Your Marketing Sounds Like Meeting Minutes
Patrick Stone has spent 15 years inside community college marketing. He came up through radio, writing 30-second spots where every word either earns its place or wastes the listener's time. That discipline shows up in how he thinks about messaging now, as Director of Strategic Communications and Marketing at Cape Cod Community College and immediate past president of NCMPR.
We sat down with Patrick for OnDeck & OffScript, our series of real conversations with marketing and enrollment leaders about the awareness and demand challenges shaping higher ed right now. One observation cut through everything else he said. Higher ed marketing, at its worst, sounds like notes from an admissions meeting. It lists what the institution cares about. It doesn't say anything to the person on the other side.
Most of us in the space know he's right.
The thing your stakeholders keep asking for isn't a message
Every institutional stakeholder has priorities, and if you aren't careful, every one of those priorities ends up in your marketing. The result is messaging that serves the org chart and ignores the audience.
Patrick's framing on this is precise: what happens institutionally should inform your strategy. It shouldn't write your copy.
"Our expertise is how do we hook someone to come to our front door," he said. "And then our admissions teams take it from there, our financial aid people take it from there."
That boundary matters more than most marketing teams are willing to defend. The moment messaging becomes a committee product, it becomes wallpaper. It hits the same generic notes every other institution hits and disappears. Audiences have heard "small class sizes" and "flexible scheduling" so many times those phrases carry no weight. They scroll past without registering either one.
Patrick described the version that concerns him most: colleges that respond to the lingering stigma around community college by addressing it directly in their messaging. Acknowledging the stigma to dismiss it reinforces the stigma. It tells the audience there's something to overcome before they trust you.
The stronger move is to behave like an institution that never had anything to prove.
Brand awareness is trust, and trust takes time
One of the most crucial things Patrick said in our conversation was about ROI. Brand awareness doesn't overtly produce it, at least not in any form a spreadsheet will confirm.
"I can't calculate a 14-year-old that followed us on Instagram because we did something cool or funny, then 6 years later converted into a student because they trusted us."
That's the right way to think about it, and it's also the reason brand investment is hard to defend internally. The return is real, but it doesn't necessarily show up in the data most institutions are measuring.
Patrick's approach at Cape Cod is to keep brand awareness running 12 months a year, primarily through social media, where the goal isn't to sell but to be worth paying attention to. Each platform has a distinct job: Facebook for institutional news, Instagram for storytelling. TikTok is where they're building familiarity with an audience that's still years away from making an enrollment decision but already forming opinions about which institutions feel familiar.
"We're just showing you what it's like to really be here," he said. "When you are ready to make a decision, we're trustworthy."
That's the function of brand work. It's the infrastructure underneath the targeted campaigns, not a flight you run when enrollment dips.
The targeted work runs on top of it. At any given enrollment season, Patrick's team runs 12 to 15 segmented campaigns, broken down by GPA band, by age, by whether they're targeting the student or the parent. Each segment gets a message calibrated to where that person is in the decision. But those campaigns only convert because the brand has already been building presence. Take away the foundation and the targeted work loses its footing. Visibility gaps don't show up in application data when they happen. They show up cycles later, and by then recovering costs more than maintaining presence ever would have.
"I don't think the targeted messaging works without the brand piece," he said. "Your brand has to be your authentic self."
When you can't explain it in 30 seconds, stop trying
Patrick used a specific example that applies far beyond Massachusetts.
Cape Cod has access to a free community college program: last-dollar funding, financial aid based, with enough eligibility nuance that it can't be summarized in a spot. You can't explain federal financial aid in 15 seconds, and trying to do so produces the pharmaceutical-ad effect, where the disclaimer swallows the message and nobody acts on either one.
So his team markets the front door, not the process. They get prospective students curious enough to show up, and the financial aid office handles everything that comes next.
"My job is to get you to the front door and let you know that when you get here, don't worry, you're in good hands."
This is the discipline that most institutions struggle to maintain, especially when stakeholders want the marketing to do work that marketing can't do. A campaign can't enroll a student. It can make a student trust the institution enough to show up, and what happens after that is an operational question. The more clearly marketing owns that distinction, the better it performs.
Bold is a strategic choice, not a personality type
Patrick is making a specific argument here, not a general one about taking risks. Generic creative is expensive too. It hides the cost by producing work that generates no response.
His benchmark is the marketing juggernauts in higher ed. Community colleges can't match those budgets, but they can match the strategic discipline behind them: a brand anchored to one clear idea, repeated consistently, with enough presence that a prospective student already has a feeling about the institution before they ever search for it. The institutions that built outsized brand recognition did it by betting on one specific message and holding it. The specificity of that bet is what makes it work, and it's territory that compounds over time. The schools showing up consistently in the markets that matter are the ones protecting future enrollment, not reacting to a dip after it's already happened.
"There's no such thing as a bad story with every student that comes to the front door," Patrick said. "Have fun, take big swings, be creative."
The fail-fast framing he uses is grounded in how community college enrollment works. The cycle resets constantly. A campaign that doesn't land gets another attempt in a few weeks, which is an asset most industries don't have. The teams that use that rhythm well treat each cycle as a chance to try something sharper and more specific than the last one. That's how presence compounds over time.
Patrick Stone is the Director of Strategic Communications and Marketing at Cape Cod Community College and immediate past president of NCMPR. This conversation was part of OnDeck & OffScript, a series featuring candid conversations with marketing, communications and enrollment and marketing leaders across higher education.
