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Shiro Hatori
Welcome to the higher ed demand gen podcast hosted by concept 3d. If you like our content, please follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple, and Google. My name is Shiro Hatori. And I will be your host today, and I’m really looking forward to talking about uplifting your university brand. And also some 2020 for higher ed, marketing debts. And for the conversation. I actually met this person live at AMA, and this is how we connected at the American Marketing Association symposium in Chicago earlier, or sorry, in November, so earlier last month, and so yeah, I’m really excited to have Tim Baldwin, join us today. He’s the associate vice president of marketing and brand strategy at Towson University. Welcome to the show.

Timm Baldwin
It’s good to be here. And ama was definitely a good time. It was good to meet you there and always love the opportunity to connect with other higher ed marketers. So

Shiro Hatori
absolutely. Yeah, I gotta give a shout out to me whenever because I had such a good time. So shout out to me. And Tim, I love asking all my guests. What what do you love about higher ed?

Timm Baldwin
What do I love about higher ed, I will say that I’m not a career, higher ed marketer, I came into this space relatively recently in 2017. And prior to that, I was doing a lot of marketing and other institutions some some that were nonprofits, some that were for profit, and coming into higher education. The one thing that I have appreciated the most is having a mission to kind of tie the work back to sometimes when you’re working as a marketer, you are selling a widget or an item that, you know, the real drivers is generating revenue and value for your shareholders or stakeholders. And in higher education. I feel like what’s nice about the work is that at the end of the day, especially at the end of the semester, which we’re getting near to right now, we get to watch the fruits of the university’s, you know, community and labor in terms of seeing students graduate. And that is probably the most gratifying thing about being a marker in the space. That’s

Shiro Hatori
fantastic. Is commencement day for winter. Like,

Timm Baldwin
it’s literally Well, yeah, so it’s literally tomorrow, we have two days of it. And it is you know, for me, I get a little wistful I you know, sometimes have a little bit of a paying myself to go back and study more, because it’s great. You see families, you see students who have put a lot of time and energy into this work and and there’s nothing more gratifying than seeing how big they smile on commencement day, and what an accomplishment it is for them. So it’s great to be part of that. That’s that’s a really fueling kind of thing for the work that we do. That’s

Shiro Hatori
fantastic. I also graduated on a winter commencement. So it was a bit different. And I really enjoyed like a smaller group, because I did go to a big state school as well. Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, great. Would you want to get started with telling us a little bit about your role as well? Sure, yeah.

Timm Baldwin
So like I mentioned started here in 2017, I am responsible for really the strategy that we have in place for the university around external marketing. So that includes primarily things like enrollment marketing for undergraduate and graduate. It also includes athletics marketing, we also work in in our space, our team is responsible for managing social media for the institution, which is always a good conversation to have. We also oversee and manage a lot of the content and guidance for email marketing and for CRM use on campus or a Salesforce campus, we use that 800 pound gorilla, but it’s a great tool that we lean on. And so yeah, so a lot of different pieces and components. I’m in the central marketing unit. So within our university, and most of our structure is pretty centralized here, we do have some decentralized marketing and communications people within the colleges. But for a university our size, we have about 20,000 students, undergrad and grad. You know, it’s a fairly centralized model. So we do a lot for the institution in terms of trying to not just market externally paid media, those types of things, digital marketing, but also trying to help in terms of setting some of the strategy around how to communicate what the value propositions will be in certain areas for campus initiatives. And so it’s really great. It’s great to be part of a of a team, a division. So we have both marketing and comms. And so we have a number of colleagues on our floor that also work on the strategic communication side. So we work collaboratively around that and it’s great work.

Shiro Hatori
That’s awesome. And is this found foundational or systematical? Like, more centralization, is that a new newer thing at Towson? No,

Timm Baldwin
thankfully, I mean, I think you know, every university has its own kind of one. A lot of structuring to some degree and, and certainly different models work for different institutions. For us, it’s been nice to have some level of involvement with the various things that are happening at the divisional level throughout the university. So we do like to partner and collaborate with our academic partners and our student affairs partners, and certainly athletics and a number of other divisions. So it’s nice to have those conversations to be really strategic partners around some of those things. And but at some institutions, you know, depending on size, a decentralized model is a little bit more effective and works a little bit better. For us. This is pretty good at this point. And we continue to grow. And it could be that over time, that that continues to shift, but it’s been a pretty good model in place for us thus far.

Shiro Hatori
That’s fantastic. Well, speaking of a prior conversation, I know, early on your time, at Towson, you took on a pretty big project and 2019, which is around uplifting the university brand. Can you tell us a little bit more about where you started and how everything’s going?

Timm Baldwin
Yeah, yeah, it was a really exciting project. One of the things, you know, coming into this institution that I was, I was pleased to kind of have the opportunity to work on is brand, it’s a passion of mine, I really love, love brand identity and left brain work. And, you know, my charge coming in to the university was to help usher in a rebrand for the institution, it was something that at the time our president had prioritized. She herself was a marketer. And so she really understood the value of brand and the need to kind of evolve the brand story here at our university. And so it was a multi year project, as it is in the case for many organizations of this size. But we started with research. And that’s also something that you don’t get afforded every day is an opportunity to really do critical research that you can use to fuel some of the work that you do. So we stepped into it in 2017. And that started with quantitative and qualitative research that we conducted both internally and externally. And we walked away with some really good takeaways, that helped to serve as the foundation for the brand identity that now is in place here at the university. And when we started the project, the we tried to help campus understand, you know, marketing and comms, we weren’t the people that were going to go off on high and decide what the university’s brand was going to be. Our job was really, to conduct research and find out what the brand already was. And we learned three important things. One, we had a great value ratio, a price to value ratio for the institution, students and alums found that the value of their degrees was really good, and they appreciate it. Secondly, we had really good personal attention at the institution. So a lot of mentorship type of relationships exist here. And that feedback in the research very clearly. And the third component that we learned about was the growth of the institution, which we kind of already knew, but it was great to hear the audience. You know, say back to us, we acknowledge that you’re growing, and that the growth that we see is really positive. And so we turn those three kinds of fundamental, consistent markers that we heard from many different constituents into our brand pillars and ultimately created a brand platform and a set of key messages that supported that. And in 2019, as you mentioned, we launched and it was married with both a new set of messages, but also a new visual identity for the institution, the first that we’d had in over 20 plus years. And so that was exciting to be part of. And so you know, that work is the kind that really energizes a campus. And thankfully, we had really good buy in from a lot of hard work in terms of conversations and feedback, and lots of different iterations of what we had kind of generated for the campus. And so now, a couple years on, we’re getting ready to do another brand perception study and see how far we’ve come. And that’s also an exciting thing to be able to do. That’s

Shiro Hatori
fantastic to turn so many different things around and is the first one of the first projects, it’s gotta be exciting, and also a lot of work. What is what is like actually translating some of that research, you said, you know, value was one of them. The ability to connect with faculty and staff and the growth of the school as a whole, like, how, what does the like, what does an actual marketing campaign look like? Is it implementing those values at the strategic planning level? Like, just just trying to visualize exactly Yeah, might look like and I know it’s not just a one thing. There’s a bunch of things, but can you give us some examples? Yeah,

Timm Baldwin
and you know, and And the question is a really good one. You know, a lot of the folks that we talked to on campus, when we started the process, had assumed that what we were working towards was a tagline of some kind, right? Like, this was going to become like, the output of this brand work was going to be a slogan that everyone would use on everything that we did. And we were really intentional about making sure people understood that this was not about, you know, distilling us down to two or three words, and then just repeating them. And that’s a strategy that can work. But in our case, we were really more focused on making sure that the stories that we were telling across the many divisions and departments at the institution started to align. You know, one of the challenges we ran into early on, was understanding that no one really knew how to describe telson. And there wasn’t consistency, you would talk to 10 different people, and they would all kind of say 10 different things. And when we did the brand work and the research, it became clear that we had hit the mark, when everyone could see the finished messages and say, oh, okay, yeah, I see that that is that is who we are. And so we had a big idea. The big idea was that as a campus, we were opportunity creators, we were really here to kind of fuel the work that students were doing and the lives that we were helping to change and the communities that we were trying to impact. And that particulars kind of spark of an idea is really what then served as trying to drive some consistency around the storytelling, we have three major pillars, opportunity, mentorship, and momentum. And those three pillars, you know, we came in and we said, hey, listen, this is this is how to kind of talk about these things. These are some kind of starting points in terms of messages, these are some specific guidelines, in terms of how you might want to frame this from your particular seat within the institution. And that really resonated, it was something that people then could take, and they could say, okay, yeah, I can apply these concepts to what I’m doing. And our goal wasn’t necessarily to have people regurgitate those exact words, you know, we were like, Hey, don’t, don’t feel the need to force the word opportunity into everything that you’re doing, right and take the concept and make sure that you’re paying off and delivering on that concept. And, and that was a way that we really found to have success in terms of the brand to really make it come to life and have people understand that what we were trying to give was a similar elevator speech across the institution. And whether you were in athletics or advancement, or student affairs, or academic affairs, what is it within your space that speaks to these core kind of pillars? And that, that is how we had some good success? That’s

Shiro Hatori
awesome. And speaking of success, the marketer me just wants to ask, like, how do you even go about measuring? Like, you know, you have your three pillars? How do you measure the success of that? Or the result of that? And what have they done? Like? Yeah,

Timm Baldwin
so data, right, data is king, and you’ve got to have the data to support what you’re doing, but also to tell you whether what you’re doing is effective? I’ll tell you, I think that’s still a work in progress. I think it’s it’s very difficult for us as it might be for other organizations, to be able to quantify everything, right? When we rolled out the brand, we knew that the first bit of information or data we would get would be largely anecdotal. And we were happy to see that the the first kind of benchmark that we passed was folks adopting it right internally. And we knew that it was important that the internal audience understand it, be able to kind of express it in their own way. And so seeing that happen in real time was a an indicator that we were having some success. But then when we moved externally, when we took that message, and we said, Okay, after the first six or eight months of you know, kind of guiding the internal audience, we got to the external audience, then we were looking for markers of our the external audiences, understanding these concepts, are they able to kind of report back that? Yes, they agreed. We are, you know, we are a place that you can find deep mentorship, we are a place where the momentum is increasing not just for what’s happening on campus, but what happened what happens off campus, that’s a harder thing sometimes to to quantify. We did you know, a lot of conversations which helped. The other thing we saw in terms of our institution, you know, one of the things we did with our visual identity that was quite intentional, is adopted a brand mark that had TCU in it, right. So, prior to doing the rebrand, we’ve always been known as Towson University, but prior to 1995 and 76. We were at Towson State University and so folks would sometimes refer to as Tsu. And we were still the State University to him and we still are a state university. We certainly don’t want to, you know, kind of walk away from our roots but We intentionally with the visual identity, we’re trying to drive home this, this to brand and, and to hear people start to refer to us in the community, whether that’s in the media, whether that’s with government partners, whether that’s with other types of community groups, and alums, when we heard that start to happen to you, that’s when you have external people calling us to you. And not just those that are internal. That’s how we also started to see some movement and understand that this was kind of catching on. And we’ve got a lot of work to do still to do this. I mean, this is generational type of work, what we’re talking about, especially in an area like Maryland, where people are born and bred. And so we’ve got a lot of history here, which is, you know, positive. We don’t necessarily expect to see overnight changes, but the the anecdotal changes were there. And now this brand study that we’re talking about doing is really going to help us more definitively quantify some things that we believe to be true. But we don’t really have as much hard and fast data beyond the campaigns that we run. So

Shiro Hatori
thank you. Yeah, that’s, it’s a very, I get asked about reporting all the time. And it’s, it’s always a difficult question to answer, especially at that brand. Awareness, getting how many people are in your orbit? Right. It’s a bit hard to quantify those. But I think a lot of anecdotal and qualitative metrics are really helpful there. So appreciate you sharing that. This makes me think a little bit like, you know, thinking about qualitative versus quantitative, I feel like maybe there’s a shift in the marketing industry as a whole, where there’s a lot. There’s a lot of qualitative indicators that were maybe ignored the last 10 years, because there’s just all these new solutions and data tools coming out that like everyone was saying, you know, data driven, which is a buzzword, I think. But it’s, you know, it’s it works for sure. But, you know, what do you think is going to happen in the future? Like, what are some of your bets for next year, and, and beyond in terms of higher ed marketing? Yeah, I feel like data.

Timm Baldwin
It certainly has dominated the conversation, right. And digital marketing, really opened the door to everyone understanding that we were going to have this opportunity as marketers to quantify almost anything that we were doing. And that chasing that was a good thing to do, I think in terms of getting better return on the investment, better targeting better real time metrics that we could then optimize? And I think that will always be the case. But I do think, you know, you’re right. You mentioned kind of this qualitative piece. And, you know, part of what we do as marketers, is to encourage people to take action, certainly, we want folks to, in our case, we’re interested in encouraging students to visit or to apply we’re doing, and we want those metrics, and we want to be able to see some success there. But we’re also really in need of trying to drive larger picture types of goals like awareness and making sure that not just the prospective student is being engaged with but the larger region that we serve, and do people understand, you know, what we offer in terms of value, not just to the student that enrolls here, but also to the larger community, state and region. And when you’re talking about doing that kind of work, right, the data is a lot harder to kind of grab, because in some cases, there’s not a direct call to action, you’re really just trying to kind of get your name out there. And, you know, with digital, I think it’s been a blessing and a curse, it’s been a good thing. Because it’s encouraged all of us to really spend every dollar as efficiently and effectively as we can, which is really critical in our space, particularly as a public institution. But, you know, the data is starting to shift, right? Like, when when we think about the changes that are happening right now around privacy, around users really getting more control over their data, which is a good thing, right? Like, it’s good that people have ultimately control over what is collected about them, and how right. But that changes the landscape a little bit. And I think in 2024, we’ll continue to see that we’ve seen it already, in the last two years or so. changes that have been made. An example is, you know, Apple encouraging users or prompting users to kind of ask them, they want to be tracked by social media sites or by other types of apps. They’re using, you know, and largely a lot of users are saying no, I don’t want that. And, and so that kind of forces the conversation towards okay, if if that data collection model changes shifts, how do we get better data? And maybe the data isn’t the only thing that we should be relying on, you know, there is a piece of this, you know, when you go down to the foundations of, of good marketing that existed before digital, right, you know, with around reach, it’s around frequency, it’s around awareness, those types of things. And those things still matter. And I think that as we look towards the future, particularly in the next year or so, we’re starting to broaden our message, rather than being super targeted, you know, how can we make sure that a message that resonates for a prospective student also resonates for prospective students parent, rather than what we used to do, which is to say, okay, parent should see this message, students should see this message. And there are platforms where that’s still going to be the case, I think, you know, email, vacations, direct kind of communications to users. But as we see the data kind of shift, and audiences start to overlap, because of that, we need to be smarter about making messages that resonate with larger groups of people. And I think that, you know, it’s cyclical, I think, to some degree, but, but that’s a shift that that we see happening, and that we certainly have seen in the data that we get back from our campaigns. You know, it’s, it’s not unusual now for a parent to be grouped in with a student audience, and maybe vice versa, because it’s clean and clear. So we have to be mindful of that. And I think, you know, to the extent that marketers can make messages that are still, you know, targeted to some degree, but that can be more universal, I think that’s a positive thing. And it’ll challenge us as marketers to kind of think about how we message and, and how we treat digital advertising in relation to what we would normally consider more traditional media. And I think you still kind of have to rely on an integrated approach, you still need a number of different types of platforms, you can’t just do digital if you’re going to try to grow an institution, for instance of this size, but but digital still foundational. So I think that’s going to be an interesting thing to see evolve and continue to evolve in.

Shiro Hatori
I know one thing we’re potentially going to, we’re thinking about concept 3d of trying next year is some direct mail. testing that out, because I’ve actually I’ve, I’ve worked in the digital b2b space for five years and digital marketing almost for 10. Now, and that was the the rise of digital marketing. So I’ve only done digital. So I’m excited to see like, and figure out how do I measure direct mail now? You know, how do I measure results? And to see what the results are? I’m pretty excited. Is there anything you’re looking forward to that you’re doing in 2024? And sorry, no, you had? No, I mean, I

Timm Baldwin
think everything continues to change. So I feel like in some cases, we’re still learning in real time. You know, certainly social media is continuing to shift. Now, for the first time this year, we’ve seen engagement on platforms like Tiktok, as an example, in advertising, exceed and, and go beyond what we’ve normally seen in places like Instagram and other kinds of spaces where younger populations tend to gravitate. And that’s the thing, you know, the populations are really shifting, but also their, the way they want to consume content and information, and marketing. Right. So it’s an 18 year old has a pretty good read on what a an advertisement is, they know when we’re trying to communicate with them. Organization. And so what they’re really demanding from us is less formal advertising, right? Like, they’re not necessarily as influenced by the 32nd commercial, or the 10. Second, you know, highly polished and branded digital ad, what they’re looking for is content, right. And what we can do as marketers, I think, particularly for this population, is serve them by giving them as much content that they want as possible. I think content marketing has certainly been kind of at the forefront of the last, you know, five or six, maybe more years. But I think the the expectation is that students don’t just want to hear from the institution, or the admissions office, right? Or even the professor’s because I think they do want to hear from from those populations. They really want to hear from other students, and how can we as marketers, just be facilitators of that? How can we connect current students with prospective students? How can we allow people to just tell their stories in their own words? Because oftentimes, they’re more powerful than anything that we’re going to put together in terms of messaging. And to the extent that, that their experiences support and reinforce the brand, which they often do. You know, we talked about commencement. One of the best things to do you know, for our division during commencement is to just talk to the students who have walked the stage and the ways that they encapsulate their experience, the ways that they talk about their four or more years with us are really compelling. And and those are the types of things. You know, we’ve, we’ve started as an example of utilizing that powerful kind of messaging, we’ve started to use that at the front end of our tours, right. So when you come in Towson University, the first thing we show you is not the slick 32nd commercial, it’s a two minute, you know, kind of testimonial piece of students that have walked across the stage and what they are, how they are framing the four years that they’ve spent here, as

Shiro Hatori
in, in person visit, by the way, yeah, exactly.

Timm Baldwin
So when you come for an in person visit, the first thing before we even talk to them, we say, Hey, listen, you know what, we’re going to talk to you about all the great things that happened to you, and why you might want to consider this as a place to get your degree. But we’d like to give you a kind of look into the future, what you’re probably going to say about this experience, you know, once complete, and I think that that really helps them understand right? What this place can do for them and what it can offer when you hear it from the people that have experienced it firsthand. So I think that’s the thing, right? Marketing is, is always looking for new opportunities, ways to reach people, but I think you know, ultimately the audience’s that we’re serving, particularly those that are on the prospective students side, you know, they’re telling us, yeah, it’s great that you want to market to us, I know that you’re marketing to me, you want me to come to your university, because there’s a whole host of universities that are doing that. But what they really want to know is, what can I expect? And can you have it delivered to me from a person that I can trust? Who will tell me something that I can really understand and, and relate to and that I think is really what’s shifted the most in terms of my job is my job is not just about coming up with, you know, kind of creative work, it’s about how can we just connect students better to real

Shiro Hatori
estate fantastic, it for some reason this conversation is reminded me I’m in like, a bunch of Reddit for marketing, Reddit subreddits. And one of them is looking at, like, old ad creative and how like, cool it was, and like, they’ll be like, like, an old magazine ad of like a Ferrari or a Porsche, or, I don’t know why I keep thinking cars. But you know, and everyone’s like, Oh, this is like the golden age of ads. And, you know, I kept thinking like, Oh, they’re so right, like, what happened to ads? Like, they used to be so good, and someone comment, and it was like, No, advertising has changed. That’s why it is what it is today. It’s not that it’s gotten better or worse, like, it’s, it’s not this thing that’s gonna last forever the way it is like that the brand strategy has changed from like, the brand voice to like, the customer voice and the influence voice, because that’s what people actually care about more now. Yeah. That’s a good point.

Timm Baldwin
One of the things that we you, I think you went to the same kind of keynote message I did at AMA, you know, one of the things that I remember one of the keynote speakers talking about is the evolution of brand, right, and the, like, what brand does and, and we’re at a point where brand doesn’t just inform the differences, or the kind of markers of or a build a connection with an audience. It builds a connection for the audience with each other. Right? So it’s, it’s building community. And I think, particularly for higher education institutions, what we’re really trying to communicate to students is the community that they’re going to become part of, and and we can’t do that, I think, in a vacuum of saying, Okay, well, we can do that, just with traditional advertising, we certainly want to include that. But I think we also have to connect them with that community so that when they make the decision to enroll, they understand not just what major they’re going to potentially have, but what’s the community going to be like? What am I really becoming part of, and that’s where the differentiation I think exists for a lot of universities is this sense that each community has its subtle differences, and its unique, historic kind of things, and, and some of the traditions that, you know, make one college or university unique to another. So I think we should lean into those and, and certainly, to the extent that we can put those in front of students with the marketing, we want to

Shiro Hatori
absolutely, yeah, I softer like to say I love Community Marketing, because maybe watering holes and old were to use, but you got to figure out who your community is and what where they hang out. For sure. Inside there. Speaking of community, kind of going into our last topic here, which is very, very high industry level. But in our prior intro, we talked about, you know, higher ed isn’t just now working towards, you know, come to our university, but really like, come to a university, right in their messaging. How do we kind of go about this and try to tackle this as the industry as a whole. Do you have any insights? You know, there’s no straight answer.

Timm Baldwin
I mean, this is a this is a big million dollar question. I think for a lot of us right now. and something that, you know, when connecting with colleagues who do this kind of work at other institutions, it seems to bubble up to the top of the conversation very quickly, you know, what I have started to realize in our work is that we’re not just trying to communicate to students around why they might want to come to this particular institution. And certainly, we have an interest in them coming. But we also acknowledged that we might not be the best fit for every student, right? Like, there are certain things that we’re going to offer that other universities might and vice versa. But really, what we’ve discovered is that we’re not just having to kind of communicate to students and families around the value of Towson, we’re really having to communicate around the value of higher education. And the larger conversation that’s happening in our culture right now seems to be happening without a lot of our own, you know, conversation added to it, that being you know, of universities, and kind of around, whether it’s worth it to even go to a university and the data, you know, talking about data, the data still supports that it’s absolutely worth it, right and pays significant dividends over the course of a person’s career lifetime. But we’re not necessarily joining the conversation as a collective kind of group in an effective way. And we’re not challenging the perceptions, because that’s really what it is. It’s a perception, it’s not necessarily a fact. But that’s common thing that happens in our culture these days, too. Right. The perception is, is the thing that guides the thinking. And so I think one of the things we’re going to have to figure out and certainly I don’t think there’s been there hasn’t been one singular kind of idea that has a top yet for everyone. But I think we’re collectively going to have to realize as institutions that we need to work collaboratively around, supporting, you know, young people thinking about college as a path that’s right for them. And certainly, you know, it’s not going to be the path for everyone. We acknowledge that right. I don’t think anyone is naive enough to think that college is the perfect path for every individual. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. But I think if we’re going to impact our, our greater world in the way that we all talk about doing, we do need to ensure that collectively, we’re working to ensure that people understand that this is the one of the best ways to improve your own personal path. And so I think, you know, figuring out how we can collectively pool our resources and our communications and our marketing, to benefit each other, and to kind of push back some of the competition that we sometimes naturally gravitate towards. Right, yeah. Because I think that’s the case, right? Everyone knows, like, Who’s, who’s my competitive set, who are my students looking at, but other universities are trying to woo and that kind of thing, I think we’re gonna have to more effectively kind of put some of that on the sideline, and realize that the real mission that we are all after in terms of trying to drive our communities forward, is to offer opportunities for students that they wouldn’t otherwise be afforded. And so that means improving accessibility, telling a better story about, you know, what our outcomes actually are reducing costs, and making it more affordable for students where we can, all of those things will help us tell a better story. And I think, you know, I don’t know that I singularly have the answer. I wish I did. I mean, but I think that, you know, again, part of it is kind of building more of a collaborative, collegial kind of approach to this, and how can we raise the kind of the tide collectively, because the The goal here is, you know, as I mentioned, serving our communities and making sure that there are qualified trained, critical thinkers, right, that can push our world forward. And if there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that we’re, we’re in need of more people who can critically think about all sorts of issues. And so that is definitely on my mind a lot. And it is something that we, like I mentioned, we kind of are having to naturally do you know, when you when you’re in front of students, inevitably, that question is one you have to answer. You don’t just have to answer. Why come to Towson? You have to answer why why a degree is going to be valuable for that individual. And what’s that takeaway that they’re going to they’re going to have so yeah, it’s a big question. I don’t know if I answered that. The you know, really, but, but I think it is one that we need to still wrestle with. Yeah,

Shiro Hatori
it sounds like you know, if I were to sum up everything you said, and a few words like creating that in Vironment of community open communication between, you know, the strategic planning and the marketing planning of all the institutions in the United States. And having somewhere where we can at least start the conversation would be a good starting point. I felt like I felt that a little bit at ama Chicago as well, because like, all these people come together, and it’s very, like senior level marketing at all in one place. Right. And I kind of felt that energy there. So that was good. Yeah,

Timm Baldwin
yeah. And to the extent that we can break down those us versus them kind of, you know, thoughts. I mean, I think that, you know, really the, the greater purpose that we’re serving is to, to help, you know, when we say we want to change the world, it starts with individuals, it starts with people. And if we’re not doing collectively a good job of shifting the narrative towards the facts, right, which is the kind of surprising thing, the faxes are still, you know, that, that there’s benefit to the individual. And if we can’t do that, and we’re not going to have success, not just as institutions, but as larger societies.

Shiro Hatori
Thank you so much, Dan. We’re just at about time here. And I’m wondering where our audience can follow up with you to learn what Tim is up to. And yeah,

Timm Baldwin
I mean, you can find me at Towson, university@towson.edu, or you can email me directly if you ever have questions. I certainly welcome those AT T Baldwin, it tells him that edu and I certainly love you know, kind of the conversations that you and I are having and and that we get to have with other colleagues in the space both in and out of higher education. So it’s, it’s a good thing to talk about. I really enjoy it.

Shiro Hatori
Yeah, this was an awesome conversation. I love these like high level industry conversations. I don’t always get to do them. So thanks for your time and your insight as well. Yeah,

Timm Baldwin
yeah. Thanks for having me on. It’s been great. Awesome all

Shiro Hatori
catch us on the next episode. And thank you so much for listening in.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai