Winning continuing education and lifelong learning programs are ramping up their direct and digital marketing in order to remain competitive with their open enrollment course programming customers and contract training clients. But they are also increasing their internal marketing efforts as they work to build institutional support.
Dr. Kim Becicka, the Vice President of Continuing Education and Training Services at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, states that to be a winner you must collaborate both internally and externally, as well as being innovative in content but also with how you operate your program. By collaborating and innovating, the chances of inclusion within your institution, as well as your community are more likely.
Quarterly Update
Some continuing education and lifelong learning programs like to fly under the radar, but the winning programs are being more proactive about updating their institution about the good work they are doing, as well as their expertise.
LERN recommends you produce a quarterly update that is produced the month following the completion of the quarter. The quarterly update might be reviewed at a central administration meeting or only distributed, but just as important as communicating the work being done, you are documenting for future reference what has been accomplished.
The quarterly update has seven sections:
Section #1: Highlights/Success Stories. Provide three to five highlight and/or success stories from the last quarter. A highlight or success story might be the accomplishment of a project or a story of a student, client or staff accomplishment.
Section #2. National/Local Trends.Educate central administration by sharing trends. Each quarter you could focus on new trends and the trends do not need to be developed by you, but instead demonstrate you are watching, tracking and acting on trends. LERN can serve as a resource for national trends.
Section #3. Annual Goals.Each year you should set three to seven annual goals – the most important accomplishments for the year that will improve the overall performance of your program. In the quarterly update you would provide a short update on each goal, which could be as simple as on-track.
Section #4. Finances & Participation.Report on the financial and participation performance overall of your program. The most important finance numbers are revenue, operating margin, and net, while participation could be total students enrolled and contracts sold.
Section #5. Key Benchmarks.Select three to five benchmarks that best demonstrate the performance of your program. Examples are staff productivity, cancellation rate, repeat rate, new offerings or lead:contract ratio. Report on your goal and how you performed the last quarter.
Section #6. Issues & Help.List the issues you are dealing with where central administration could support you, by either eliminating roadblocks or communicating to rest of the institution the importance of resolving the issue.
Section #7. Next Quarter Priorities.Provide a list of the most important accomplishments for the next quarter. The priorities may play off of your annual goals, or may be important actions that must take place this quarter due to a challenge or opportunity identified the previous quarter.
Make It Simple
Ideally the quarterly report should not exceed four pages, with two pages most likely ideal. Producing a quality report utilizing a template is important so people receiving the quarterly report recognize it.
Each section can be assigned to a person who knows during the quarter to be collecting the information for the quarterly report; thus ensuring the quarterly report is a collaborative effort.
Conclusion
The job of continuing education and lifelong learning staff is to educate central administration. Demonstrating your successes is important to getting support and recognition. Due to excellent work collaborating and innovating, but also educating, Vice President Becicka and her team is a key player when decisions are made and strategic planning is taking place.