It was great to see so many friends and colleagues last week at the UPCEA National Conference in Boston. I was able to attend a lot of great sessions. Jessica DuPont and Jim Fong's session: Strategic Alignment of the CE Marketing Department was a standout.
I was also able to introduce attendees to the theme for this year's Marketing Seminar: Stake Your Claim - Exploring and Expanding Your Role in the New Frontier of Marketing. Rebecca Egsieker (who is heading up the communications for this year's event) and her team at Georgia Tech did a great job on the creative.
The idea for "Stake Your Claim" came out of an informal dinner gathering of committee members the night before our planning session in Austin began. We headed down South Congress to a pizza place called
Homeslice Pizza. For those that plan to join us in November, it's an easy walk from the hotel and a must visit for great pizza.
As we were batting around ideas about theme we toyed with ideas around some well known Austin clichés like "Keep Austin Weird" or the "Live Music Capital" and then we began talking about the unique history of how many people came to Texas and other western states. Settlers had to make a claim to land and then actually do something with it, in order to keep it. As we thought about this we also talked about how, for many of us, the bar is being raised in terms of the results of our marketing efforts. Many of us are being asked to show tangible results for our work in ways we have never had to before, in short, we are having to stake our claim.
In this new world of analytics, crm, and email campaigns marketers have access to an ever increasing amount of data around the effectiveness of our work. Many of our leaders are getting wise to this and they are asking tough questions. We decided one of our major goals for this conference was to make sure you know how to answer those questions. Whether you have an amazing CRM or just some analytics data, we want to help you stake your claim by empowering you to provide insightful information on how your efforts support your unit and institution.
We also felt we, as the committee had a claim to stake. We agreed, it's time to raise the bar on the content that is provided in concurrent sessions at the seminar. Ted Rockwell stepped up to the plate and is leading the efforts to provide amazing content for this year's event. My next blog entry will feature Ted's thoughts and ideas for how he and his team are going to accomplish this. I've been on a few calls with this team and I can't wait to share what they have in mind for the conference, so stay tuned.
I'd love to hear from you about how you need to stake your claim. How do you need to grow as a professional, how do you need to grow your team, where do you need to be in order to remain relevant in this ever changing world of enrollment marketing?