Sharlyn, Content Strong: Hello, and welcome to higher thinking on higher. Ed. I am Charlene Carrington, communications steward and strategist, so excited once again to continue diving into the biggest trends, common challenges, and the most effective solutions encountered by communications and marketing leaders in higher Ed. And today I am honored to talk to John Penrose, Vice President of enrollment and marketing at Kentucky, Christian Christian University.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: John leads strategic growth initiatives across admissions and branding, and with over 20 years of experience in higher Ed, and also as the founder of velocity, 290 digital solutions. John brings both institutional insight and entrepreneurial perspective to this conversation. Once again. Big. Thank you, John, for being here with us today. How are you doing?
Sharlyn, Content Strong: I'm doing great. Thank you for inviting me.
John: Of course.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: To this, too. I'm so happy you had the time to do it today. So we'll just start really easy. I've just said a little bit about what it is that you do, but I would love to just dive in a little bit to your journey and and your experience. I know you have a really unique blend of academic and missions focused and leadership experience. Can you tell us a little bit about? You know your role as Vp. For marketing communications now and generally, how it connects to the broader mission of the institution.
John: Yeah, excellent. No, I have a deep connection to the mission of the University. Honestly, it's the mission
John: of Kcu that brought me here. I was at Thomas Moore University before this, and really enjoyed my role there, and the president of this school came and spoke at my church, and my church is connected to this university. I live about an hour away from here.
John: and I don't know. 2 months later I'm working here. It was.
John: and it was strictly because of what what we do here. It's it's a unique situation of of a Christian
John: university that offers many of the same
John: things that a larger State school or someplace like that. But in a very personalized Christian environment. And I super love that. And and we're really focused on producing servant leaders for people in both careers and ministry, or doctors or lawyers, you know, anywhere they find work
John: outside after they graduate here. So
John: I love it. It's it really fits with what I do and how I do it.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Now I do this often, and I apologize in advance. You say something that's really interesting, and it's a question that completely I didn't think about before. But as you're talking about your connection to your own personal values and your personal mission, and of course the connection to the mission that the institution tries to bring to the world. I wonder if you can speak a little bit on how the values based mission actually drives some of the marketing efforts that you do in the University.
John: That? That's a great question. It it completely drives the we, the marketing. We are desperately working
John: to get away from the giant net philosophy and really
John: focus on mission fit students, mission critical
John: procedures and market to those groups on a number of platforms. So students that are looking for a Christ centered
John: education need to be at the top of our list, and
John: from years past, when you would do broader outreach and broader perspectives in in the the folks you market to. We. We don't really do that anymore. We are looking to target individuals, and our messaging
John: has to be authentic to what we do and connects with those students. Or it's ineffective.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: I think that's a really interesting response. Because I think, you know, coming from a communications and marketing lens myself, I think about
Sharlyn, Content Strong: really trying to find a way to identify who those leads are. Who those people are. I wonder how you do that? Is it some? Is it they come to you first, st or how are you finding kind of finding them?
John: Well, that's that's the great mystery of all mysteries in college admissions, you know, finding the mission fit kids that have.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Yeah.
John: But we have a number of things that we do. We have about 200 Covenant churches. Obviously
John: kids from those churches are are likely good mission fits. We work with camp teams at Christian camps. In the summertime we go to conferences, and what we do is we. We build them. We build profiles of those type of students where they come from. And then we look at our alumni and we build a profile of the alumni that are most connected to the university, and then we try to find that in this generation which isn't
John: always easy. But I don't know when you you know, when you know, you know it's
John: it's it's a difficult task. But I think if if we're in the right spots where they're consuming
John: media where they're.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: I mean
John: as Bart Taylor would say. They're watering holes. Then then we have a good chance of reaching those those students. But if we're, you know, if we're running an ad in the newspaper, we're probably not reaching those students, not. There's not a reason to run an ad in the newspaper. I don't have a reason to run an ad.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: But
John: You know I have to be where they are.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Exactly so. I love that you said that because I mean, I feel that that leads perfectly into my next question.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: When you said about, you know. Sometimes it's hard to identify them and to find out where it is that they are and connecting with them on the platforms that you're using, and I think about just in general kind of the sector shifts the shifts that we're seeing across higher Ed, but across marketing communications in general, and the difficulty in reaching people. I wonder, in general, what changes you're seeing across higher Ed, particularly for smaller or
Sharlyn, Content Strong: faith-based institutions, for example. And how are those shifts, kind of shaping your communications and marketing strategy or priorities right now.
John: Yeah. The well, obviously the demographic cliff for us is important and straight ahead. Then the good news is, Kentucky is a few years behind that demographic cliff. So our high, this should be our biggest high school graduation this year and next for several years, and then it'll slightly decline afterwards. So that's a shift. I I see that some of the larger institutions.
John: have pulled their tried to pull students from our our niche into their
John: into their recruiting processes where maybe they weren't going after those students as
John: intensely, but but mostly I've seen it used to be in marketing higher. Ed, the
John: the Big 8, the small.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: Right. The big ate the small and the small had to fight all they could, and I've always been at smaller schools.
John: But now it's the fast eats the slow.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: Right, and it used to be all these, you know. You'd have all these philosophies about lead follow up and and kind of, and I started in for profit. So we're pretty aggressive. And and so we have marketing. And then we get leads. And then prospective students. We really go aggressively and quickly, and just across our entire process.
John: There's a greater need for speed, and there's a greater need for student experience. And if you can marry those 2 things appropriately, then you will be successful. But if you don't react.
John: you know nobody. And I have this conversation with folks all the time. When you buy something on Amazon, and you pay for it, or you fill the form out. If something doesn't pop up immediately.
John: you lose your mind. Right? You're like long.
John: Yeah, why? And so the same experiences. You drive somebody to your website. You convert them, and you don't respond to them immediately. More marketing on top of that. Essentially.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: They think something's wrong in the process, especially this generation and the the current, the current group of students we like we or we're dealing with now. They really are looking for curated choices.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: I'm like
John: a gigantic portfolio. So it's important on our end for us to kind of know where we're marketing. Know what the students are looking for, and then give them a few choices that are meaningful to them.
John: Instead of 8,000 choices where some previous generations kind of
John: they, they wanted multiple choice. They wanted a thousand.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: From.
John: So those are some of the major shifts both demographically and process wise that we're seeing. And then, of course, obviously, as students move around. I'll
John: we set up a Snapchat Snapchat
John: business profile like a year ago, and I was working on that myself because we're small, and I just felt so old.
John: I'm doing that, Snapchat, and I'm trying to figure out how this all works. And and you know I'm just looking at that. I have 12 year old kids, so they're not. I'm I'm holding off the social media as long as I can. If I, my 16 year old niece, was here, I'd be dominating this. So that's it's like you have to. You have to adapt.
John: And you have to find the folks where they are. So yeah. So I've learned to use Snapchat.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: That's I mean, that's what you need to do exactly that. You need to figure out where it is that they are. I want to pick up. There are a few different things you said that I've actually written down here because I don't want to forget them. And one of the things you talk about is curating that kind of personalized experience. What does that look like for your team? What is that from before they actually become a student, or you're just talking about once they're a student, and you're trying to retain them and make.
John: No, no, that's before they become a student. That is,
John: that is, using the information we have in their journey, especially on our website and other places to understand.
John: So once again, we lead. We
John: we had, for example, Icom is a large conference on missions that we had here last year. And there was like 40,000 people. We did some Geo targeting and and captured some
John: data from that. And we started sending ads out about our certificate programs. And and so what that looks like is using a specialized QR code or using a specialized to direct people to the choices. We think they would be most interested in, based on where they came from.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right, right.
John: And so instead of sending them to a landing page of all the online programs.
John: right? We're sending them specifically to a landing page on a certificate in church ministry. Yes, or
John: if it was an we did a big nursing event in Eastern Kentucky a couple months ago. Those we we actually have a curated landing page.
John: That those particular leads will be directed towards
John: that will give them options in undergraduate nursing, because we know they're all high school kids right? Right?
John: So that's that takes a little more
John: effort on both ends, the market, the marketing and the enrollment side. But honestly, in this job
John: it's the same job. If you can't do both, you're in trouble. I mean.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: That's how I got into the whole marketing side I was at.
John: I was at a conference for Enrollment leaders in Nashville quite a long time ago, and they asked, they asked us all they said, Do you? How many of you guys text your students to recruit them? I was the only guy that raised my hand.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Oh, wow!
John: And I didn't want to say I came from the evil for profits, and they told us to text the kid. I mean, that's where I kind of learned about texting, I mean, that's not. I'm just joking about the evil part I work from for a couple of really good for-profit schools, but
John: so I was the only guy that raised my hand, and the next year I don't remember where the conference was. It was someplace, else it was.
John: and they did the same thing. They said how many people.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Everyone, raise their hand.
John: Everybody right.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Oh, for sure!
John: Then the very next question, they said, was, how many guys are using
John: targeted digital ads to attract your students? 2 people raise their hands.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Oh, my! Gosh! Right.
John: It wasn't me.
John: I wasn't 1 of the people that raised my hands.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: And then I thought, -oh, I'm gonna be all those people from last year that I was whooping on
John: for a couple of years right because they didn't text their students.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: And I felt like I felt that that exact second, I'm like I'm behind.
John: and I have to do whatever I need to do to learn how to do this.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: Right, and I worked at a small school with no money, so I mean it was, if it was to be. It's up to me right? So I'm like I'm behind right now. I realized now the good thing. One. I think one of them was
John: a very Vanderbilt, I think, was one of the schools, so we really wasn't competing with Vanderbilt, but I knew at that moment I had to learn how to do the marketing side and marry the 2 of them
John: to be successful. So that's when I started and and started in digital marketing and and trying to learn how to be a digital marketer.
John: And so.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: You.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Yeah, I mean, I think you touched on so many things there that I think are so critical. Just this idea that technology is changing so quickly the tools that we have are changing and advancing so quickly. The ways to reach your audience to reach students are changing and advancing so quickly, and it's really easy to almost miss the boat on certain things. But but you also touched on just this idea that when you're in a smaller school, and you have a smaller team.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: You know there are different challenges. There are different challenges that present themselves. And I wonder, you know, thinking about some of the successes that you have, and then some of the things that maybe are still kind of challenging for you. You know what's what's
Sharlyn, Content Strong: clicking right now for you in your work. What's working really? Well, maybe something that is exceeding your expectations. And then, on the flip side, you know what's been especially frustrating or difficult to move forward.
John: Integration of AI. I think we're ahead of the curve.
John: I think we're ahead of the curve as far as Sing.
John: and it's intentional planning, and it's intentional work on our part as seeing AI as
John: a a tool in our toolbox that we we bring alongside of what we do.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: Not trying to figure out a way to use AI to do what we do, so we don't have to do it.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: It right.
John: Right it has to be. It's like it's like giving everybody this assistant that might get the, you know, be super fast and super smart. And then some of the integrations in our Crm and some other places where we actually have like options like you can type a response, and then it'll say, Hey, maybe you ought to send it this way.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: Knowing as enrollment professionals
John: to say. And you know sometimes the way the AI sets it up. It's terrible right. Of course you wouldn't send that to a student. And then sometimes you're like Whoa, that's pretty good.
John: perfect example. I was working on them.
John: I'm working on a TV ad, right, a streaming TV ad digital ad
John: and I was. I was struggling with the last part of the
John: of this, the sentence and I had, like 4 or 5 ideas, and I
John: I put them together, and I used AI to help me like I listed my ideas, and I'm like help
John: analyze these, and give me suggestions.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: And I came up with something I thought was really good. You know it was
John: it was. It was.
John: It was focused on nursing. So it was like a ready to care statement. But
John: if I just said, AI, give me the statement.
John: and I had to put like my 5 ideas. Yeah, you have to that. It would. It would have been, it would. It's just be junk. So you have to kind of understand
John: that technology and that emerging technology and not be afraid to use it absolutely. But you have to understand that it is just part of the tool in our toolbox, and I feel like as a team and as a school like I feel like we've been pretty progressive on the on the academic side, and we're working hard on the marketing side to use AI, but not to do it like.
John: And you know you scroll through your social media feed. You can tell the AI. And matter of fact, it's it's going to be like it's eventually, I honestly think the full AI ads are going to be
John: kind of a students are smart, right? They're smart. They know when that picture of the guy walking in.
John: Backpack, and the sun's hitting their face. Just the right might not be real, you know. And so
John: I'm
John: I think we're really doing well in that. I think we're doing really well in our outside lead creation, our our in-person marketing shoe leather type stuff.
John: And I feel like we've done well on the digital
John: advertising, the paper click, the digital creating digital ads that are right
John: people, and getting those in front of perspective students. I feel like that's going pretty well for us, right? And our indicators, like our conversion rates, and our all those that all the numbers that count look.
John: you know, like we're doing well in there, because I could feel it all day long. But if the conversion rate's terrible, and our click through rate is terrible, and all the things that we measure every day
John: aren't working. It doesn't matter what I feel, because that's olden times, and this is the new time, and you have to track literally everything. So.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the next question I was going to ask you, but I don't want to. I don't want to ask you yet, because I want to know if there's any of you have any challenges or.
John: Yeah, no tons of challenges we have.
John: We're still in an overall branding voice. Authority deficit at this school. This school is excellent. It is excellent. And the thing that struck me about that 1st meeting I had with the President
John: he talked about.
John: He said
John: he was bragging, not bragging. But in his speech he was talking about the top 10 nurse practitioner program in the country at Kcu.
John: I'm in the college admissions business.
John: I'm at a lot at a at a good sized school.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: I have a nursing program that I promote.
John: I didn't know Kcu had a top 10 program.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: I didn't know these things, and of all the people sitting there in those pews that should have known that it would have been me.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: And it kind of was like a challenge like.
John: I gotta help fix this. I gotta help fix this. This is so there's like a voice authority, a branding authority, and they did some just classic mistakes. It wasn't out of neglect, like, for example.
John: when I got here, the course catalog for this university was a Pdf. Saved on our website.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: It was a good course catalog. It was all in there, but you know, and I know with Google crawls that course catalog. They just see a Pdf. They you don't get any authority from all those classes you have. So the 1st thing you know, 1st thing I said is, we got to build a new website. This has to change. We need, we need authority in these content areas. And so no, that's still a struggle. We did a lot of painting, and I've been here 2 and a half years. In the 1st 2 years I painted
John: I rolled out a lot of paint on fresh woods, you know, it's just being sucked in. And
John: we're starting to see in our own backyard, which is where I wanted to own first, st like applications from local high schools and stuff.
John: which is the real test for us. Those have all increased. So I know we're being effective effective. But
John: yeah, it's still a struggle and our our biology program. We have kids getting accepted into Med school. And we have all these great things happening in our pre-professional programs. And it's like
John: we send press, release after press, release after press release and and part of it, because it's not like the old days. The sources you used to send that information to
John: they reached a broad, broad audience aren't as effective. And so you have to send it to multiple places that have like more narrow reaches. And so that's a challenge. That's a challenge. And we have some tools to help with that, or we couldn't do it.
John: But so I think that's a struggle.
John: But we're making progress.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: I want to get into that a little bit. I want to hear about some of the tools you're using to do all of those things. So you talked about using AI and what that means, how they're supplementing some of the work that you do. And I use that word very specifically supplementing some of the work you do and some of the other tools you said for kind of pushing your Pr machine. But you talked a lot just now about metrics and watching your conversion rates. And you know, actually being able to track directly what you're doing.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Enrollment numbers from high schools directly into your schools and into some of your programs. So in general, with limited time and resources, what key metrics are you? Are you watching most closely? And how
Sharlyn, Content Strong: are you kind of about you waiting.
John: Honestly, time and resources isn't nearly the the
John: issue it used to be in tracking right? Most of the vendors I work with most of the folks I've worked with individual folks. They provide me dashboards and.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: Another inside metrics.
John: But I learned the Ogsm model of planning from some friends at Procter and Gamble. When I was at Chatfield college in Cincinnati. So I worked with a lot of those people. So I kind of learned what their strategies and how important the measures were.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: So when we set up all our planning, the measures are just as important as the objective right, because you can't prove the objective of that.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: So for us the the main goals obviously are lead creation, and then lead creation by funnel.
John: So we track that. And then the second is applications.
John: Which every school in the country's applications accepts.
John: And and all the way down that funnel through register. Now on the marketing side, it's it's we use pixels and everything we do digitally.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: So we know where our traffics come from. Our analytics is set up. So it coordinates in several different dashboards. And so I'm tracking
John: what the click through rates are on the ads. I wanna know who's clicking on it. And why.
John: more importantly, what's the bounce rate on that ad? So if people are coming to us from a digital ad or streaming TV ad, or something like that, I want to know if they're staying. And then I want to be able to map their journey once they're on our website.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: So we have Kpis for all those including
John: our our on page conversion, which, because, you know, at 1 point it's the ads responsibility. And then once it gets to your website, it's your website's responsibility
John: and your team's responsibility. Then convert them. So I want to map that journey and we have
John: pinpoints and goals for each, each different
John: step of the way to kind of build our entire picture.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Of course.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Okay, no, that's great. I'm cognizant of your time. So I do want to ask you some of the 2 big questions. So the 1st one is, and I love these because I feel like they really kind of wrap up everything we talked about. But when you think about the next 6 to 12 months. What's something you're hoping to build to refine or to see kind of real progress on, whether it's you know, in your team specifically or at kind of a broader institutional level.
John: I got 2. We are in the process of building a new newsroom as a separate site to use for marketing.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Okay.
John: I've got I made a lot of progress on there with I'll say me one of my team members
John: who does that, Trevor. He he really focuses. He's got the nuts and bolts of it put together, and I have some stuff I need to do from my side, and we want to generate a newsletter off that that site. And we want to do build backlinks. And we want to do all these different things for SEO. So there's a lot riding on that site. And the second project that I want to finish in the next 12 months is we have started to build a AI Chatbot.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Oh, great!
John: And so I'm in the testing phase of the AI Chatbot once again.
John: Both of those projects are very close to completion.
John: So for me. They're they're big, and I want to get that that finished and
John: those those would be the 2 big projects. I wanna.
John: It's pretty institutional. But that's where I want to go.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: No, that's great. But I you know I've had a lot of conversations with other institutions, and everybody's talking about how they map out the Chatbot, and how broad it reaches just little parts of little smaller faculties, or across the university. And what that means for them? What are you looking to do. What's your objective with that? Is it, student retention and helping them kind of figure out how, when they get to a site, how they find what it is that they need navigational issues, for example, or support issues. For example, I don't know.
John: If you want.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Share all that, but.
John: Can't get too proprietary, but.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John: They. This bot needs to assist in the helping prospects through the enrollment funnel.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right? Okay.
John: That's number one, our our number one. But we we can 2 sided website. It also needs to help people on the other side with registration and how to do their student portal. And if their email doesn't work, what do they need to do? So there's like a mechanical help, the current population side. But the
John: there's no, it's a marketing tool for us. It's a marketing tool, 100%.
John: And then in the front end of the website. And that's the goal for it.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: That's excellent.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: So my last big question and this for some reason, this is a tough question every time I ask it for everyone. But if I gave you a magic wand and you could wave it around right now and solve one persistent
Sharlyn, Content Strong: marcoms or leadership even challenged no budget limits, no structural barriers. What would you fix first.st
John: That's easy for me. Honestly, it was
John: having the staff and the resources to pull in the different content created throughout this campus and
John: pump it out to the appropriate platform you have people that are creating, you know, that are in journals and and science experiments and histories doing a dig. And all these different things that are going on.
John: And we currently do not have a very good system of those, one being delivered to marketing
John: and and 2 processing the news, the events.
John: the etc. In there to to then get them out to the public, because
John: multiple times I'll find out about things that are old news by the time.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right.
John: And it's like, you know, like somebody wins an award. Somebody does this?
John: That's that. That structure is not in the DNA
John: of this place. When I 1st got here on the admission side.
John: a culture of documentation wasn't here. That was like it had to become part of our DNA.
John: This content creation and sharing from a marketing perspective.
John: because we can't afford to spend a billion dollars on exactly right
John: advertisement. But we do a billion dollars worth of cool stuff that can be picked up
John: nationally, that that's where we have to fill in that gap. And that's the one thing I would love.
John: because that would help everything marketing enrollment that would help us from top to bottom.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Of course, of course, I would like to say that's not a challenge that you're the only person I've heard say that some of the universities I'm working with now. It's the same thing because they're so broad. There are silos. There are things happening, and it's difficult to build that process in necessarily to share that information in a timely manner. Right? Because we know we work in a very kind of reactive industry.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: John, thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your experience, your perspective with us today. Is there anything else that we didn't get to touch on that you're, you know, dying to share with us before we wrap up.
John: No, I just I just appreciate this opportunity. I love what I do, and I love.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Where I do it, and it's.
John: When when I was in high school I was for sure I was either going to be a rock star or play in the Nfl.
John: I mean that that's those were my 2 goals, and
John: I had no idea what a Vp. Of marketing and enrollment was. You know what I'm saying.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Right. I know exactly.
John: It's like, I didn't even know this was a job or what it was, and so but it's a great job. It's a great place to be, and a great thing to do. And
John: we just had graduation. And did, you know, to see the fruits of our labor and and what we did.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: Deal.
John: It's an amazing thing that we get to do.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: That's why that's so. That's so true. But you know you're a rock star. What it is that you do. You're a rock star in a different way. John.
John: I'm not sure about that, but it's still not quite what I'd imagine when I was 16, but still pretty cool.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: It's still pretty cool. Well, it's been such a thoughtful and generous conversation. Thank you so much. Again, John. To our listeners or watchers. Anybody who watches this. I hope this episode sparked ideas affirmed your own experiences, or helped you see a challenge in a new light. If you're a communications or marketing leader in higher Ed. And you want to contribute to this evolving conversation. I'd love to hear from you, because we know these conversations aren't just talk. They really are a start of ideally a shared roadmap for the future of our field.
Sharlyn, Content Strong: So let's get to work. Thanks so much again, John.
John: Thank you.