Talking Stick - January/February 2015 - 40

Building Bridges
Housing and marketing pros alike share tales from the front lines of collaboration

Cheryl Janus
Assistant Director, Housing Operations
and Marketing
Seton Hall University
South Orange, New Jersey
When working together I would advise
any housing and residence life and
marketing team to first discuss the goals
of the project, for both the invested
department as well as the overall
university and also the university
standards for publications and its voice
beforehand. For example, when my intern
and I began to build a mobile application
we had a very different vision of what it
should look like. But with the guidance
and expertise of our marketing team we
were able to produce an app that has
been viewed multiple times by users
across the globe.

Cindy McClanahan
Director of Marketing and
Communications, Auxiliary Services
Georgia College
Milledgeville, Georgia
I had a two-headed monster to work with:
between the university communications
department and me and between the hall
staff and me.
Working with university
communications took a lot of relationship
building up front as they were hesitant to
allow me the authority to take the lead
on the housing marketing. We had many
discussions about the overall direction of
the university's brand. When it was time
to finalize housing's marketing strategy,
I made sure we had strong university
communications representation at the
table. We moved slowly and deliberately,
making sure all parties were on board.
Working with the hall staff was a
different experience. Before I arrived,
housing had not placed any emphasis
on marketing or communications. I did
extensive training sessions for community
directors and community advisors on why
marketing is important and the roles we
40

TAlkiNg STick

each play in the process. It took several
years to get that message engrained into
our culture.
I learned that while marketing people
are very metrics-driven, the hall staff
was not. For example, each hall has a
Facebook page. Relying on best practices
in social media, I required each hall to
create a minimum number of posts per
week. Each week I would send out a
report to the entire group noting which
halls met the requirement and which
did not. This is a common tactic used in
sales and marketing, but it was wholly
rejected by the hall staff and caused a
significant amount of pushback. I had to
change my tactics in order to hold the
team accountable in a way they could
comprehend and responded well to.

Brittney Rutherford
Marketing Coordinator, Department of
Residence and Dining
Iowa State University
Ames, Iowa
Believe me, you don't want me managing
a facilities project. But I absolutely
love working with our facilities team
to communicate with residents during
a project. Residents are more satisfied
because they're informed, and our
facilities team is more satisfied because
the residents are interested and excited
in what they're doing and not sending
in complaints because they don't fully
understand what's going on.

a communication plan, means the
marketing team must lead the way to
ensure that products, programs, and other
deliverables are in place. This, in turn,
dictates that housing and residential life
teams must be thinking and planning
many months, and sometimes years, in
advance. That sort of planning can be
very difficult as we work in the now to
meet the needs of our current residents
while anticipating the needs of a high
school junior.

Nicole A. B. Edwards
Marketing Manager, Housing and
Residential Education
The University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina
Our biggest issue is that folks don't
always see eye to eye about what should
be communicated to our students. One
area of struggle has been our website.
From a marketing perspective, our
website is a huge sales tool with lots
of potential to capture target markets.
We try to put on the lens of a student or
parent and try to think about what they
would like to see. However, sometimes
other areas want to see their programs or
information promoted that really may not
be of interest to more than a select few,
and trying to help them understand that
can sometimes be a struggle.

Stacy Oliver-Sikorski
Kenny Mauk
Associate Director for Operations and
Outreach, Student Housing & Residential Life
University of Houston
Houston, Texas
The issue for me was truly understanding
the importance of lead time on university
marketing and communications plans.
An 18-month lead time on the freshman
view book, or implementation of

Associate Director, Residence Life for
Student Success
Lake Forest College
Lake Forest, Illinois
At a previous institution I spent a great
deal of time collaborating with marketing.
Because the university designed housing
and started construction before they
hired residence life staff, much of the
marketing was done before I came on
board. While the designs were beautiful -
truly incredibly well-designed brochures,
Talking Stick - January/February 2015

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