Reflecting on Budgeting and Promotions Planning
By Tom P. Fitzgibbon, RAD, China and India
Several years ago when I began my role as the RAD for Southeast Asia and India, one of the first things that I noticed was that the previous market manager took a rather dim approach to budget and promotion planning. The process at the time was focused on nothing more than setting a budget amount and assigning the budget to the field. No planning, no schedule of activities, just saying “here’s your money, go spend it and get X number of students.” While it’s a very simple approach, it doesn’t provide any insight into what activities are successful in yielding students.
Beyond the fact that there were a lot of other “issues” in the market, it was necessary to take a step back and apply a different approach to managing the market. The first step in that process was to apply a new strategy to promotional planning, a bottom-up planning process. Instead of taking the simple, and failing, approach to planning in the market, I felt that it would be much more effective to solicit proposals from our Educational Counselors that would detail the activities they thought would work, and what return on investment they anticipated from the activities. In effect, rather than simply “assigning” a budget and target, the ECs were putting their own proposals together.
Obviously, this is much more time consuming and far more complex than a top down process. So, why did this work? First, it allows us to acknowledge who the experts are in specific markets – and by the way, it’s not us. Our ECs are in the market every day - they know what the barriers are and how to get past them to be successful. Beyond that, the ECs are business people, they want to be successful as much as we need them to be successful. We don’t want an EC to spend a lot of money and not succeed and they don’t want to spend a lot of time and fail. While the objectives may be “different”, we all have the same goal, getting qualified students into our schools.
The process itself wasn’t as complicated as you may think. We already have a set of promotional “categories” (fairs, high school visits, digital marketing, etc.) that we use for our regional budgets. Therefore, it’s simply a matter of creating a worksheet that the ECs can complete that details the activities, costs, timing and expected outcomes from the activity. The intent is to keep it simple so the information is detailed enough to be actionable.
Beyond the process, the other benefit in this approach is it supports having a strong “relationship” with our EC partners. Instead of us “telling” the ECs what to do, we are working collaboratively on a tactical plan that is sensitive to costs and enrollment performance. This provides an opportunity for joint “ownership” of the plan and the expected outcomes. A “top down” process doesn’t establish that joint ownership and certainly doesn’t support a partnership with our ECs.
While this was a very different approach, the performance results certainly justified the effort. Overall market spending dropped by about 50% in the first year at the same time enrollments were up over 30%.
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