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Kevin Renton:
Hi there, my name’s Kevin Renton, and welcome to Quickfire with Volt. This is where we put higher ed marketers on the hot seat and ask them 20 questions to see what makes them tick, what makes them successful and what their goals are for the future.
So in the crossfire today we have Kathy Kissane, the associate vice president of marketing at Thomas Jefferson University.
Kathy Kissane:
How’re you doing? I’m happy to be here.
Kevin Renton:
We’re doing all right. So give us your elevator pitch. What do you do at Thomas Jefferson University?
Kathy Kissane:
So like you said, I’m the associate vice president of marketing here at Thomas Jefferson University. We’re located in Philadelphia, and I lead an amazing team whose goals are, you know, with every higher ed marketer to elevate the brand and also grow awareness and reputation, as well as grow our enrollment. And we have a really strong partnership with our enrollment team to do just that.
So I’ve been at my current institution, which is now Thomas Jefferson University. We actually merged with Philadelphia University in 2017. I come from the Philadelphia University side, but have been working there for many, many years in higher ed, and it’s just been great.
Kevin Renton:
Yeah, it’s great to have someone on from our hometown. So let’s go Phillies. Anyway first question, I wanted to work in higher education because…
Kathy Kissane:
Yes. I always tell people I wanted to work in higher ed because I didn’t want to graduate college. I never wanted to leave. And that’s partly true. But really, I think, you know, higher ed, you can’t really get better, in my opinion, than working in higher education. It’s a place that truly changes lives, and our mission at Jefferson is we improve lives. So like I said, you really can’t get any better than that as a purpose in life.
I’m also a super strong advocate of professional, and personal growth, and we’re surrounded by that all the time in higher ed, right? There’s an energy that I’m not sure you can get anywhere else, like students choose to be here to learn things that are going to take them further in life and to reach their goals, and we’re surrounded by people that wanna help get them there. So it’s very inspiring and incredibly worthwhile way to spend your days.
Kevin Renton:
I agree it’s a great energy. Anyway, the marketing tool I can’t live without is…
Kathy Kissane:
I don’t know if this technically is a tool, but maybe. I would say I’m a big fan of Microsoft Teams. I mean, it’s a tool. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a marketing tool, but it is for collaboration. We adopted that after or during COVID, and I’m just finding it such a great way to collaborate with our team. Whether it’s if we have to do a virtual meeting or just quickly chatting with each other or storing different things that we’re working on collaboratively. I love that.
And then also one thing that I’m really interested in learning and I’ve been working a lot with is just ChatGPT. I do think that that’s a great tool for brainstorming. I encourage the team. We just sat together the other day and went through some webinars on it just so that we can see where we can use that.
So I think that that’s something that’s going to be a helpful tool as we continue to move forward and see how it changes.
Kevin Renton:
Cool. No, ChatGPT is a great tool, and it’s a different tool than anything I think we’ve worked with before in the past because it is a collaborative tool that you can actually use to enhance your work, generate ideas. And it will be a fascinating thing how we crawl, walk, run with it as it comes into our lives.
Kathy Kissane:
Mm-hmm. I agree.
Kevin Renton:
In the next five years, I’d like to…
Kathy Kissane:
I think for the next five years, I’d say I’d like to continue to plan and pivot. Like, I think it’s one of those things that I’m definitely a goal setter, probably annoyingly so, but when I think of five years, it’s kind of far out. And as you know, like in higher ed and in any kind of marketing, it’s constantly changing.
So I think, you know, if we look at the constant, it would be continuing to grow the team, continuing to help them to grow professionally, and most importantly, continuing to encourage them to be the CEOs of their life and their careers. So I think that that’s something that I’m looking forward to seeing where we are from now until five years from now.
Kevin Renton:
My biggest professional mistake was …
Kathy Kissane:
I think this is somewhat common for people. Like I said, I’ve been at my institution for many years, so I grew up there in many ways. And when I took the role of overseeing the marketing team, I was used to being that doer. I still am a doer, but I needed to spread the wealth, so to speak, and delegate so that my team felt like they were part of it as well.
And I did find that, you know, I was taking on a lot thinking that they’re too busy to take it on and things like that. So, you know, I had a discussion with them and I said, you know, I’d love for you guys to feel much more a part of everything that we’re doing and some of the bigger strategic pictures and things like that.
So I did talk to them and said, what would you like to learn more about whether that was creating part of the brand campaign or doing, working market research or media buying media planning, I should say, but now we have a team that we call our cross-functional leads that they’re all taking different parts of what we do in marketing and collaborating together so that everyone can learn about it. And I’ve really seen the benefits of delegating. I think sometimes it is a little bit like, you don’t want to burden people, you know, you have to be able to trust them to do the work that they’re going to do, which helps them to grow.
So it’s been a great learning lesson for me, for many ways, and I’ve seen the benefits of it and also just the engagement and how much the team has grown and the ideas that they bring to the table. It’s been really great. But I wish I would have done it sooner.
Kevin Renton:
Okay, when I’m not working, I’m…
Kathy Kissane:
Mm-hmm. I definitely love to hang out with my family and my dog Kelsey. She gets me outside a lot, which I love to do. So I love to find different places to hike within the Philadelphia area and suburbs. And I love to travel when I can. My bucket list trip is Greece, which I’m hoping to do in a couple of years from now.
And I also do a lot of reading. I’m probably annoying in some ways of how much I love to read about high performance and how we can get better and those sort of things, but I’m always reading and finding or watching webinars or classes or things like that just to see, you know, how we can get that one percent better as we go along.
Kevin Renton:
Is there a title or a podcast that you’ve read recently that you could recommend?
Kathy Kissane:
Well, I’ll tell you what I’m reading. It’s right here on my desk. And I’m finding it really, really good is Bart Caylor‘s new book, Chasing Mission Fit. I think that is something that it’s really practical. And I was just talking to my team about it, about all of us reading it, but just looking to see what’s out there, and making sure you’re subscribed to all the different higher ed.
Kevin Renton:
Okay.
Kathy Kissane:
And outside of higher ed, you know, podcasts or newsletters, just to see little, you know, the more you listen to, you’re like, ooh, I can pull that thing from here and that thing from there.
Kevin Renton:
I start my day at…
Kathy Kissane:
Time-wise, I’m usually up around 6:30 or earlier, depending on, a lot of times now, when my dog is waking me up. But I do have a pretty standard routine where I do first coffee but I meditate. I have my coffee while I’m doing that. I also listen to, I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Growth Day. It’s kind of like a coaching platform, but they do this Daily Fire every morning and it just gets me in like, okay, how am I going to spend my day? You know, they have a list of questions that you answer, like, what kind of energy am I going to bring into the day? Like, what am I excited about doing? What’s thinking about what’s going to stress me out and what can I do about it? So it’s really helpful to be able to sit in the morning before you kind of jump into everybody else’s emails and things to kind of put your own intentions down. So that’s something I do. I do it now every day. I’ve been doing it for years.
Kevin Renton:
The secret to our students succeeding at my school is…
Kathy Kissane:
Thomas Jefferson University is a great place for students. And it’s a great place for students that really have a good clue on what they want to do. We’re a professionally focused university. And even part of our curriculum is, we call it the creativity core, where students, we feel everybody’s creative. Everybody, you know, you have to be curious. You have to be willing to try things and fail and see how you can iterate to make it better.
So it’s students that are definitely doers. But I mean, it could be any student, but those are the students I think that really thrive at Jefferson. And it’s interesting, you know, when you talk to students on our campus, you’ll say, you know, what are you majoring in? And they’ll say, I’m a fashion designer or I’m an engineer or it’s not so much I’m studying this, they see themselves in that. So it’s people that have, I think, a lot of ambition, but also know what they wanna do and love to talk about the work that they’re doing. So it’s something that I think is really interesting. And also we work with students that, or we encourage students and we do a lot of cross-disciplinary projects. So business students are talking to designers or healthcare students in healthcare that want to design something new or solve some sort of problem. So there’s a lot of collaboration that goes in with the student projects that we do as well.
Kevin Renton:
I admire the marketing at…
Kathy Kissane:
Arizona State, I think is just really interesting. Purdue, I really admire the work that they’ve done. And I think partly the work itself is really great. Like they have a podcast that I think is really interesting just for anyone to listen to whether you’re interested in Purdue or not.
But I also love the way that they promote their marketing team. I think that that’s something that’s really interesting. They really look to elevate the profession and the value that it brings to not only the institution but that community. And I think that that’s something that’s worth imitating.
Kevin Renton:
The biggest challenge facing higher education marketers are…
Kathy Kissane:
I think we all know the budget constraints, the competing priorities, everybody has great ideas, the enrollment cliff that we have coming from an enrollment standpoint, and then all the surveys we see out there about the lack of trust now in higher ed more than ever. But something, and I think that that’s something we have to continue to work with, obviously, to be successful.
One of the things too that I would love to see, and it kind of goes back to the question that you just asked about Purdue, is how do we as marketers elevate the profession of higher ed marketing? I think it’s been happening more and more, and you see more conferences or books like the one by Bart that I just mentioned, or CASE is doing even more outreach for education and professional development. But one of the things when I hear people say, we gotta hire people from outside of higher ed to come in the marketing teams, I don’t think that that’s a bad thing. But when I’ve seen people come in for that, I hear them often say, wow, I’m impressed with what you guys are doing. And I think that it’s such a complex platform. I mean, the audiences that we work with, that we’re doing everything from creative to media planning to market research. I’d love to see higher ed marketing get its true respect and do. So, I think that’s something we can all work on together.
Kevin Renton:
My favorite social media channel is and why…
Kathy Kissane:
One of the things I said is that higher ed keeps me young. So I do, I can’t say I post dance things on TikTok. You’re not gonna be able to find me there, but I do love to watch TikTok. And I love LinkedIn or Instagram for like, you can truly curate what you want, curate what you want to see. So I think that that’s interesting, right? That you can go on and get mindless if you just need to kind of unplug. But it’s also you can really follow things that are going to keep you in a certain way, you know, like and help you either grow or learn new things or whatever it is. But LinkedIn is definitely my go-to. You know, professionally, I think there’s no other place to connect with people, to share what you are doing, to elevate higher ed marketing. I think it’s a great place to do that. So LinkedIn, I’m on quite a bit.
Kevin Renton:
It’s great. My biggest professional achievement is…
Kathy Kissane:
I think part of that is what we were talking about with my hardship was the delegation. But I think with merging two universities, it’s not easy. It’s quite a challenge, but we’re up for the challenges and being able to create a team, a cohesive team that really feels like they’re part of the same enterprise, because when you’re bringing two together, it takes a little bit of time.
But to be able to create the team and create really great work, really great campaigns, we have been reaching goals and increasing enrollment and all the good things and being able to see the team that when I kind of step aside, they’re doing really great work. I look at that as definitely my best professional achievement.
Kevin Renton:
For you, what’s working in higher education at the moment?
Kathy Kissane:
You know, with all those things that we had mentioned that there’s definitely a lot that higher ed needs to work on, but I think it’s still, you know, it’s continuing its mission of training our future workforce and transforming lives and giving people opportunities and also bettering society, you know, with the research that we do or the training or, you know, the training of our students, whether it’s from the medical college or designers or engineers. I think it’s still a place that just is helping us to impact society in a better way.
Kevin Renton:
What do you think is not working in higher education at the moment?
Kathy Kissane:
This is talked about a lot, and I think COVID has forced us in a good, it’s a good thing. One of the good things that came out of it is for us to really look at the way that we provide education and looking at, we have online programs in some ways, it’s usually for those, what we used to call kind of nontraditional students, which I don’t know if we can say that anymore, but just having options, like really looking at like the way that we deliver education, like the cost of education, obviously, like how do we bring that down? But, you know, does it have to be a four-year degree for an undergrad? Could it be three? Could it be more hybrid in the sense that, you know, the first year experience can be on campus and get those, you know, social skills and learning to like live on your own, like there’s definitely a good benefit for that.
But do they have to stay there and do it for another three years? Or can they be working and doing it at the same time? So, you know, all the upskilling and how do we train and help our students not only for their first job, but all their jobs after. Again, things that people are looking at and we’re looking at, but it’s definitely going to have to change, I think, to fit not only what audiences want but also the employers and what they need.
Kevin Renton:
The hardest part of my job is…
Kathy Kissane:
Definitely, there’s just so many things that everybody wants to do. In higher ed marketing and enrollment too, because I worked in enrollment for many years, we see the big picture, we see everything. And you might have people that are looking at, like for the nursing program, or might be looking for the engineering. And of course, they’re gonna say, I need you to help me with my program.
I would be doing the same thing if I was in their position. But being able to really have those priorities set, and we all know that if everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority. But there’s only so much time, there’s only so much money, and even though there’s a lot of great ideas, I think it’s just hard to kind of…
Kevin Renton:
Manage the stakeholders.
Kathy Kissane:
Be able to do it all. Yeah, yeah.
Kevin Renton:
I love my job because…
Kathy Kissane:
It definitely, I think it keeps me young. You know, I think that it’s someplace that’s always learning. We get to work with people who want to help others succeed. And we work with students that are looking to go onto the next phase of their life, which, you know, if you’re making an impact on people’s lives, you know, I think that it really can’t get any better than that.
Kevin Renton:
Kathy Kissane, thank you for being on QuickFire. Thanks for your time. Thanks for inspiring us this morning. We’ll get the books that you’re reading and put them in the comments below. But yeah, thanks for taking your time to do this with us.
Kathy Kissane:
Thank you so much. It was a lot of fun.
