Academic Thought Leadership and Enrollment Lead Nurturing Services

The Vendor is required to provide integrated marketing services—combining Academic Thought Leadership (“ATL”), media relations, content development, digital lead nurturing, CRM integration, and enrollment communications support.
- Students often balance academic pursuits with full-time employment, family responsibilities, and other professional obligations. Many enter with prior college credits, professional experience, or industry credentials. As such, messaging and engagement strategies must reflect their practical motivations, career-focused goals, and need for flexibility and value.
- The School differentiates itself through its fully online delivery model, generous transfer credit policies (up to 105 credits for undergraduate programs), credit for prior learning opportunities, zero-textbook-cost general education courses, and strong return-on-investment as a public institution.
- The goals of this engagement are to:
•    Elevate the visibility of agency and its subject-matter experts across national, regional, trade, and academic media.
•    Strengthen brand recognition for agency within priority academic disciplines and workforce sectors.
•    Increase qualified prospective student engagement, with an emphasis on inquiry‐to‐application conversion.
•    Deliver coordinated ATL and lead nurturing efforts, ensuring prospective student touchpoints are aligned, timely, and data‐informed.
•    Support enrollment growth for undergraduate, graduate, certificate, and professional programs.
- Academic Thought Leadership & Media Relations
•    Develop and execute an annual ATL strategy.
•    With the assistance of agency, identify and interview faculty subject matter experts (SMES).
•    Produce quarterly communications plans with targeted pitch angles.
•    Secure 4–6 high‐quality media placements per month.
•    Manage outreach to national, regional, and industry‐specific media.
•    Facilitate expert commentary and byline placements.
•    Provide amplification assets for agency marketing channels.
•    Deliver quarterly coverage book reports.
•    Conduct monthly strategy and reporting meetings.
- Enrollment Lead Nurturing & Communications Support
•    Provide two (2) dedicated enrollment communications advisors.
•    Conduct proactive outreach to 400–600 inquiries (including prospective students, those who have started but not submitted an application, and those that have submitted an application but have not yet enrolled) per month via email, phone, and SMS. - implement lead segmentation and prioritization.
•    Support inquiry‐to‐application conversion.
•    Develop re‐engagement campaigns for stop‐outs and dormant leads.
•    Produce nurture workflows, CRM templates, and message sequences.
•    Integrate with agency slate CRM platform.
•    Provide monthly performance dashboards.
•    Map student journey touchpoints for priority programs.
- Academic Thought Leadership
•    Strategic thought leadership plan outlining priority themes, key faculty subject matter experts, media targets, and quarterly outreach goals.
•    Proactive media outreach to secure placements in national, regional, local, industry, and trade publications; including expert commentary opportunities, byline articles, interviews, and op-eds.
•    Reactive media response support, including rapid turnaround pitches and responses to external media requests aligned with agency expertise.
•    Media amplification deliverables, including social-ready snippets, digital placements, and language for newsletters, websites, and other promotional channels.
•    Comprehensive reporting, including coverage book reports with key metrics (UVPM, domain rating, estimated views, publicity value, social mentions, backlink tracking, and message pull-through analysis).
- Enrollment Lead Nurturing
•    Development of inquiry-to-application communication workflows tailored to adult learners, transfer students, and graduate-level audiences.
•    Ongoing outreach to prospective students, including coordinated email, phone, and SMS touchpoints designed to move inquiries toward application submission.
•    Lead segmentation and prioritization, aligned with agency program needs and enrollment timelines.
•    Monthly reporting on conversions, including number of prospects contacted, engagement insights, barriers to enrollment, and recommended adjustments to outreach strategy.