enewsletter082008

Berklee College of Music
Orchestrating Partnerships

Berklee College of Music has an international reputation as one of the most prestigious music schools in higher education. Its innovative and successful academic model draws promising and rising-star students in the music world.

Its operational model attracts and retains highly credentialed and musically renowned faculty and staff. Dynamic relationships that Berklee has with cooperative endeavors and institutions, such as the Massachusetts Higher Education Consortium (MHEC), make it a model of successful collaboration.

Berklee College is intertwined with what’s happening in the real-life music industry. Clubs, venues, theaters, professional and not-yet-professional musicians form a vibrant music scene around Berklee. Prominent alumni in the music industry like Quincy Jones, John Mayer and Pat Methany return to teach class or hold discussions.

Celebrity musicians like Billy Joel, Smokey Robinson, and Jimmy Buffett participate in guest clinics. Berklee faculty and alumni garnered 25 Grammy nominations in 2008 and more than 150 past Grammy Awards have gone to Berklee alumni and staff. Melissa Etheridge, Bruce Cockburn, Susan Tedeschi, Branford Marsalis and Patty Larkin are among the scores of successful musicians who have attended Berklee.

It is the flourishing culture of music, even beyond the academic and operational model, that sells Berklee to visiting students and parents.

Berklee’s old Boston brick buildings house a music Mecca for students and faculty from around the world to gather and share their passions for jazz and pop, for composition, technique, songwriting, and the business of music.

Students walking into the College’s music and recording studios for the first time have the opportunity to envision their life immersed in Berklee’s culture of music.

The College’s flourishing environment of music, connections, and achievement impresses parents, who see not only what this school would have meant to them as students, but what their children could be as Berklee graduates.

This exciting culture of music at Berklee has made it a prominent institution in the world of music, but as with any well-produced and skillfully directed production, the business model behind the scenes also helps keep Berklee successful.

To find out more about the Berklee College of Music’s cooperative culture of music, look for the Fall 2008 issue of Higher Education Consortia magazine.

UMass Medical School
A Collaborative Global View Starts at Home

The global economy is drastically and rapidly changing the higher education medical research playing field. Travel, commerce, and communications, to name only a few, are joining countries together that once maintained a separatist identity.

Medical research knowledge is expanding and changing so rapidly because of international collaboration that medical students might find medical techniques they learned in college outmoded by the time they finish their residency.

An avian flu or mad cow disease outbreak not only threatens the host country but threatens the world. This global view of disease is presenting new challenges to institutional leaders of medical research such as the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS).

The University of Massachusetts Medical School has met these challenges by building an infrastructure of collaboration that starts at the global level. With the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine being awarded to UMMS faculty member Dr. Mello, the school’s reputation and relationship with the world research community is now expanded.

On the national level, UMMS is working with organizations such as the National Institute of Health, and partnering with many national corporations. They have become an epicenter of medical research attracting students, faculty, and staff from throughout the United States.

On a state level, their proactive partnership with such state organizations as the Massachusetts Higher Education Consortium has brought them a powerful cooperative purchasing leverage that translates into cost savings and effective management.

Locally, UMMS has continually reached out to business and organizations that want to create positive partnerships with the University. This includes partnering with local female- and minority-owned businesses.

One of the most important collaborative forums that UMMS has created is internally with its faculty and staff. UMMS has continually strived to create a cooperative atmosphere of medical research where faculty and staff work together for the common goal of delivering the world solutions to what ails them.

Collaboration internally between employees can be one of the greatest challenges that face any organization, but UMMS has met this challenge with creating a culture of medical research that supports the enthusiasm of faculty and staff for the work being done. UMMS does this by delivering the tools the faculty and staff need to pursue their research and allowing the freedom to use them.

To find out more about the innovative tools the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester has developed to create a successful culture of medical research, look for the Fall 2008 issue of Higher Education Consortia magazine.

Hitting the Beach with Cooperation
A Collective Marketing Approach Might help your Company
Establish a Beachhead in Higher Education

A recent meeting at a facilities management company brought to light a familiar concern many companies attempting to enter the higher education arena have. The president of the company commented on the difficulty his business has had on bridging the gap to academia. His question, “How do you succeed in the higher education market?” became the predominate focus of the meeting.

The company’s president compared their attempt to enter the higher education arena with the allied forces in World War II fighting for every inch of ground on Omaha Beach during D-Day.

This facilities management company has a thirty-year success record of managing multi-million dollar facilities for housing complexes and corporations, but has had yet to successfully break through the barriers to academia.

For a brief six year period they managed the facilities at a major Northeast university. The company’s tenure in higher education ended because the university wanted to bring the facilities management back in house even though the facilities management company was saving the university money and effort.

On the commercial side the facilities management company’s long success record can be attributed to a very traditional sales and marketing approach. They advertise in association publications that reach their core corporate and housing complex market, attend key association and industry conferences and expos, and rely on word of mouth from their present senior management clients.

Their marketing approach also includes cold calling key decision makers, influencers, and researchers in their corporate and housing complex market.

They are a Northeast regional facility management company focusing primarily on large urban areas. Because of this urban focus their marketing approach includes involvement with local urban area associations and organizations.

Their systematic sales and marketing approach to their core corporate and housing complex market has continued their success for thirty years and has been contributed to their recent expansion over the last eight years, but the higher education arena has constructed many hedgerows to their traditional marketing approach.

One such barrier is higher education’s perception of outsourcing such a complex management project as their facilities. A college or university could save a considerable amount of money in the form of hard costs and time saved with outsourcing their facilities management, but because of their perception of loss of control, colleges and universities are resistant to outsource.

Another barrier to the facility management company’s traditional marketing approach is the ability to identify and reach the key decision makers, influencers, and researchers. The traditional marketing model does not work in academia because these key individuals in higher education are not easily identified and the multi-layered purchasing approach higher education is built on is not reflective of their core market.

The facilities management company has reaped many bits of wisdom during their attempts to bridge the gap in higher education. One very important bit of wisdom is again reflective of the conquering allied forces during World War II.

Just like the many countries that joined together to leverage their collective strength during World War II, companies might consider that individually marketing to high education will be a long and hard road, but if complementary companies allied together in collective sales and marketing approaches they might just be able to break through.

The key to this sales and marketing approach lies in the multi-layered purchasing approach colleges and universities must undertake to obtain much needed products and services.

Higher education is a very high yield-low lead industry. Even the smallest college is faced with making very large purchasing decisions, and a company that offers only a very small part of an overall solution might be shot down.

A primary mantra that reverberates through academia is cooperation. Colleges and universities have long been built on the understanding that working together can help them succeed and help academia last the test of time.

Companies that are successful in higher education have embraced this dictum of partnerships with a much more expansive understanding than what might be expected in the corporate world. Before a company even sets foot in academia they need to consider how far they are going to go to build long-term relationships both with their higher education partners and with their corporate allies. Taking this very important cooperative approach to higher education should be considered by any company before they even step one foot off the boat

Cooperative Purchasing by Design
Sell the Sizzle and Then Feed Them the Steak

Over the last thirty years our world has been going through a communications revolution with many seeds of change taking root. Because of the vast array of communications, our children have grown up in a world that has offered them a global perspective. Their awareness of the vast array of opportunities and possibilities has given rise to a new aphorism that is just starting to build momentum. This dictum, “living by design,” is giving a new twist to the old adage “form follows function.”

We see “living by design” every day in the cars we buy, the homes we live in, the buildings we work in, and the colleges and universities we send our children to. Living by design goes much deeper than just the visual appearance of our world—living by design penetrates all the way down to the new infrastructure being built on the old.

If you were to walk the paths that encompass, for example, Wellesley College you would see primarily Gothic revival architecture dotting the landscape, but you would also come across something new and modern, the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center.

The Campus Center is a symbol that even the most prestigious colleges in the world have to compete for the academic trinity—students, faculty, and grants.

At face value one might not consider that Wellesley College needs to compete for students, but it definitely has to vie for that top echelon of students among whom may be our next Secretary of State or President of the United States. It also has to compete for that star faculty member who is going to bring in the top students and the many millions of dollars in grants.

These very high-performing students who are going to be our future leaders of the world have many offers on the table from colleges and universities. They also grew up in a highly designed world, with many luxuries most over age forty couldn’t even imagine when children.

Over the last ten years stylish coffee bars have been popping up on college and university campuses. Northeastern University spent in excess of twenty million dollars on their workout facility, which, of course, has a very cool coffee bar.

Wedged somewhere in between the academic giants are the other eighty percent of the colleges and universities in the United States trying to keep up with the Joneses when they are not even in the same neighborhood, and who do not have the Jones’s enormous endowments.

Many of these smaller colleges and universities still have a healthy steak to serve their students, which translates into a strong academic program, but are short on the sizzle. And just like the big guys they have to contend for their market segment of students, faculty, and grants.

A basic marketing mantra is that you can really never sell anyone on anything—they have to want to buy, and most buying is done in the first ten minutes of a presentation.

When students and parents walk a prospective campus for the first time they both need to make a connection that will translate into intention. It is the intention of the student to be part of a campus that reflects the lifestyle they want to lead, and it is the intention of the parents to send their child to a campus that reflects a life that they would have wanted to live.

This “judging a book by the cover” approach might seem to be inappropriate to what higher education is communicating at its core, but there are many upsides to this approach. One very important positive aspect is creating an atmosphere on campus that reflects the deeper school culture. It is best for students and parents to find the right fit with the right college, and presenting the sizzle can communicate the campus culture in an instant.

So how do colleges and universities find the funds to purchase the design and develop the infrastructure that reflects their own individual campus culture? Well, I guess you are going to have to read our next issue of Higher Education Consortia magazine, Group Purchasing by Design to find out.