Boosting Awareness Starts With Paying Attention
Eve Markman has spent more than 30 years inside marketing at Community College of Philadelphia, moving from publications coordinator to Executive Director of Creative Services to her current role as AVP for Brand Management and Operations. She was named Communicator of the Year in 2022, and she now serves as national board president of NCMPR.
We sat down with Eve for OnDeck & OffScript, our series of real conversations with marketing and enrollment leaders about the awareness and demand challenges shaping higher ed right now.
Eve has an intentional and practical understanding of what exactly a brand is, and it's bigger than an ad campaign. An important theme runs through everything else she described: the most useful signals are rarely brand new. They're already there, in a survey response or a room full of peers doing the work, waiting for someone to notice them.
Brand has to survive the handoff
Eve draws a distinct line between what marketing does and what brand actually is. Marketing gets someone's attention. Brand is the promise that has to hold up long after that attention fades.
"What we've found is marketing tends to be what you do to get people into the funnel for admissions. You're trying to get prospects, you're trying to get people interested. And then you're handing that off, and all of a sudden it's up to admissions and the enrollment folks to move those prospective people into applicants, into enrolled students. And then on top of that, how do you retain those students."
Her conclusion is that brand has to survive that entire handoff, well past the opening pitch.
"Branding really overarches all of it. You have to have a brand proposition: who are you, what are you about, what are you offering these students. That has to follow them all the way through. You can't just market something in an advertisement that says, we're this amazing place, come to us, you're going to have a great experience, and then hand it off and assume that they will have that experience. It has to be followed through."
That follow-through reaches well past marketing alone. In Eve's view, it's a job every employee on campus carries.
"We have to feel like our students are customers too, and we have to make sure that they can count on us. Every single person who works at the community college is part of branding. Every person has to keep that promise to our students."
That standard, a promise that has to keep holding up through admissions, enrollment, retention, and every person a student encounters along the way, is the lens the rest of this conversation runs through.
One survey theme changed everything
CCP had spent years attempting to track awareness spend, even running formal research through an outside firm to track whether people across the city knew who the college was and how they felt about it. When asked how those awareness efforts were received, Eve was candid.
"It wasn't great," she said. "They either wouldn't think of us or we wouldn't be listed, and when people did ask about us, the perception wasn't great."
That kind of research was tough to hear, but it gave CCP a real starting point. The actual direction for the rebrand came from somewhere closer, right on campus: a student satisfaction survey the college runs every year. Over time, one theme kept surfacing across responses, worded differently by students who never compared notes with each other.
"Students said that they didn't feel that they were getting the same experience that they would at a four-year institution."
That's the promise gap Eve described a moment ago, showing up in plain language. Naming it was the first step. The second was Eve and her team's reaction: listen closely, then ask what they could actually do about it.
Presence became something students wore, and eventually part of who they were
What came next moved past advertising entirely. It became something students could feel simply by walking across campus, which is exactly the kind of follow-through Eve says a real brand promise requires. CCP invested in an 8-foot bronze lion statue that's become a favorite photo spot for graduates. A wardrobe of better-made gear turned into something students chose to wear on their own, instead of leaving it in a drawer after one event.
"We are the lions," Eve said.
A statue and a better t-shirt sound like small details next to a full rebrand, but they're adding a layer of exposure most awareness channels can't reach on their own. A shirt travels with someone into a hallway, a family dinner, anywhere they go next. That's a different kind of exposure, one that happens inside someone's own sense of who they are and where they belong, often without them noticing it's happening at all.
That kind of identity work tends to surface later, well after the moment it actually happened, and it's likely part of what's underneath the enrollment growth that followed. By the time someone applies, they've usually already absorbed years of small, ambient signals, a friend's photo with the lion, a general sense that this is a place people are proud to be part of. None of that gets logged as a lead source, even though it's doing real work before anyone ever applies.
The next signal is sitting in the same place the first one was
Defending that kind of spend is something Eve has done before. Awareness advertising doesn't convert in any way a spreadsheet easily shows, and she's used to the skepticism that comes with it.
"I know people are like, what, you spend money on awareness? However, if they don't know you exist, then all the other advertising isn't really resonating. They have to know you're there. They have to know you're a place they want to come. We do spend money on awareness advertising that we hope leads toward enrollment."
Eve says enrollment at CCP has climbed steadily since the 2024 relaunch, and that raises the harder question underneath all of this: how do you know the growth is actually connected to the work?" Eve would welcome formal, funded research confirming exactly how public perception has shifted since the rebrand, and that kind of study takes real budget.
"I really want to [run that research again]," she said.
That kind of research runs on a budget decision that isn't fully in her hands, so for now, she's working with what she has: anecdotal impressions and the enrollment trend itself.
"It's more anecdotal, plus the enrollment numbers. They say, well, enrollment is up. Why do we have to check it?"
That's a position most brand and enrollment leaders will recognize. Formal proof runs on its own timeline, often slower than the moment that actually calls for it. Eve is reading the anecdotal evidence and the enrollment trend together, and trusting what that combination tells her. Sometimes what you’ve previously known holds up well before a study exists to confirm it, and that's a fine place to operate from. The tool that actually built this rebrand was something sitting inside the college the whole time: a satisfaction survey CCP runs every year, available to read and act on well before any bigger budget comes through.
That instinct extends to the people doing this work beside her
Everything so far has been about Eve listening to the students already in front of her. The same habit shows up in how she treats the people doing this work at other institutions.
Eve serves as national board president of NCMPR, the professional community for marketing and communications leaders at 2-year colleges nationwide, and she's direct about what it's given her.
"I absolutely love NCMPR," she said. "I try to promote it every way I can, because it's helped my career so much."
Part of why it works is structural. Every community college serves its own county or region, so schools in the network aren't recruiting against each other the way universities pulling from a national pool often are.
"We are not competing with each other. Every community college has its own county, its own area that it works out of. Therefore, we can share all of our ideas."
That openness has mattered more as Eve's own role has changed. Her current title comes with less direct staff support than the team she used to run as Executive Director of Creative Services.
"I'm an employee of one," she said. "I don't manage anybody anymore, but knowing there are people out there willing to help because they want to help is the most amazing thing. I'm honored and proud to have them as my partners in this."
Eve came up through that same network years ago, learning from people who'd previously done the work she was still learning to do. She's since taken on the roles most people find a reason to avoid, planning conferences and mentoring newer members. She's also kept speaking at events long after the nerves stopped fully going away. Leading it now reads less like a title and more like a continuation of the same habit, showing up and sharing what she knows, then trusting the people around her to do the same.
It's the same logic as everything else in this conversation. Presence compounds when you keep showing up for people, whether that's a hallway full of students or a network of peers who've been exactly where you are.
Ask the people already inside the building
That same instinct is what Eve pointed to when we asked her for one thing she'd want every marketing and enrollment leader in our audience to hear. She didn't point back to the rebrand or the ad spend. She pointed to where the whole thing started.
"Ask your students! Get out there, talk to them, run focus groups or a satisfaction survey. Find out what they really want."
It's a reminder that showing up with the right question matters more than showing up with the answer already prepared. That's the real substance behind awareness work: the discipline of paying attention to the data already sitting in front of you.
Eve Markman is the AVP for Brand Management and Operations at Community College of Philadelphia and national board president of NCMPR. This conversation was part of OnDeck & OffScript, a series featuring candid conversations with marketing, communications, and enrollment leaders across higher education.
