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Thursday, March 28, 2024
The Eagle

Costs and causes: Dollars and sense behind AU's rebranding

AU added $1.27 million to the University Communications and Marketing department’s operating budget for the two fiscal years of 2010 and 2011 to go towards marketing initiatives that eventually became the wonk campaign.

This brought the total two-year budget for University Communications and Marketing up to $7.031 million, with $3.726 million allotted for FY 2010 and $3.305 million for FY 2011. The additional funds went toward AU’s first comprehensive branding campaign that it has undertaken, according to Teresa Flannery, executive director of University Communications and Marketing.

AU’s total operating budget for the two years are $456.7 million and $479.2 million, amounting to a total two-year budget of $935.9 million. The Marketing department’s budget represents 0.8 percent and 0.7 percent of the University’s total operating budgets, respectively, for those years.

KIRA KALUSH and ANNA SCALAMOGNA / THE EAGLE The Eagle interviewed a few students to get their opinions about the new "wonk" campaign.
“To put that in context, if you look at a corporation, what they would spend on marketing is 3 to 5 percent,” Flannery said. “We would never spend that much in a higher education environment.”

The purpose of the extra funds for the two years is to create the branding campaign, promote it and integrate it among AU constituents and to revamp its web presence, according to the American University Budget.

The University budget is created based on the priorities indicated in the University’s Strategic Plan, which was approved in November of 2008, according to Flannery.

Some of the campaign budget came from funds going toward specific Strategic Plan goals.

The branding campaign fell under goal 10, “Win Recognition and Distinction,” which was allocated a total of $1.328 million for FY 2010 and $908 thousand for FY 2011. A part of these Strategic Plan totals were spent towards the wonk campaign.

“The institution, through its community, its leadership and its board decided that this was a priority and that it should be funded and that it was important to do that so that we could be more successful in meeting our goals,” Flannery said. “The University could see that it wasn’t effectively integrating all the things that we were doing from the marketing communications fund.”

Flannery cited enrollment and alumni outreach trends that indicated the need for a branding campaign at AU.

Note: This is not a scientific poll.
Currently, AU tends to enroll an average of one freshman for every five to which it reaches out to during the recruitment process, according to Flannery. Schools with the strongest brands, such as Harvard, probably retain about four out of five for enrollment, she said.

The numbers are caused by “discrepancies between what [AU] thinks is the quality of the institution and the perceptions that are out there,” Flannery said. “That means you have to spend more on all those people who are not coming to get the one you do get to come, and that’s not cost-efficient.”

The same is true for alumni relations.

“What we have to do to raise a dollar of scholarship money from a donor is twice what it is at other institutions,” Flannery said. “The brand isn’t doing enough of the heavy lifting.”

The rankings on the U.S. News and World Report exemplify this problem. This year, AU was ranked 79th overall out of universities in the nation. While this was an increase from the previous ranking of 84, Flannery said it could be even better.

Twenty-five percent of the U.S. News and World Report ranking is determined by surveys of school administrators’ perceptions of other institutions.

But Flannery pointed out that in the component of the ranking that surveys high school guidance counselors, AU came in 47th, a place in the top 50 instead of the top 100, as in the peer-assessment component.

“Guidance counselors ... [talk] to current students ... have more direct knowledge,” Flannery said. “I know what a good university we are. We should be in the top half of that list, but our reputation is lagging behind the actual quality ... That’s why we invest in branding.”

This is not the first branding campaign that Flannery has headed. In 1997, she was asked to be the first marketing director at the University of Maryland.

For the next 11 years, she headed two separate campaigns at UMD themed around the mascot of the diamond back terrapin turtle named Testudo. That species grows only a matter of inches.

The first campaign was based around the word “zoom,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to an image of a fierce, determined under-dog turtle, as in the tortoise and the hare fable, according to Flannery.

The second campaign was for “Fear the turtle,” an idea that came from a cheer that UMD students would chant at basketball games.

From 1997 to 2008, UMD went from 30 to 18 on the U.S. News and World Report ranking for public universities. Its research funding more than doubled, and alumni donors tripled, according to Flannery.

“Same thing, you took a campaign that sounded very unusual for an academic institution,” she said. “It was organic, same as ‘wonk,’ coming from Nate [Beeler]. You start with something from within ... that represents the tone of the institution and gives you the opportunity to convey its strengths.”

Beeler, a 2002 AU alumnus, drew a cartoon that became the inspiration of the wonk campaign, The Eagle previously reported.

Higher education branding is a relatively new market that was only just brought into use in the 1990’s, according to Elizabeth Scarborough, CEO of SimpsonScarborough, the market research firm hired in early 2009 to conduct surveys about how AU community members viewed the identity of the school.

“For a long time, colleges and universities didn’t market themselves at all,” Scarborough said. “Fifteen or 20 years ago, when I started in this business, I actually was kicked out of a college president’s office for using the word ‘marketing.’”

However, it is extremely common now for colleges to invest in marketing and branding, according to Scarborough.

But squeamishness about using commercial marketing terms to refer to promotion of higher education still persists, including at AU, Scarborough said.

“It just makes people so uncomfortable,” Scarborough said. “And I understand that. Marketing higher education is different than marketing soap ... That’s your professors sort of adhering to their morals and wanting to protect what they hold so dear about the purpose of higher education, in general. They don’t want it to be commercialized.”

But the goals that AU pursued with the wonk campaign are important, Scarborough said.

“It’s had its fair share of image challenges in the last 15 years,” she said. “We were told by the president, by the provost ... by all of the leadership of the institution, ‘This is a great university, and not enough people know about it.’”

mfowler@theeagleonline.com


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