Marketing University Outreach Programs

Book excerpt: Discover the successful marketing strategies of programs which have extended the resources of a university to its community. Marketing University Outreach Programs covers all aspects of continuing education program construction and the marketing process for positioning the university into the public. This book begins to eradicate academicians’ fears of marketing by showing them a contemporary marketing plan using terminology and examples familiar to them.Seventeen contributors--professors, administrators, and outreach professionals--comprehensively describe the strategies being successfully used to extend the resources of a university to its community through programs of extension, public service, and continuing education. Although many existing models of the education process contain parallels to elements in a generic marketing process, education is not viewed as a consumer product. Even educators may not view themselves as marketers involved in a marketing process. This attitude can place barriers between understanding the marketing process and how it relates to education. Marketing University Outreach Programs helps educators overcome these potential barriers; it explains marketing as a comprehensive process using terminology and examples which university extension and education professionals will find familiar and understandable.Application-oriented, it cites numerous examples of how the marketing process can be put to use immediately. Each chapter explores in-depth a separate segment of the marketing process involved in public university outreach programs: issue-based versus discipline-based programs program delivery and delivery technology funding outreach programs comprehensive promotional strategy customer service long-range planning marketing research information resources future trends model programsThis book is of value to the faculty of universities, specifically those in the disciplines with a mandate for professional renewal or recertification (engineering, medicine, education); faculty and professional staff in divisions of continuing education; program leadership in cooperative extension organizations (as well as those in other identifiable university extension units); and faculty affiliated with applied research centers. Members of professional associations focused on higher education outreach can also successfully apply these strategies.