2024 Breakout Sessions

Dorothy Jones, Dallas College Chief Marketing Officer

Room: Rio Grande Ballroom

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The college landscape has changed. Traditional enrollment strategies no longer work for today’s students, many of whom lack a clear understanding of the value of higher education. In our opening keynote session, Dorothy Jones, Dallas College CMO, will share innovative marketing research methods that go beyond demographics. She’ll share a summary of the student segmentation model which uncovers attitudes and motivations, unveils 5 key student personas, and identifies the drivers of satisfaction. You’ll walk away with actionable insights to tailor your marketing, improve retention, and drive enrollment at your community college.

Donald Dement, Graduation Alliance

Room: Brazos I

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Discover how Dallas College gained over 7,500 additional enrollments brought on by Texas House Bill 8, which shifted enrollment to a new model based on outcomes and student success. Hear how the college impacted credit and workforce enrollment by making macro and micro adjustments to outreach and retention strategies quickly. Starting with the premise that student success is everyone’s business, Dallas College implemented a financial aid strategy, leveraged marketing, and launched an approach to student success impact planning.

Melissa Hinshaw, Lone Star College

Room: Brazos II

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Culture can make or break the success of any organization. Discover how one of the largest community colleges in Texas created an intentional focus on organizational culture and kept the success progressing years later, including both successes and roadblocks encountered along the way.

Jake Myers, Adjunct Professor & Head of Local / Regional Advertising Strategy for Atmosphere TV

Room: Brazos III

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, content consumption habits and social media trends are evolving rapidly. Discover innovative strategies to adapt and thrive, ensuring your marketing efforts pack a punch well above their weight. From understanding shifting audience preferences to leveraging new social media platforms and tools, this session will equip you with the insights and techniques needed to maximize your impact and stay ahead of the curve. Don't miss this opportunity to elevate your marketing game and achieve knockout results!

Jessica Vess, Austin Community College

Room: Guadalupe

In an era where digital engagement shapes perceptions, leveraging technology to narrate the journey and essence of our college is not just innovative—it’s imperative. In this session, we’ll look at the transformative power of technology in storytelling. Join us and explore the many ways technology can help shape your college’s narrative and forge meaningful connections with your audiences.

Kathi Swanson, CLARUS - a Carnegie Company

Room: Brazos I

Have you fully explored the ways that you can integrate AI into your creative workflow? And save hours in your day? AI can save an incredible amount of time for you and your team, by conducting and analyzing focus groups to help define messaging, developing initial drafts of advertising copy, creating ad sets, facilitating multiple placements of your messaging, and automatically generating display ads in different shapes and sizes to fit every opportunity that exists in the digital arena.

Joanna Fritz & Jorge Palacios, Trinity Valley Community College

Room: Brazos II

This session will cover inexpensive ways to create live streaming and producing videos with your cell phone or iPad.

Valentine Ollawa, Workzone’s VP of Customer Success, and Meridith McLarty, Assistant Director of Marketing at Dallas College

Room: Brazos III

In this session, Valentine Ollawa, Workzone’s VP of Customer Success, and Meridith McLarty, Assistant Director of Marketing at Dallas College, will share innovative ways to leverage project management data into insights to influence strategic decisions for your organizations. They will share key challenges common to marketers and specific examples and successes. You’ll walk away with actionable steps to implement a foundational project structure that will give you data and key insights to improve your marketing outcomes and demonstrate value to your organizations.

Lisa Elliott, McLennan Community College

Room: Guadalupe

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Unlock the power of Transformational Leadership with a Growth Mindset! Join me to explore key strategies, real-world examples, and practical tips for implementing this leadership style. Elevate your leadership game and inspire meaningful change within your team and organization. Don’t just lead, elevate!

David Knight, Advance Education

Room: Brazos I

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Third-party cookies have driven personalized ads and audience targeting for years. However, with the impending deprecation of third-party cookies, colleges are on the brink of a seismic shift in audience targeting. This session will explore how to create effective digital marketing without cookies.

Elizabeth Garza, Darin Kazmir, and Tisha Sternadel, Victoria College

Room: Brazos II

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This session will focus on the Nov. 14 shooting incident at VC. We’ll discuss the response from Marketing & Communications, Campus Police & Security, and local law enforcement. The focus will be twofold: what worked well and what can be improved. This includes communication, evacuation procedures, and overall response. Your questions and insights are valuable. Join the discussion to help us ensure the continued safety of our college campuses.

Chris Hager, Sales Executive Terminalfour

Room: Brazos III

In today’s digital-first world, as the digital landscape continues to shift, how do you break through thenoise and allow your institution to shine.

Cesar Jimenez, Brazosport College

Room: Guadalupe

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According to a study by SalesForce, 80% of customers now value a company’s experience as much as its products and services. As departments serving our colleges, this applies to us too. In this session, we’ll explore simple ideas to streamline project edits, leading to quicker approvals and greater client satisfaction, all while maintaining our high-quality standards.

Cheryl Broom, GradComm

Room: Brazos I

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Long Beach City College’s approach to marketing historically low-enrolled programs includes tailoring the marketing strategy for each program to the target audience’s needs and interests. As a result, the college saw increased enrollment across multiple programs. Learn how to create innovative and effective marketing strategies without breaking the bank or experiencing burn out.

Andi Atkinson & Dina Togle, Houston Community College

Room: Brazos II

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You can spread buzz without spending bucks! Learn how to create easy, FREE content that increases visits, impressions, reactions, and followers.

Abdi Zadeh, Sensis

Room: Brazos III

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We often see the term user-experience, and typically think of UX Design, which is only a single facet within a collection of disciplines. This session will touch on four UX disciplines that work in concert when designing your community college website – with the goal of increasing enrollments.

Shaydi Clary & Joanna Fritz, Trinity Valley Community College

Room: Guadalupe

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Digital media is consistently growing! Through digital marketing, individuals or businesses can promote, market or grab attention through multiple channels like websites, radio, social media, email marketing, and so much more! As a marketer, it may feel like you are running through a hamster wheel trying to keep track of all the projects. In this presentation, we help you navigate through options of digital marketing and important tips to remember when implementing a digital marketing campaign.

Dewey Price, 25th Hour Communications

Room: Brazos I

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You have been labeled the brand police, gatekeepers, protectors, and maybe some more colorful terms in the name of managing your brand. Let’s talk about how maintaining your brand identity can help attract and retain students. Discover how you can use your brand voice to carve out a distinct identity in the crowded educational landscape, and foster loyalty and engagement among students and stakeholders.

Kimberly Bow, Stantec

Room: Brazos II

This session will discuss the critical steps needed for success in a general obligation bond campaign. Those buckets include data, consensus, and communication. The presentation will review laws/regulations, provide a sample timeline (if considering a bond), and further share strategies on how to organize your community into an army of advocates who vote. Experienced individuals or folks talking about bonds for the first time should walk away with lessons learned.

Kristin Van Dorn, Bravery Media

Room: Brazos III

See their content in context, while designers want to know how much content needs to be designed. But we’ve seen design projects fail when content isn’t set. This session covers why content-first design works best, how to support writers who want to know “what it’ll look like” before they write, and talking points for getting stakeholder buy-in.

Jonathan Blundell, Dallas College

Room: Guadalupe

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As marketers, the question “What’s my email open rate?” often takes center stage. However, there’s a world beyond this vanity metric. Join us in this session as we delve into other metrics we should consider to gauge our email campaign success. We’ll also spend time in a round-robin discussion to talk through strategies for enhancing our campaigns and achieving meaningful engagement.

Conner Koenen, NextGrad

Room: Brazos I

NextGrad has been hard at work collecting information on how high school students are deciding what’s next. Join us as we discuss why, when, where, and how students are learning about higher education opportunities.

Lynda Lopez & Adam McGrath, South Texas College

Room: Brazos II

South Texas College marketing leadership will share best practices and lessons learned from their award-winning rebranding and logo redesign initiative. From getting support for a rebranding to an unveiling event that will have your community embracing your marketing efforts, the STC team will go over a step-by-step plan, tell you what worked and what didn’t and hopefully inspire you to give new life to your brand.

Aaron Radtke, Genius Monkey

Room: Brazos III

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Unpack programmatic advertising and how it relates to your student’s unique digital journey and define different media types and how the digital journey can be tracked from first touch to RFI and beyond.

Janet Cowey, San Jacinto College

Room: Guadalupe

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Come along on the journey to see how San Jac overhauled their website, including moving from open source Drupal to Omni CMS. Gain valuable insights and tips for your next web redesign project.

Laura Fragoso, Round Rock Express

Room: Rio Grande Ballroom

Join Laura as she dives into connecting with baseball fans through purpose-driven marketing. Her core belief is built on the foundation that our purpose as marketers goes beyond our actions—it resides in the impact those actions have on others. This guiding principle shapes her career path and outreach efforts. With a focus on bringing joy to others through the game of baseball, Laura shares insights into the Round Rock Express brand, the world of Minor League Baseball, and the strategies employed for outreach. Through her presentation, she explores the theme of finding purpose and delves into how the Round Rock Express has cultivated a devoted fan base.

Joyce Grogan & Christine Stuart-Carruthers, Texas State Technical College; Tommy Bolger, Element451

Room: Brazos I

Today, AI is crucial in education marketing. Texas State Technical College (TSTC) amplified outreach with an AI-powered CRM. Results? 24% increase in applications YTD, 83% improvement to the application completion rate, and a 45% reduction in marketing costs per application. TSTC & Element451 will discuss this collaboration with highlights including: AI-driven strategies, data-driven decision-making, and case studies showing the impact of AI-tailored content.

Lorenzo Salazar, Slate Group

Room: Brazos II

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Step into a world where your imagination has no bounds, where innovative ideas sparks transformation and where creativity reigns supreme.In this session, let’s challenge ourselves and discover new possibilities to inspire change. Whether its groundbreaking product concepts, innovative marketing strategy or visionary solution to a pressing problem, this presentation will display the potential of human creativity.

David White, San Jacinto College

Room: Brazos III

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Explore practical techniques to evaluate and improve the usability of websites, focusing on navigation ease, clarity of information, and user experience. This session is ideal for marketers aiming to enhance digital engagement for prospective and current students, as well as the broader community. Learn to apply website usability testing to ensure your website effectively meets the needs of all users.

Dina Togle & Loritta Nelson, Houston Community College

Room: Guadalupe

Short videos sell! Learn how to create reels/shorts using just your smartphone and Adobe Rush. This is a hands-on session so bring your phone and laptop and make sure the Adobe Rush app is installed on both devices prior to the event. Learn how to produce reels in no time!

Room: Rio Grande Ballroom

Colleagues from around the state will present a challenge they have faced that cannot be easily solved. The rest of us will act as consultants, offering insightful questions, feedback, and creative solutions. Detailed instructions will be provided at the beginning of the session.

Room: Rio Grande Ballroom

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Dr. Russell Lowery-Hart, Austin Community College Chancellor

Room: Rio Grande Ballroom

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Dr. Russell Lowery-Hart serves as the Chancellor for Austin Community College District. Russell’s leadership is centered around the concept of–– LOVE, with a dedicated focus on enhancing student success through systemic and cultural transformation. As he prefers to be called, Russell previously served as president of Amarillo College in Amarillo, Texas, from 2014 to 2023 before beginning his tenure as ACC Chancellor. Under his leadership, Amarillo College received several awards and was named co-winner of the prestigious 2023 Aspen Prize, a Community College Excellence award. Russell received a bachelor’s degree in speech communication and rhetoric from West Texas State University, a master’s degree in communication studies from Texas Tech University, and a doctorate in interpersonal communication from Ohio University.