021 – Running a One-Person Marketing Department with Melissa McGurgan of Cummings Graduate Institute for Behavioral Health Studies
Are you a one-person marketing department at your nonprofit? In this episode, Melissa McGurgan shares her tips on being the only marketer in your organization. We discuss how she handled marketing when her school was unaccredited, how a “sprint mindset” helps her get more done, and operating with limited human and financial resources.
- The American Marketing Association and their Nonprofit and Cause Marketing Virtual Conference
- Hubspot Academy
- Website: cgi.edu
- Podcast: Disruptors at Work: An Integrated Care Podcast
Full Transcript
Spencer Brooks 00:03
Welcome to Health Nonprofit Digital Marketing. We’re a podcast for nonprofit marketing and communications leaders using their internet to reach and engage people with health issues. I’m your host. Spencer Brooks of Brooks Digital, a digital agency for health nonprofits. Today I’m joined by Melissa McGurgan. Melissa is the Director of Marketing at Cummings Graduate Institute for Behavioral Health Studies. They’re a private nonprofit institution offering behavioral health education through a virtual, online campus. So, Melissa, I am really excited to have you on the show today to to talk to you about all things Cummings Graduate Institute. Could you just start by giving listeners a brief overview of who you are and what you do?
Melissa McGurgan 00:52
Certainly. My name is Melissa, as Spencer mentioned, and my role as the Director of Marketing at Cummings Graduate Institute, which I will refer to as CGI, for short, is one that encompasses many things. We function much like a startup, as we were founded in 2015, so I wear a lot of hats. My hats include all acquisition, with regards to recruitment for our academic programs and continuing education programs, website, digital advertising, social media, creative content and SEO, so many things under one role, and my goal is as marketing director, is to build awareness of our institution and build enrollment in our programs that are both currently operating and in development.
Spencer Brooks 01:42
Awesome. I thought that one of the things that I was really excited to bring you on the show to discuss is this the marketing like a startup concept. So, I’m really excited to dive into that. And one of the things that you mentioned as we were talking before the show was that in the early days of the school, it wasn’t accredited yet, and I know it’s accredited now, but Melissa, could you talk a little bit about how you got people to take that risk when you first started?
Melissa McGurgan 02:14
That’s a great question, and it was a big challenge when I first came on with the institution. Being unaccredited is not something you want to necessarily lead with, however, it’s an imperative thing to communicate to your prospective students as they need to understand it and the risk that it involves. So a way that we approached it is kind of twofold. One is focusing on what I call the shiny part. So what are the valuable characteristics and assets of our product? In this case, it’s education that we are providing, so it’s a service, and how do we compare to the competition? What might be an advantage of going with a newcomer in the realm of education versus a legacy brick and mortar institution, and the other part of it is being transparent with the things that you can’t necessarily alter at the present time in which you’re communicating with a prospective student. So I never hid any of what could be deemed as the less than desirable parts of the school accreditation being one of them, we transparently communicated that to prospective students, both on our website and in messaging, when we were communicating direct one to one, and we provided as much information as we were able to and within the space of accreditation, there’s a lot of regulations about what you can and can’t say, even when you’re in the application process. So, we had to craft messaging around these commonly asked questions pertaining to accreditation, educate our admissions team and anyone else who might be engaging with prospective students to ensure that we were consistent in the messaging, as well as driving people to understand that accreditation was our number one priority. We couldn’t say anything else beyond that, but it’s the number one priority, and when it happens, we’re going to scream it from the mountaintops. So, it was really excited to be able to scream it from the mountaintops when it happened. And that’s kind of the approach that we took.
Spencer Brooks 04:24
Yeah, I’m curious. I actually would like to dig into both those things you mentioned, the shiny parts and transparency. But one thing that occurred to me as you were talking is what you described is actually it’s a very specific way of approaching that conversation. And how did you end up arriving at that strategy in the first place? Was there something that triggered it? Did you have conversations beforehand? Did it just intuitively come to you in the middle of the night, in a dream? How did you arrive at that point?
Melissa McGurgan 04:55
Sure, when I first came on board and was learning about okay, this is where the school is. This is where the school’s going. And my job is to get people into the door and make sure they understand, one, what they’re committing to with a degree program. Two, that they’re the right fit for the degree program. Intuitively, it came to my mind, okay, we’ve got some great things. Let’s talk about them. Let’s proactively communicate them through our marketing materials and our communication. And a core value of the institution is transparency and being human centered. So, the transparency piece of we’re not going to bury something so deep in fine print that you don’t see it until you’re it’s too late that that wasn’t even an option, if that makes sense. So, it was intuition, and also through learning about who it was that I was responsible for marketing, I was able to kind of distill those parts from my own research and discovery.
Spencer Brooks 05:59
Yeah, well, now I’m even more impressed. I was gonna ask you too, did you find that dual aspect of both communicating the distinct advantages of the school but also being really honest and transparent about maybe some of the risks or some of the downsides, did you? Did you find that that created a better student as a result?
Melissa McGurgan 06:27
I feel it created a better relationship between the institution and the prospective student. To be completely honest, not everyone kept moving forward in the process when they found out things such as we couldn’t tell them when we would be accredited. I would rather have them actively make that choice and come back to us later than the alternative. But those who did follow through understood kind of the trade offs of the process and also understood that we were a different kind of university than a traditional university or a brick and mortar university in the higher ed space. Therefore there were some advantages, and through our marketing and admissions process, we hoped to kind of cultivate that target student through that process to where, when we get to the end, it’s a symbiotic relationship, more so than a one having more trade offs than the other.
Spencer Brooks 07:31
So, then I would imagine that you mentioned your target student. I would imagine there’s certain ideal students that tend to gravitate towards what you have to offer. Could you describe what that that ideal student tends to look like?
Melissa McGurgan 07:50
Sure. So, at the beginning, when I came in the door, my understanding is that our target student was anyone who met our eligibility requirements for our degree program, which is a good starting point. But as I was watching students move through the funnel, I realized, oh, it’s more specific than that. So, throughout the years, we’ve developed some personas for our target student, and we actually have three personas that we look for during the recruitment process, and we target our messaging towards the top two. So our top two personas are people who want to see systemic change in healthcare and either want to be the catalyst for that within the organization that they work for, or want that change to be even more broader, and perhaps goes into a policy space, and we look for those indicators through conversations that we have with students and also during the interview process to validate that we’ve successfully identified them. Additionally, our students are ones who are not necessarily driven by clout of the institution, because we’re newer in the field, a student who’s attracted to an Ivy League is not going to be the same student who’s attracted to us. And it’s not that we wouldn’t welcome them, but we often know that what’s driving that student, what’s their motivator is out of alignment with where our school sits in the higher ed space, and another aspect of the students is that they are looking for a human centered education experience, which often you don’t necessarily associate a 100% online program with. Sometimes when I think of online ed, especially before I joined CGI, I thought of being kind of like this anonymous student in the online space moving through my program as quick as possible, getting my degree and moving on, whereas our school is designed to actually have more of a cohort and community feel, and we have a really small student to faculty ratio. So we want students who want human interaction, because if they want to be invisible, this isn’t the right place for them. So those are kind of the things that we look for when we are targeting students, but also what we hope to attract through our messaging and creative.
Spencer Brooks 10:26
Could you describe to me how you got from the place when you started? The target student was anyone who meets our admission criteria to what you just described, which is highly specific. How did you get to this place where you started to narrow in on those qualities? Was it through conversations or observations? How did you get there?
Melissa McGurgan 10:53
It’s through both. So, in the early stages, I was very involved in the admissions process. So I got to see someone go from opening an application to enrolling in the school, and I was able to observe conversations that they had, even participate in the interview process and see what are the alignment between what they’re submitting in an application, where they’re providing a statement of intent and a whole lot of other information about themselves to ultimately be critiqued and evaluated, and then actually talking about why this program is the one that they want to pursue for their own goals. And by watching that, I saw a bit of a misalignment, we can say, and the traditional process of applying to a school is very rigorous, and then we have this conversation in an interview that juxtaposes it, and observing those students who succeeded through the process and then matriculated into the school and then performed, I was able to then observe, okay, these were our success stories. How can we backwards engineer a success story? And that’s where the beginnings of the persona started to develop. The original personas were actual students in our school. Now they’re not named that, but working closely with our admissions office, and also being able to see reports on how students are performing once they get through the door and through their first year. It’s a lot of data, and being able to look at that data and track it back to okay, what was their first interaction, and can we detect anything from their early communication with us that can help indicate to us are they a better fit? So it’s a blend of a lot of things, and I know that answer was all over the place.
Spencer Brooks 12:52
I think it’s really helpful, and I like what you described about just through honest interaction and observation and conversation arriving at those personas, rather than maybe sitting in a room by yourself or with a bunch of people and saying, oh, let’s just craft this based on our own ideas. And so I think there’s a lot of parallels between your work and the work that other listeners might be doing. And so I think that is, it’s super valuable. I did want to move on to another question that I had for you, Melissa, you mentioned this earlier, when you’re introducing yourself to everyone, you’re a one-person marketing department, right? And you’re not the only one, frankly. So how do you operate with the limited resources that you have, both human and financial?
Melissa McGurgan 13:47
Yes, and I know that being a single person marketing department is very common in the nonprofit world, so hello to all my single human units, though the way that I approach things is from a lens of efficiency and yield. So, I want to spend my time, which is the most valuable resource I have, on the efforts and activities that yield results. And you only know that through tracking and monitoring what you’re doing and identifying what are your indicators that show that something’s working from an early point to then the end point. In our case, that’s an enrollment in a graduation, which is a really long timeline. And with monitoring, it’s not just watching, it’s also continually adapting what you’re doing. So never be afraid to stop doing something because it’s not working the way you want it to like try something else. Experiment. Run multiple tests if you can. And then if you get something that works, see how many times you can replicate it before it breaks. And if you strike it right, and I’ve had a few of these, there are things that I’m able to just kind of let go and check in on periodically, but they work for the space that they’re working in. And coupled with that, is automation. Automate as much as you can, invest in automation monetarily, it will, it will pay you back in tenfold, if once you put the work in to get them set up. And then the other piece is be very careful with who you choose as a vendor, those relationships can make or break you at times when you do need help, because despite being a single person, department, there are things that it makes more sense, monetarily and time resource wise, to delegate out. And if you have a trusted relationship with a vendor, that gives you one peace of mind, but two gives you that reliability piece, which can free up as much of your time as possible to work on the things that need your voice, your mind and your insight, as well as have that little bit of time available to deal with a fire. Because fires inevitably happen, and we have to be able to prioritize on a dime in marketing as you know,
Spencer Brooks 16:19
Yeah, I man, there’s so many follow up questions I have to that. And so I’m like a kid in a candy shop here. But I want to actually start with a super simple one. I love your idea of experiments. I’m not sure you use that actual word, but that’s kind of what I took away from this, is being willing to experiment and measure. Could you give me an example of something that maybe you even did recently, or it could be a long time ago, but an example of an experiment that you ran something that either worked or didn’t work, and how you learned and adapted?
Melissa McGurgan 16:55
Sure. So, this year, we launched several new programs, and we invested a lot of money, a lot of creative, a lot of advertising dollars, into the announcement of those programs. And since it was kind of six all at the same time, and I wanted to see which one would have the most interest, I invested the same spend into all of them for the first quarter and approached the same style of ad with all of them, variations of the same copy for all of them specific to the program and the audience, and watched them and made and tried as hard as I could to not modify the ads after I launched them and let them run for like two weeks. And I was watching the results come in, and there were clear top performers in terms of those programs, and then other programs that weren’t receiving the same interest. And I was like, that’s interesting. Let’s pause and reset so the ones that had the highest interest, I did very little modifications to how they were being advertised and relaunched to see if we could replicate the same results. And in those cases we could, with the ones that didn’t receive as much interest, I tried different imagery, different copy, different financial investment to see, can I generate more interest any way possible? And for some of them, I couldn’t. So, it showed me that there was a lower interest in specific programs than others, which could be used to forecast potential enrollment in the future. And also told me, Don’t just keep running those ads and spending just to spend turn the ad off, start over. And I went for a totally different approach with those programs in terms of kind of a general awareness ad that has a very low financial investment, because I’m not anticipating us to see much interest in them, but I still want the programs to be visible, whereas some of the other programs get a higher investment, because simply, there is a higher interest and potential for a higher yield in enrollment as well.
Spencer Brooks 19:22
Yeah, one of the things, and I think that’s a great example, by the way, one of the things I’ve noticed about that mindset is that some people are or just maybe some organizational cultures are afraid of taking risks and of failing. And I remember reading somewhere, I think it’s Amazon, 50% of its experiments end up failing, right? So, if Amazon is failing half the time, you know, if you’re trying stuff, you can’t expect to do much better. But Melissa, do you have any advice for those folks who are thinking about dipping their toes, in this approach, and maybe are just afraid of blowing it, or of getting over that fear of trying something and having it not work?
Melissa McGurgan 20:08
Sure, I completely agree that you have to have things that don’t work in order to figure out what does you also won’t know the boundaries of what can happen without trying something. So, for those who have very limited resources, which is very common in nonprofit, I would find a way to set aside a small amount of money, and it could be as small as $25 on a Facebook ad, and count that money as spent. It’s spent on branding awareness, advertising, you’re not counting on getting a yield on it, and then try something completely new with it and see what happens. And if it doesn’t work, you knew that the $25 was going to be gone. It’s built in to be used, better to use it and prove that something doesn’t work, then invest way more on that same idea in the future with a higher risk. And try it. Try it just it’s a done better than perfect mindset. Give it a shot.
Spencer Brooks 21:24
Love it. I think it’s a great idea. And okay, I have, I have one last follow up question for you on this, and then, and then we can move on here. But you, you mentioned something about a good vendor being helpful to free up your time. And I’m curious to you what constitutes a good vendor, and what you would advise listeners to look for?
Melissa McGurgan 21:49
For me, a quality vendor is a person that I can delegate a function or a task to, give them all the information. Here’s the deadline, take care of it, and they do it so they have follow through referrals in terms of from both colleagues or other businesses within the same space that you’re in, is a great way to get recommendations for credible people, I will say you will get what you pay for. I believe in paying vendors well, investing as much as you can so you can get that dependability and quality. And then the other piece is they’re only going to be able to know what to do based on what you tell them. So you have to be prepared, as, in a sense, the project manager to communicate everything, create reference documents, give them access to you as they have questions. And then when you receive a deliverable, give them timely feedback on it. That’s a piece of feedback I get from my vendors, is they say you’re one of the only people who gives us feedback., like, within 24 hours, it’s so rare. And I’m like, why wouldn’t you give feedback? So if something works, tell them it works. If something doesn’t meet your expectations and standards, explain to them why. And they should be able to take that feedback and get back to you, hopefully with a new deliverable that meets your needs and standards, and keep them informed of how something performs. So with my vendors, I share with them the quarterly report, which has more information than they would ever need, but they can go in and see, oh, here’s the things that I’m contributing to, and here’s the results as it compares to the prior year, and that can help validate them as well, that what they’re doing is in alignment with the strategic planning goals of their client.
Spencer Brooks 23:56
Awesome. Yeah, that’s some great feedback. I appreciate you sharing all that with listeners, and I have another question for you, actually one more, until I move on to the questions that I love to ask every guest, but just briefly in our discussions leading up to this interview, you talk to me about this concept of a sprint mindset. I thought that was really interesting. Could you take a minute or two and just explain to listeners what that is and how you think about that?
Melissa McGurgan 24:29
Sure, so to me, I think of a sprint mindset as organizing or structuring your work into bite sized chunks that yield deliverables very quickly, and the type of work, or the space of work that my brain sets into when I work in one of these is one that’s very energized and speedy. This can apply to special projects or maintenance and ongoing projects. And as I mentioned before, it’s more about getting something done than it is making something perfect. Because if you can produce something and put it out there, you can start getting feedback on it, and as you get the feedback, that’s how you can adjust and iterate that deliverable or that campaign to further be refined to yield what you’re hoping it will yield. And this way of working helps me produce at volume, which I need to do as a single person department, because the work of the school doesn’t get smaller just because I’m one person, if anything, it grows because we’re growing as an organization, and it allows me to have multiple kind of tests and experiments running at one time, and being able to continually adjust them. And it also takes what I can call like the emotional investment that sometimes comes with a project, it helps minimize that, because it’s not about making this incredibly perfect and rich final product and then never touching it again. It’s about producing something and continually improving it as your organization evolves.
Spencer Brooks 26:20
Oh man, I love this mindset, and I’m so sad that I’m running out of time to follow up on that. Yeah, suffice it to say I agree totally. And you know, for everyone listening, I can validate with my own experience, with the experience of Brooks Digital’s clients. This is an awesome way of working, and Melissa has figured out the secret, so I love it, but Melissa, I wanted to switch gears a little bit talk about something right now that you’re working on in marketing, or could be anything, I guess, that just is consuming a lot of your brain space right now. And what takeaways might you be able to share with listeners who are struggling with that same challenge.
Melissa McGurgan 27:04
So, a project that’s definitely holding a lot of real estate in my mind right now is a new program that our institution will be launching in the near future, and I have to be secretive about it because, you know, regulatory agencies. So, this new program is one we’ve never had before. It’s an entirely new market segment, and it’s a new focus in terms of the topic area. So there’s a lot of new and then the piece that is the most, let’s call it uncertain, is the timeline, because in the world of higher ed, you have to get everything approved by a lot of agencies before you’re allowed to advertise it in order to be in compliance. So, I don’t know when I can talk about this program. So, there is the prep work that goes into anytime you launch something new. There’s a laundry list of assets that have to get created and approved and vetted by all the appropriate people within your organization, and then they get to sit there in this like holding pattern, until it’s time to release them. And then it’s coordinating the release because whenever you announce something of this magnitude, you want to make sure people can find information on it immediately that messaging is consistent, you’re ready to answer questions, and in this case, ready for people to start applying to the program. So, my takeaways at this point are as much as other people might want you to do things fast, fast for fast sake isn’t a good thing. Doing something intentionally, preparing adequately, and being ready to move quickly when it’s necessary and needed, is what I would advise, and that that’s going to probably have some difficult conversations along with it. So, hold firm to what you know works when it comes to timing. Hypothetically, let’s say, if I find out we can advertise this program on the 25th of December, am I going to do it hen? Absolutely not, because I don’t want it to be hidden. So, use your knowledge from prior projects that you’ve advertised, from what you know kind of competing media messages will be going on, as well as where people are in the buying cycle to time to the best of your ability. But don’t just go fast because you have to feel like you have to go fast. And the other piece is the order in which you prepare assets for a launch can make your life easier or difficult. And I’ve figured out a formula that works for me as a single person marketer and the industry that I’m in and I do this order so everything else can flow naturally afterwards. And despite people asking, hey, can you start on this early? That’s another space where I’m going to hold a boundary and say, nope, I’m going to be starting on this because this is going to set the framework for everything. So those are my takeaways at this point.
Spencer Brooks 30:20
That’s great some really helpful reminders, especially to those folks listening that might be in a environment there’s where there’s timeline pressure, and so I think it’s always great to hear that helpful reminder. I wanted to ask you, Melissa, one last thing here, just what two or three resources you might recommend to listeners who want to keep up on news and trends in the nonprofit marketing world.
Melissa McGurgan 30:50
Two resources that I regularly visit are the American Marketing Association. Both their membership assets, they give away a lot of non-complimentary resources and webinars if you’re a member, as well as their nonprofit marketing conference that they hold annually, there’s a lot of nuggets to take away from that, and you can attend virtually now, which is fantastic, for a lower price point, so you can be in the comfort of your home, but still listen to all that great content. And the other one is HubSpot Academy and their guide for nonprofit marketing are references that I frequently revisit, both for refreshers, and even if you don’t use HubSpot as an element in your marketing setup, their resources for nonprofit marketing are general enough that you can utilize that information regardless of how you are communicating with your stakeholders.
Spencer Brooks 31:53
Super and as always, for listeners, I’ll make sure to link those resources in the show notes so that you can access them. And Melissa, thank you so much for the awesome interview. How can listeners get in touch with you if they’d like to learn more about your work?
Melissa McGurgan 32:12
Yes, well, there are two places. One is our website for Cummings Graduate Institute. It is cgi.edu We have information about all of our training programs and our degree programs there. And the other piece where you can learn more about us is our own podcast, which is called Disruptors At Work, an integrated care podcast. It is a podcast specifically focused to integrated healthcare, which is the space in which our school offers training and programs, but it’s available on all your podcast platforms.
Spencer Brooks 32:44
Great. Well, that does wrap up our show today. We are a new podcast, like I say pretty much every time. Now, I guess we’re not really getting to be a new podcast. I wonder when the cutoff point for that is for the purpose of this episode. We’re a new podcast anyway, so please consider rating and reviewing us on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to this so that more people can find interviews with people like Melissa and this show as well. It’s a part of the thought leadership of Brooks digital. We’re a digital agency for health nonprofits, and we specialize in web strategy, design and development. So if you like this podcast, feel free to check out our website at Brooks dot digital. You can find more of our insights like this podcast and learn more about our work. But with all that said, Melissa, thank you so much for coming on the show today and giving an awesome interview.
Melissa McGurgan 33:39
Thank you for having me.