The Community College PROMISE Framework
The PROMISE Framework is Most Likely to Succeed’s proprietary framework to drive community college positioning by mitigating risk and leveraging opportunity.
It identifies current college positioning and a pathway forward, driving success through enrollment, retention, outcomes, and community engagement.
Find the balance between external positioning and internal readiness.
Articles
Before You Set the Next Community College Marketing Goal, Ask: Do We Have a System?
Conversion Isn’t Just a Goal—It’s a System We talk a lot about enrollment goals. Application goals. Event attendance goals. But goals are just direction. As James Clear of the NY Times Bestseller “Atomic Habits” puts it: “You don’t rise to the level of your goals. You...
Student Recruitment for Community Colleges: Why ‘Everyone’ Is Not Your Audience
Visibility Feels Like a Moving Target Because It Is Community college visibility isn’t one thing, it’s everything, all at once.You’re trying to reach everyone and someone: The general public and under-enrolled groups Through traditional channels and whatever’s...
Dear Community Colleges: Stop Chasing Communications Fixes. Start tracking Reputational Risk.
Reputation is how trust shows up at scale. And when we’re not tracking where trust is breaking down, we stay blind to reputational risks.
Creating the Right Context: Three Lenses to Rethink Community College Marketing
Awareness ≠ impact A college once spent 60% of its marketing budget placing ads during a high-profile basketball game that aired on ESPN (a paid cable channel). It was a bold move with expensive airtime, and a big audience. When asked about the decision, the Marketing...
Why Community College Campaigns Fail: Preconditions for Community College Marketing
The Case for a Theory of Change Over the last few months, I’ve gone down a few rabbit holes. The most useful being the concept of a theory of change. Popular in the nonprofit world, it’s a planning approach that starts with a goal and works backward to map out all the...
WEBINAR: Create a Program Marketing Plan
This webinar introduces an actionable framework to approach program marketing for community colleges through three essential steps: Prioritize, Package, and Promote. The session will provide participants with practical tools, following a usable framework that will...
Community College Positioning Pillars: Translating Mission into Value
I was on deadline, knee deep in a 75 slide powerpoint presentation trying to explain a community college brand: what it is, what it isn’t, how to live the brand, how to create a brand. I was exploring every possible way to explain the brand’s relevance within the...