Food for thought on Memorial Day

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 26, 2008 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

- President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956

Food for thought: the United States military budget is $713 billion dollars. (Slate) For every American man, woman, and child, that’s $2,376 paid out every year.

Whatever your politics, understand that this reflects our national priorities, where we put our tax dollars to work, governed by who we vote for.

Food for thought: two months’ worth of the military budget would wipe out the student loan debt of every current student in America and then some.

Four months’ worth would send every student academically eligible to attend college to school for free.

Three months’ worth would pay for the entire reconstruction of the Gulf Coast, erasing Katrina’s damage.

As we remember those who have given their lives for the country, please consider carefully who you vote for this fall, and urge every American you know to get educated about the candidates and participate by voting and staying involved in the political process after the election. Hold your elected representatives accountable by staying in communication with them, sending them email, faxes, YouTube videos, whatever it takes to ensure your voice continues to be heard about the priorities that are important to you.

“Pray for the dead. Fight like hell for the living.” – Mary “Mother” Jones

Staycationing

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 24, 2008 in Uncategorized | 0 comments

Just added a new article to the Financial Aid Podcast blog – how to staycation properly. In a time of record gas prices, record food prices, record airline prices, record everything, this article will hopefully inspire you to try something different and lighten both your spirits and the load on your wallet.

Hope, advisement, and Melissa Rakes

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 21, 2008 in Education | 2 comments

One of the highlights of this past EASFAA conference was not at the conference at all, but in the bar after the Monday sessions. I had the good fortune to sit down with Melissa Rakes, an Ed.D. student looking at how advisement works, and we got to talking about one of my favorite things – marketing, of course. We chatted about her doctoral thesis and a few different ideas and systems that could be applied to academic advisement, which was a lot of fun.

I kept asking nearly absurd questions about porting existing business, sales, marketing, and motivational systems to education, because it seems to me that if Amway Motivational Organizations can generate books, tapes, CDs, etc. to keep their members moving ahead in an organization that statistically holds little hope for them at all, it should be a cakewalk for academic advisors to use the same tools and technologies to motivate their students in an educational system that DOES generate good results.

One of the highlights of the conversation was on the topic of branding. I was mentioning Ze Frank’s fantastic explanation of branding as emotional aftertaste, and asked Melissa what she thought higher education’s brand was and is. We concluded that it’s hope. Not anything necessarily specific – lots of people go to college for lots of reasons, but hope seems to be a common thread. Hope for a great job, for freedom and independent, for a better future than past, hope as an emotion.

I thought of the students who are first in their families to go to college, and the hope, excitement, and trepidation that they must feel in their first days in school – and how processes such as financial aid, enrollment, and other parts of academia’s paperwork bureaucracy do their very best to squash that hope under a mountain of paper.

If advisors in higher education could communicate, reinforce, and energize hope consistently with the same aggressive methods of motivation that business uses, I’d bet that retention and dropout rates would plummet. Melissa’s got a few great projects underway, and I wish her outrageous success in all of them. I suspect she’s going to be one of higher education’s rock stars of the future.

Pimping the Financial Aid Podcast

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 19, 2008 in Podcasting | 0 comments

I’m happy to say that the Financial Aid Podcast just hit episode 800. Check out the episode – it’s 5 success stories powered by new media, ways in which new media has made a real difference.

Ask, ask, ask

Posted by Christopher S Penn on May 17, 2008 in Advertising, Marketing, MySpace, New media | 0 comments

I’ve been looking again at MySpace, as a recent blog post detailed. One of the things I’ve been looking at is the depth of engagement. Is a friend relationship enough to market on? What is the value of a MySpace friendship?

Over the last five days, I’ve been sending out 200 messages a day or so to my MySpace friends, advertising the Financial Aid Podcast. It’s themed pretty basically:

• Thanks for being a friend of mine and of my show.
• Here’s three links to iTunes, Google Reader, and the site.
• Please subscribe.

How’s it been going?

I started with a Feedburner number of about 1,000. The show had been static around that number for a while, a couple of months at least. Today? Hit a new record – the last four out of five days.

Ask. Ask those in your network to get connected, ask them to take action, ask them to be more involved in your community efforts. If you don’t ask, you definitely won’t receive.