most useful information for thetime, effort, and expense involved in gathering the

data. But getting therewasn’t painless. The measurement discussions created anxiety among staffmembers, who worried thatthe results would be used toevaluate their performance.Brennan publicly pledged

that this wouldn’t happen.He also reminded his staffmembers that backing uptheir efforts with data wouldhelp tell the department’sstory more effectively—andberter show the impact oftheir work to senior leaders.

After attending a PR conference a couple of yearsago, AU’s LePre discovered that she had been applying the Barcelona Principles without realizing it. Herunit’s outcomes are directly tied to two transformational goals in the university’s strategic plan, and themetrics her team uses help evaluate its progress towardachieving chose goals.“We should all be asking ourselves: What are we

trying to prove, what are we trying to show, andwhat are we trying to justify,” LePre says. “You needto work backward from the outcome you want andask yourself what that will look like and what youwill need to do to get there.”LePre’s team reviews not only the quantity of

media placements but their quality, looking at thetypes of media outlets, their reputation, and theaudiences they reach; overall quality of the stories;how much of an article is focused on the institution;and the favorability of the portrayal. Staff membersalso examine the total number of placements andcompare how coverage has increased or decreasedyear to year. Her staff targets specific media outlets forplacements, and the team sets goals for achieving acertain percentage of stories focused on institutional

Measurement

MattersThe Barcelona Principles (bit.Iy/

Barceiona-principies) were established

in 2010 by a partnership of five major

international public relations indus

try associations to establish unified

benchmarks for PR measurement.

• Goal setting and measurement are

fundamentally important.

• Measuring the effect on outcomes

is preferred to measuring outputs.

• The effect on business results can

and should be measured where

possible.

• Media measurement requires

quantity and quality.

• Advertising value equivalents are

not the value of public relations.

• Social media can and should be

measured.

• Transparency and replicability are

paramount to sound measurement.

You need towork backward fromthe outcome you wantand ask yourself

what that wilL look likeand what you will needto do to get there.

28 JULYAUGUST2013 CASECURRENTS 29

MEASURING ADVANCEMENT

priorities, such as faculty research and students’ academic success as well as coverage for institutionalprograms, offices, schools, and divisions.“Goal setting depends on where you are today,”

LePre says, “and where you want to be tomorrow.”

SHARE WHAT YOU KNOWWant to demonstrate the value of your work and gaincampus allies? Reporting outcomes can play a usefuland strategic role in developing partnerships. Brennansends twice-yearly reports to UB’s school and collegedeans recapping the media coverage their unitsreceived during the spring and fall semesters.“It shows that we’re working for them, and it cre

ates an opportunity to sit down a couple of times ayear to discuss how we can work together,” Brennansays. “If we’re doing things that aren’t getting goodresults and really aren’t a good use of our time, I canhave a conversation with a dean or a vice president

and show them that if we put our energy in certainplaces, we’ll get better outcomes.”These meetings have led not only to more strategic

discussions about tactics, time, and resources but alsoincreased campus collaborations as deans and facultymembers contact him with newsworthy ideas,updates, and information.“It’s already started to change how we’re seen,”

Brennan says. “And more importantly, I think it’simproved our effectiveness at serving the institution.”Florida State University has seen similar results with

its media highlight reports, says Jeanette De Diemar,assistant vice president for university relations anddirector of university communications. The reports,which include social media activity, go to internal colleagues and partners each month and to the boardeach quarter.As FSU moved to an integrated marketing and

communications model, Dc Diemar believed that

showing the ROT of communications and socialmedia was important since the university had committed staff and budget to these areas. Similarly, DeDiemar and her staff have worked to shift the culturetoward showing their results.“Before we might have forgotten to talk about the

ROl or the impact or the result of something that wedid with a dean, a department chair, or researcher,”she says.Now, De Diemar ensures that partners and col

leagues see their contributions to the university, suchas a faculty member’s participation in a media pitchor quote in a story. This also demonstrates the rolethat communications has played in helping raise theprofile of a particular college or school. At boardmeetings, trustees see how the communicationsdivision has increased awareness of the universityand strengthened appreciation for its work, whichis essentially the overarching goal of most higher

education communications and marketing efforts.This type of reporting also illustrates the continu

ous nature of measurement. You can choose a place tostop and take a snapshot, but the activities, projects,and goals will continue, grow, transform, and evolve.“What are you trying to achieve?” De Diemar asks.

“Without that starting point, it doesn’t matter whatyou’re measuring.” I

Theresa Walker is a CURRENTS senior editor.

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