How Community Partnerships Enhance a College’s Brand

In every brand study I’ve conducted, I’m always amazed and inspired by what I’ve learned from the community partners of my client schools, yet I’m often perplexed by a general lack of appreciation over time for how these partnerships enhance the overall quality of life of a region. A well-designed marketing communications plan can fix this.

Here are the important things to include in your plan in order to build brand, increase opportunities for relationship building, and identify new revenue streams.

Lose the silos, embrace the mission

If you want to super-charge brand awareness and affect public perception of your institution (“public” being local, regional, or national), intentional collaboration across campus is critical.

In most cases, the person in a “community partnership” position reports to the senior advancement officer and interacts with many others from many departments across campus. In doing so, it is important that these interactions are not about the tactical requirements of the task at hand but rather about the mission of the institution overall.

If the mission is the guide for community partnership activities then each initiative can be measured by the degree to which it enhances student success, showcases the academic offering, and enhances the institutional narrative with new stories of the “brand-in-action,” not simply by the degree to which a specific project met its short-term goals.

Gather the metrics, and acknowledge the humanity

For some of the more formalized and longstanding activities that a director of community partnerships would facilitate, such as volunteer or internship hours performed by students, tracking the time served by all students each semester is routine and important. These metrics are key data points in an annual report and help when applying for grants or national designations. Less measurable and often overlooked is how these forms of partnerships catalyze human interactions and strengthen an institution’s place in its community by adding joy and a sense of empowerment to people’s lives.

A recent story on NPR, Schools Face A Massive Challenge To Make Up For Learning Lost During The Pandemic illustrates this point. Because of COVID-19, remote learning has replaced in-person learning for most school children. This news story describes a call to establish a national tutoring corps (as part of an expanded AmeriCorps) that would employ college students and recent graduates who would work with children in the primary and secondary schools near a campus. Based on an interview with former Education Secretary John King Jr., it describes that this corps “could be used to mobilize tutors who could both work with students to address their academic needs, but also build really positive mentoring relationships with students.” He goes on to say “we have decades of research showing that high-intensity tutoring can help students make up lost ground academically very quickly.”

No doubt that over the years, these “academic gains” have been tracked and quantified. Every college that offers programs in education, social work, counseling, and more, has done so. Less likely is the curating of the stories of the lives that were affected as a consequence of the “really positive mentoring relationships” that endured long past a single semester.

And these stories are gold.

These are the stories in which the people across an institution can take pride—from the community partnership director who set up the relationship, to the faculty who provided the skills and the confidence to their students to take on the role of mentor, to the student life office who gave structure and support to participants, to the students themselves who took on the mantle to be of help, and to the marketing and enrollment people who developed and shared these stories to new students and new community partners.

But these stories don’t write themselves. A bit of entrepreneurial thinking about the role of everyone on the advancement and communications teams may be in order.

Every Position at Every College is about Partnerships

Today, a core tenet of how institutions of higher education effectively reach external audiences and build partnerships is by deeply (i.e., empathetically) understanding the people with whom they want to connect. Personal relationships and direct communications matter a great deal, and they always will. But so does all of the content you produce as part of your communications and marketing. (Content, according to Ann Handley in her book, Everybody Writes, is any and all “medium through which you communicate with the people” with whom your institution interacts). These people are your potential partners.

A director of community partnerships focuses on building connections with high schools, with businesses and nonprofit organizations, and with local, regional, and state governmental agencies in order to strengthen the institution and the community of which it is a part. How this partnership dynamic is represented in an institution’s marketing communications plan can represent the difference between success and mutually beneficial long-term advancement for all.