9 Takeaways from CUPRAP 2023

“Yay, you’re here!” one person exclaimed inside an emptying conference room, excited to see an old professional friend. And in so doing, they captured a feeling that seemed to go around quite a bit at last week’s Spring Professional Development Conference, held by CUPRAP. The annual event brings together 300 or so higher ed marketers and communications professionals, offering nearly three full days of insights and, of course, socializing.

Those we spoke with said they particularly valued the chance to catch up with professional contacts, and to make new ones, but there were also plenty of learnings to be had, as well.

1. “Our market has an image problem.” That was the declaration made by Joseph Master, executive director of client strategy at higher ed agency Ologie. This was a recurring theme at CUPRAP, one that is tied to a larger loss of public trust in institutions, Master said. This issue impacting higher ed was also addressed by Teresa Flannery, chief operating officer of The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), who announced the rollout of a CASE-led campaign to boost the public perception of higher education as an industry. 
2. 93%. That’s the number of Gen Z-ers using YouTube, said Sarah Goldfarb, director of social media and digital content at RW Jones Agency. That statistic underscored another common theme that came up time and again at CUPRAP—the prevalence of short-form video, be it on YouTube, TikTok, or Instagram. Even with concerns around TikTok, as more users use these social media platforms as search platforms, the need to create high-quality content on them rises for institutions, as well. 
3. “People are talking about your university, and they’re not tagging you in it,” Jon-Stephen Stansel, a longtime social media manager in higher ed who now works in the entertainment industry, told a packed conference room in Thursday’s keynote session. There is a difference between social monitoring—checking your mentions and your replies—and truly social listening, which means digging deeper to find where your audience is and what they’re saying about their experience at your school.
4. “You do not have to have ‘director’ in your title to lead,” said Jaime Hunt, the chief marketing officer at Old Dominion University, extolling the virtues of an integrated marketing communications strategy. Ideally, she said, marketing leads and approves communications across departments, and functions as a decentralized system that pulls in expertise from across the marketing team to collaborate on individual projects.
5. 90% of marketers at institutions feel they are not receiving a budget large enough to reach their goals, said Jamie Oleksik, vice president of business development at Carnegie agency, citing data from a recent survey-based report the agency has produced.
6. “They don’t care who your provost is, I’m sorry,” Stansel said, explaining that while there is plenty of ‘talent’ on your campus that can show up in your social media, it is not your president and it is not your leadership. Instead, it’s the people who they see every day around campus, like the friendly cafeteria worker. “I promise you there is a Miss Susie on your campus, and you don’t know about them… but the students see Miss Susie everyday, and they tweet about her.”
7. “Just because it doesn’t have a call to action [targeting a specific audience] doesn’t mean it’s not doing that job in some way,” Stansel said. “In fact, sometimes adding that call to action, it’s counterintuitive, it’s hurting you more than helping you,” Stansel said. His point? That every social media post is addressing every potential audience of an institution, from prospective students and current students, to alumni, parents and everyone else—and customizing individual posts with specific CTA buttons is awkward and alienating.
8. $15 Billion. That’s the size of the social media influencer industry, Goldfarb said, as she espoused the virtues of activating and creating influencers on campus. That can be a difficult and delicate task, particularly when it comes to reaching out to existing students who are influencers with significant following who may not want to be encumbered by the restrictions of a partnership. But those relationships can be built over time, she said, and in the meantime schools can tap into smaller influencers while launching their own student ambassadors, adding that she particularly liked the idea of creating connections with incoming freshmen and establishing those relationships before they even move in.
9. “It is very easy to spend a lot of money very quickly and inefficiently in paid search,” Oleksik said. On the other hand, the beauty of paid search is it enables institutions to get directly in front of people who are asking questions, and to provide—and be—the answer. And while inefficient spend is a pitfall, Oleksik said the Carnegie survey finds those spends getting more efficient, particularly as institutions collaborate on PPC keyword strategies across campus instead of operating independently and competing for the same keywords, cannibalizing each strategy—and each budget.