An Interview With the Former President of the NC Association of Community College Presidents
Small community colleges may seem quirky and a niche market, but there's something we can all learn from how colleges in rural communities market themselves. Dr. Mary Kirk is now on her 13th year as president of Montgomery Community College, North Carolina’s second smallest community college. Until recently she was also president of the North Carolina Association of Community College Presidents and she remains an advocate of small town America and community college education. Here she shares some marketing tips which have helped double her full-time enrollments from 600 to 1,050 students during her 13 year term.
Five Marketing Tips from Dr. Mary Kirk:
- Ensure your college has genuinely unique programs and course offerings that are helpful and relevant to your community. When registration is coming up, we announce this regularly through Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Troy is a beautiful, small town in North Carolina and Montgomery County has 34,000 gorgeous acres of countryside perfect for hunting and farming. Therefore, we offer two-year programs in taxidermy, pottery making, forestry and gunsmithing in additional to conventional course offerings like human resource management, business communication and practical nursing.
- By offering relevant training of genuine use to your community, word–of-mouth works to market our programs well. Through our course offerings such as pottery making and taxidermy, many local graduates have gone on to run their own businesses. This liberates and empowers our graduates and they are proud and vocal about where they gained their training. Many can then stay in Montgomery and flourish here rather than leaving in search for work elsewhere.
- Publish your course schedule and offerings nicely and clearly onto a placemat, print off several hundred and distribute them around fast food establishments and restaurants. This tactic might be old school, but it works.
- Bring in the school children. We hold open houses and invite students from elementary through middle school. This markets our programs to teachers and students and reminds them of the importance of finishing high school, even though their parents often did not. Troy, N.C. suffers from a 14.7 % unemployment rate and 32% of adults over age 25 don’t have a high school diploma. By marketing our programs to school age locals, we hope to counter that.
- Ensure your organization’s visibility at state festivals. We often give demonstrations from our forestry program and show locals the kinds of careers this training can offer. We also have workshops from our gunsmithing program showing people how their training helped them learn to fix military armor or perform gun repairs for sheriff and police departments. This visibility helps us market our core programs.