"Veterans Waiting on Federal Aid to Help Pay for College" 

Today a few news outlets have been reporting up to 25,000 veterans who are eligible for tuition/room/board assistance under the GI Bill are struggling to pay their tuition bills because the government is having trouble processing their applications.

It’s a sad story, but a great opportunity for the organization ready to step in. If you’re a large adult education provider, why not setup a special financial aid program to help these students over the hump? You may know I teach graduate marketing classes at the University of Phoenix, the largest private education provider in the world. (now well over 400,000 students I believe) Lets do the math for the University of Phoenix.

25,000 veterans waiting for aid

$5,000 - amount of aid to get them over the hump *estimated

That comes to 125 million dollars. Yikes. But wait, they won’t *all* go to University of Phoenix. Lets say 1% of these students chose the University of Phoenix (not an unreasonable assumption, even though University of Phoenix is the largest education provider, they are still a small part of the overall education pie)

Now we’re talking 1.25 million, still a hefty number but a fraction of what University of Phoenix pays for the naming rights to the University of Phoenix Stadium every year.

But wait, we’re not giving the money away. We expect much of it to be paid back when the students receive their GI Bill benefits. Overall student loan default rates are running somewhere in the area of 6 − 7%. Lets add a few percent for veterans that may not qualify for the GI Bill for one reason or another. Lets make it a generous 10% estimated default rate.

Now we’re down to $125,000. Add another $25,000 for the carrying cost of "bridge financing" the GI Bill funds for 6 months.

So the final number is $150,000, what do you get for that?

Most important you get to help returning veterans go back to school. You also get a number of student veterans considering University of Phoenix when they might not have before, and all the future revenue generated from the students. The reputation of University of Phoenix in the military, already very good, wouldn’t be hurt either.

Finally, you get these headlines:

Is that worth $150,000? $150,000 buys roughly three television ads. Which do you think will have more positive impact?

It’s well worth it. An even bolder strategy would be to help veteran/students to go to any college, not just University of Phoenix. Best publicity you can buy. 

If it were me, before I spent an additional dime on marketing this year I would ask whether it could be better spent on this.

September 17th is constitution day. Today I got an email from University of Phoenix pointing me to this information / quiz. Interesting, but unfortunately it stops there.

What if instead of (or in addition) to this quiz, University of Phoenix developed a Facebook application that was a Constitution quiz. Then I could take the quiz, and show my score to my friends, who could also then take the quiz, etc. It might not go totally viral, but for sure if it started off in the enormous community of University of Phoenix students / teachers / alumnus /employees (the school has ~ 430,000 current students alone) it could go pretty far.

There are even a few pre-built Facebook constitution quizzes out there, just waiting for a benefactor to come and sponsor them. Imagine the reach, and the information about your audience you could garner?

Social marketing requires a different mindset. You can’t decide you want to get in front of Facebook users and buy your way in. Instead you have to be more opportunistic, looking for content the community might be interested in and offering it up when you run across it.

From http://www.onlineidcalculator.com/ , apparently I am “digitally distinct.”  How do they determine this? How else….Google. The site asks you to do a Google search, then has you fill out a profile telling them how many listings you have, how many are relevant to you, etc. 

Slightly interesting, but nothing you didn’t not know already if you know how to use Google. It would be stronger if it considered social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter.

McKinsey this week released another great visualization, this time summarizing results from their annual technology survey of 1700+ companies. If you want to know how fast ‘real' companies (the kind that hire McKinsey) are adopting web 2.0 technologies like Twitter, Facebook, etc. this is the place to find out.

We talk a lot in class about how marketers are always switching between analytical and creative thought. The two articles demonstrate that exercise with respect to evaluation of advertising. The first article (free ebook actually), from the Ad Contrarian, gives a mix of the soft and hard logic behind advertising and branding.  The second, a research paper from Carnegie Mellon, presents a very rigorous analysis of how advertising and branding can shift the price demand curve. You need to absorb both to be a good marketer. Figure out why you’re advertising (shift the demand curve) and then determine how to do the advertising (get creative).

Personas is one of those things that is really cool, but almost impossible to explain. It is a visualization tool from the MIT Media Lab. Go there, type in your name, and be fascinated with the results.  http://personas.media.mit.edu/