3 Major Benefits of Forming Organizational Partnerships in Higher Ed
College marketing is more competitive than ever. That’s why it’s so important to discover innovative avenues for reaching and recruiting students to your programs. While traditional print and digital marketing strategies will continue to have their place, building relationships with local organizational partners can be an effective way to diversify your marketing strategy.
In fact, forming relationships with organizational partners can offer your institution three major benefits. These include developing a pipeline for traditional students to find jobs, gaining more prospective students for marketing your programs, and growing your graduate and adult degree completion programs.
Preparing Traditional Undergraduate Students for the Job Market
Whether or not a school can provide viable job prospects is a major factor for students considering programs. So it’s extremely important that you’re able to deliver on the expectation that graduates will have strong career prospects.
One effective way to offer this benefit is to build more relationships with organizational partners in your area. This is important for two main reasons. The first is that it allows you to offer students more internship opportunities, ensuring they develop the real-world skills necessary to thrive in today’s workplace. The second is that the relationship can result in a pipeline that helps graduates find full-time roles with that organization.
The more familiar your school is to an organization—and the more they work with students as interns or graduates—the more likely they will consider your school first when looking to hire. It’s a win-win. Your school helps your alumni get jobs when they graduate, and local organizations fill their roles with proven, well-educated candidates.
For example, Point Loma Nazarene University has formed a fantastic relationship with various school districts in San Diego. As a result, when new jobs arise, school administrators literally come to PLNU first to see if they have any interested graduates.
Increase the Size of Your Recruitment Pool
The third major benefit of organizational partnerships is that you can expand the size of your recruitment pool substantially. It's a powerful way to help employees at your partnering organization become aware of your school and its offerings.
One way of doing this is to offer free, one-off workshops or lectures on site at your partnering organizations to familiarize employees with your school. It’s helpful to consider this as a form of high-level content marketing. In this case, you offer free educational resources on site at an organization in exchange for the contact info of all those who attend. Now you can add them to lead-nurturing campaigns to encourage them to become students down the road.
For example, you could offer a free leadership lecture series on site and then collect emails for those who want to learn more about your graduate program or credential program on organizational leadership. At a local hospital, you could offer a three-day workshop for RNs and then gain prospects who might be interested in starting a nurse practitioner program at your school.
Of course, this requires finding professors and instructors (and paying them) to teach on site at a company as well as getting buy-in from the partnering organization itself. It’s true that forming organizational partnerships can require a considerable amount of effort, resources, and institutional commitment—and can pose a difficult challenge.
Expanding Your Graduate and Adult Degree Completion Offerings
Another benefit of developing strong relationships with local organizations is that you can team up with them to offer graduate and adult degree completion programs on site. For example, you could offer an onsite MBA program, adult degree completion in organizational leadership or nursing, or even a human resources certificate program. This is incredibly convenient because employees can literally attend school and earn a degree without going anywhere other than their office.
It’s also beneficial when collaborating with a partnering organization to offer a discount to their employees (say, 10% off tuition costs). This makes for another incentive for your partnering organization’s employees to enroll in your on-site programs. Plus, the more organizations you work with, the more other organizations will start to hear about the benefits of your on-site programs and want to collaborate with you.
Of course, this means you’ll need to demonstrate to partnering organizations that the education you’re offering on site is going to help their employees contribute to the organization. If you’re offering a business certificate or a healthcare master’s, then you’ll need to customize the curriculum to meet the specific and relevant needs of the industry.
Adapting programs will mean working with academic departments for creative implementation. And it may require presenting to organizational stakeholders how your curriculum can directly impact their employees’ productivity. But again, doing so can certainly be worth it. DePaul University, for example, launched MBA and MPH cohorts at a local organization in the Chicago area, which resulted in 70 new graduate students and $3.2 million in revenue.
Close collaboration with partnering organizations can also benefit your own programs’ curricula. Such a partnership offers first-hand knowledge about the industry’s evolving trends. This can result in tweaking your own courses or developing new ones (or even whole programs) to better align with real-world industry trends.
And by having a strong relationship with stakeholders at an organization, they can collaborate directly with your faculty, deans, and administrators to develop these new curricula. The benefit is obvious: the more aligned your curricula is with current industry trends and needs, the more your graduates will stand out to employees when they graduate.
Again, the payoff can be huge. In some cases, a single organizational partner can help you address all three goals: expand internship and work opportunities for undergraduates, widen your recruitment pool, and increase enrollment for your graduate and adult degree completion programs.
Ultimately, forming organizational partnerships can take your marketing strategy to a whole new level. Who are some potential partners you can reach out to today?
