Three Takeaways from Online Dating to Improve Your College's Marketing Plan

Today, on Higher Ed Conversations, I embark on my first solo episode! And with a very good reason –I've just released my first ebook, "Why Your Community CollegeMarketing is Failing: Lessons From Online Dating," which has already hit number one in several online categories! So, I'm here to dive into the book's three themes and how they've helped hundreds of colleges dramatically improve their marketing results. In this episode, I give you a sneak peek of the book and share how I take the topic of community college marketing and turn it on its head by utilizing online dating techniques. Each of these three themes is packed with information on how to start improving your outreach today. If you stick it out to the end of the episode, there's also a fun story on how online dating has impacted my life. Be sure to grab your copy, and let me know what you think of the book by leaving a review!
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Transcript

Cheryl Broom [00:00:08]:
All right. Hi, everybody. This is Cheryl Broom. I am CEO of Gradcom and host of higher ed Conversations. And this podcast is a first. This is my first solo cast. I do not have a guest on today, and I would be lying to say that I wasn't very nervous. I'm actually, like, pretty nervous about this solo cast.

Cheryl Broom [00:00:29]:
I don't know why. I just published my first ebook. I'm really excited, really proud of that. It's actually amazing how much attention you get when you publish a book. I've been doing this podcast for three and a half years. It's rated in the top 10% in the world, one of the ten best podcasts on higher education in the United States. But I publish an ebook and everybody and their mother just thinks, oh, my gosh, you've made it. Maybe I do feel a little bit like, wow, I actually made it.

Cheryl Broom [00:00:56]:
Well, the ebook is live and it's doing great. It actually hit number one on Amazon in the higher education book market. Ebook market, and hit number one for Kindle's top reads under 90 minutes. So it's a really quick read. It's meant to be quick. And its entire focus is on community college marketing. So I know a lot of the listeners out there are community college marketers, or maybe marketers at four year universities or private universities, or maybe administrators or aspiring administrators. And so I think the book is a great way for you just to see how to approach marketing better, how to make the most of your money, how to recruit students, and really, you know, how to be the best marketer you can be.

Cheryl Broom [00:01:41]:
And what makes this ebook fun and different is that I actually take some lessons from online dating. So I take my experience and probably some of your experiences as well, being on the online dating market and applying that to the many ways that we actually need to woo our students. We need to court them. We need to invite them to get to know our institutions, to take the time to decide what they want to do and decide if they want to make that commitment before we lock them in and get them to actually commit. So today's podcast, I wanted to talk a little bit about the book and take some of the key themes, but I'm not going to talk about the online dating portion of the book. That's something you're going to have to spend $9.99 on to get those insights. But I'll tell you what, if you, as a listener, go on your favorite podcast platform and leave higher ed conversations, a review, take a screenshot and send it my way I will give you a special coupon code so that you can download the ebook at no cost. So all you have to do, leave us a good review, take a screenshot, email it to me, because I don't know who, who you guys are.

Cheryl Broom [00:02:57]:
Like, I don't know who your screen names are, so I need to know who to send the code to. And I'll give you a code and you can download it for free and share it with your friends and even share with your boss. I have a letter in there that I wrote to college presidents from the marketing director. So I think it's a fun book for you to share with your boss as well. Reviews are super important for this podcast. It's how we get ranked. Actually, those rankings I shared earlier are based on the reviews and the listens that we have. So really important to us.

Cheryl Broom [00:03:28]:
So I want to cover some of the main themes in the ebook today. But like I said, I'm going to leave the fun lessons from online dating to the book itself. Except at the end of this podcast, if I'm feeling it, if it's gone well, I will tell you a fun little story about my own online dating experience that you can't find in the book, and maybe it will inspire you to look at things a little bit differently, like it did for me. So three themes. The book has more than three themes, but I'm going to focus today on three themes that I constantly see as I work with clients across the nation. Speaking of working with clients, this morning I actually sent out an article to clients. I'm going to touch on this a little bit later on the podcast, and I noticed there is 103 clients on my list. So we've officially crossed the 100 current client threshold.

Cheryl Broom [00:04:21]:
So I'm really excited about that. And if any of my clients are out there listening to this podcast, thank you for being so wonderful to work with. So let's dive right in. Let's dive right in into three things that I see that community college marketing is doing wrong and some approaches that I recommend you can do to fix it. And I want to say these approaches are things you could do on your own or with your advertising agency, whether that be gradcom or another agency. These aren't really things that are that tough. They're just shifting your mindset so that you make better use of your time, better use of your money, and actually start using some research and some critical thinking to make buying decisions. So my number one thing that I see that community colleges are doing wrong with their marketing is they are stopping and starting, stopping and starting.

Cheryl Broom [00:05:19]:
And they are completely building their marketing and outreach strategies around the semester dates, around key enrollment dates, so around their own academic calendar, rather than building these things around the student journey and the life cycle of an actual student. When. Gosh, when was it? 20 19, 20 18, 20 19. I had this amazing opportunity to travel to Google and Menlo Park, Google's higher education experts, met myself and about, I think it was about 40 community college clients for a full day of learning. It was amazing. First of all, the Google campus itself is amazing. And this was pre COVID, so we were allowed to go everywhere. We rode bikes, we had coffee, we went to the Google store, and we heard from Google's higher education experts.

Cheryl Broom [00:06:12]:
And before going on this trip, I actually had no idea that Google had an entire arm of higher education experts. But they do, because higher education is a multibillion dollar industry, and Google wants to study how people are searching what keywords they're looking for. You know, they want to study this so that they can better optimize their own product, so that, frankly, they can make money, right? And many of you out there are doing Google AdWords and are on YouTube, which is a Google product, not to mention all of the other digital medians out there. OTT geofencing, digital display, social media. So we're all advertising on these platforms. And Google wants to study people's behaviors so that we can be better advertisers, so that we know when we should be marketing and what people are looking for. And of all the things that we learned that day, one of the things that stood out the most to me was that the average student takes up to one year to decide where to go to college. One year.

Cheryl Broom [00:07:15]:
One year researching, one year talking to their family, asking their friends, talking to their high school counselor, talking to maybe a therapist, trying to figure out if they want to invest the time and the resources to getting a college degree. But what I see, and I'm dealing with it right now with some of my clients, this is what I typically see. We are maybe six weeks outside the start of the semester, and enrollment's down. Maybe it's down a handful of programs, or maybe it's down across the entire campus, and all of a sudden, everybody turns to marketing. We've got six weeks to build a campaign and to somehow recapture our enrollment losses. But yet here we are over here, hearing from Google saying the average person's taken a year, but we're not going to bother to market until we're six weeks out. And actually end crisis. You are not going to make an impact on people's decisions with a single social media ad or, I don't know, a pay per click word in six weeks.

Cheryl Broom [00:08:24]:
You have to be present throughout the year when somebody is thinking to themselves, man, my friend is making $65,000 a year in manufacturing. And I wonder, like, if there's any programs locally and how long they would take, because I'm sick of making 40 grand a year. I don't want to work off tips anymore. I don't want to work overnight. Like, I'm super interested in this. They're going to go searching for it. They're going to go looking for it. And if you're not there, even though it's march and you're not enrolling, they're going to find somebody who is there and they're probably going to enroll somewhere else.

Cheryl Broom [00:09:00]:
Also, it takes a lot of touch points to get through to people. I mean, when you're driving on the freeway and you're hungry and you see a billboard for chick fil a, and then you see a billboard for McDonald's, I mean, you're making a quick decision. Are you going to have a hamburger, chicken sandwich? Maybe you see Taco Bell, right? Those are like split second decisions. And maybe that billboard, that outside ad, is going to influence your behavior. But when you're making an investment as, as difficult, frankly, and as powerful as education, a single message isn't going to do it most of the time. I mean, you're going to want, maybe you see a message, maybe you see a billboard. You're going to want to talk to someone. You're going to want to do research.

Cheryl Broom [00:09:40]:
You're going to want to call the school. You want to see how much it's going to cost. You have to look at the schedule. Is the schedule going to actually work with my life? All of these things are going into your decision making. That's why marketing has to be there constantly. It needs to be there. So I really want my clients, and I tell them this all the time, whenever it's possible, develop year round marketing strategies and then change your messaging to highlight important things throughout the year. But always keep your marketing going because you never know when your audience is actually looking for you.

Cheryl Broom [00:10:17]:
I was doing some research on this a couple weeks ago, and I came across a survey that was conducted, and I'm going to put a link to this in our show notes. And it was super, super interesting. So this was a survey that was conducted in 2018, and I haven't been able to find anything more recent. So made me think maybe Gradcon should start doing these surveys. But this company, they wanted to better understand the timing of college and university considerations and selection by high school and pre high school students. So they went out and they conducted a nationwide survey of current freshmen and sophomores at four year colleges and universities, old and students within their first two years at community colleges. So they wanted to see how long these students took to take a decision of which college they wanted to attend. What they found was that most students, about 39%, wait until they're a junior in high school to start compiling a list of colleges and universities.

Cheryl Broom [00:11:19]:
So, you know, most of them are juniors, not seniors, not August before their freshman year, July before their freshman year. They're in high school making these decisions. And that's, you know, when most four year university recruitment is taking place as well. But interestingly, almost the same amount, 38% actually start evaluating colleges in middle school. So this survey found that 6% of respondents were thinking about college and middle school, 12% as freshmen, 21% as sophomore. And then the biggest percentage, 39% as juniors, just under a quarter thinking about it their senior year. So by the time they were seniors, 75% of them already knew where they were going to go. How are you reaching that population? Are you going back and forming connections to these students and their parents in middle school as their freshmen? Are you running ads to parents of freshmen or sending postcards to these homes, letting them know the opportunities there are at the community college? I'm sure few are.

Cheryl Broom [00:12:29]:
We really have to start thinking more long term. Interestingly, there's a lot of great data in this study, and I'm not going to get into it all, but one thing that I found particularly interesting is that female students actually start looking before male students do. And according to the survey, much earlier. So I know that male enrollment is down across colleges nationwide. And perhaps we need to start talking to these younger male students more frequently and sooner in their academic career. And this isn't just, you know, the case with high school students, this is the case with working adults as well. I mean, this is not like choosing a taco or where to go on vacation. This is, am I going to invest six months, nine months, one year, two years, four years of my life and earning opportunities to go to college? So you got to start talking to people sooner and you can't stop.

Cheryl Broom [00:13:28]:
You can't turn it on and you can't turn it off. When I was in high school, I really wanted to go to UC Berkeley. That was my dream. I was a speech and debate student, and we went every year and competed in the Berkeley tournament. And I just. Something about Berkeley was just so cool. And no one. I mean, this is 30 years ago.

Cheryl Broom [00:13:48]:
I know it's hard to believe, but 30 years ago, no one ever told me about community college. And I lived down the street from Miracosta, which is where I ended up working for eleven years. I didn't know you could transfer from a community college. I just thought that's where people went when they didn't have any other options. So I got rejected from UC Berkeley. But I did get a letter from somebody. I don't remember if it was from city or if it was from UC Berkeley itself, saying that I could go to city college next to UC Berkeley and I could even have help with housing, and I would take my first two years there and I would transfer into UC Berkeley and it would just be this amazing experience. I was like, no way.

Cheryl Broom [00:14:32]:
No way am I going to move all the way to Berkeley just to go to a community college. I mean, how, looking back, I'm like, how stupid was that? How dumb was that? I mean, Berkeley was my dream. I could have gone there. I could have lived on campus. I could have probably had many of the same professors lived in this amazing environment. But I had this mindset that it wasn't for me because nobody had ever talked to me about it before. My mom had never gone to college before, and she'd taken some classes at Pasadena City College but never got a degree. And my dad went the traditional route.

Cheryl Broom [00:15:06]:
He was at San Diego State University. So nobody could tell me, hey, this is a viable, this is a great option for you, Cheryl. Take a look at this. So I wish that, you know, marketing had been done when I was a teenager to talk about community college so that I could learn about transfer and all these great opportunities. Anyway, long story short, don't cry for me, because then I went to UC Santa Barbara, which is a fantastic school. So it's really important to be there for years as people are considering your college. And even, like, even the travel industry. For example, you don't just see advertisements for beautiful beaches in July.

Cheryl Broom [00:15:45]:
I mean, people plan their vacations for months and months and months. So you're seeing advertisements. And I get mailers in the mail all the time for cruises and special deals in November and December for the summer, because that's when people are planning. So you need to ask yourself, what's the life cycle of our student? How long have they planned to go to college. When should I start marketing? Before I get onto my number two reason that community college marketing often fails. I want to just get a little bit more into the money of long term marketing. So you can think of like short term marketing as sprint marketing. So this might be six week campaign, a month, maybe a quarter, but it's really something that you stop and you start.

Cheryl Broom [00:16:29]:
And so that's what I mean about short term and long term marketing. I'm really thinking of something that runs a year and other people might say, oh, six months or multiple years. But for community college marketing, I found that one year is what I consider to be long term. So there are some great benefits to short term marketing. First, you're going to get quick results, right? You pump a bunch of money into a two month campaign and you're going to see your website traffic spike. You might see some more inquiries, you might see some applications jump up. I mean, you are going to see results, especially if you're spending a fair amount of money. Also, it's great if you have something like a deadline, like a last chance or a join.

Cheryl Broom [00:17:10]:
Now, I mean, if you're really like pushing like semester starts in six weeks, it's time, like it's time to get here. It's now. It's now. You're wanted and you're needed on this campus right now. So urgency is great in the short term, but there's some big drawbacks. Big drawbacks. First of all, short term marketing is more costly. And I'm going to get into why in a minute.

Cheryl Broom [00:17:33]:
Your timeline is super compressed. So that's when you call the agency and you're like, we need these ads up next weekend. We need a landing page and we need you to make the ads and we want a video. And there's just no possible way all that can be done in a thoughtful way with such a compressed timeline. So longer term marketing where your ads are already booked, gives you more time to focus on messaging and getting great collateral made. So also burnout risk. If you're dumping like 2030, $40,000 into a two month campaign but don't have time to make rotating collateral, your message is going to get stale and people are just going to go right by it. And then also you're not testing anything in the short term.

Cheryl Broom [00:18:10]:
You're not getting enough data to see like are your ads actually doing well and which ads are doing well. So those are some drawbacks for short term, so some benefits and then also some drawbacks for long term marketing. The number one thing that I think obviously, I just kind of like went over this for 20 minutes, is you need people to see you all the time when they're thinking about you, whether that's two years out from when they enroll or two weeks out, you should be there with your marketing. You need to be visible and that visibility builds credibility over time. If you're running a one year social media buy and every month you're marketing different programs, different services, different messaging, you're really building up your credibility and you're educating your audience in a way that a short term campaign just can't do. You're also really engaging people in the long run. So you're building relationships, but finally you are saving money. How are you saving money? Well, this is the case in terms of digital marketing and also from some traditional as well.

Cheryl Broom [00:19:09]:
So for digital marketing, Google is going to give you a lower cost per click on your pay per click campaigns. The higher your quality score is. So what goes into a quality score? It's a lot. It's a crazy algorithm. It's proprietary, so I can't tell you everything that goes into a quality score. But the more people click on your ads and then interact with your website and the more relevant the content of your site is to your ads, the better your quality score is. And then Google rewards you by lowering your cost per click. So if you have keywords up for a long time that are performing really well, and maybe you're using optimization software to push a little bit more budget to the keywords that are performing well, Google's going to give you a better score and you're going to pay less money.

Cheryl Broom [00:19:57]:
So I'm going to give you a real life example of this. We have a college in Southern California. We're doing their marketing. They've been running year round marketing with us for three years. So we're going to be entering their fourth year this summer. And the average cost per click for education based pay per click campaign is about $10. So it could be as low as $4 and as high as $13. So every time somebody clicks on an ad, the average price that you're going to pay is somewhere between four to 13, maybe around $10.

Cheryl Broom [00:20:30]:
This college has dialed in their pay per click so well that every time somebody clicks on one of their ads, they pay thirty two cents. Thirty two cents. They're saving so much money and guess what? That means their ads are shown more. So now they're getting more marketing for less amount of money because they've kept their campaign going all year. Also their average cost per contact. So this is the average cost that we calculate somebody's clicked on the ad and then done something to contact a college that might be making a phone call, filling out a form, filling out an application. $4. What's the average? $62.

Cheryl Broom [00:21:13]:
So they're saving $58 every time somebody contacts the college because they've invested in long term marketing. And this is also the case on social media and other platforms as well. All right. Okay, so number one theme, discuss this in the book. And I also could talk your ear off about it clearly, but that is stopping and stopping your advertising. So I'm going to talk about two more ways that community college marketing is failing. But first, I want to take a quick break and hear from our sponsor.

Cheryl Broom [00:21:49]:
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Cheryl Broom [00:22:12]:
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Cheryl Broom [00:22:41]:
Okay, welcome back. So before that break, I spent about 20 minutes talking to you about year round marketing and building out year round strategies. So that's the number one thing that I see with community college marketing failing is stopping and starting and not having a plan for long term engagement. The number two thing is being too generic and you're busy. I get it. Because I was once a community college marketing director and I did government relations and board relations and chief of staff for the college president, and I had to be on chamber boards and I was appointee, mentor. You know, I know you know, and you don't have time, you don't have time to dream up these non generic ads. But I'm telling you, the more generic you are, the least, the less successful your campaign is going to be.

Cheryl Broom [00:23:35]:
And I'm going to tell you a case study that I absolutely love. So one of our clients is Long Beach City college, and they're here in Southern California. They came to us because they had some historically low enrolled programs. And they were like, hey, should we just do, like, a big campaign just for the college? And we could just talk about how affordable we are and why everybody in Long beach loves us. And I was like, you know what? No, because you're already doing that. And these programs are still low enrolled. Like, we got to do something different. Are you really spending your money wisely when you do, you know, an eight week billboard with.

Cheryl Broom [00:24:08]:
With a generic you belong here message? It's important part of your strategy, but it's not going to fill up these low enrolled classes. So let's take a look at these classes, and let's see what their comparative advantages are, and let's build out a marketing plan for each one of these classes. So the dean was like, okay, got it. Going to do that. He went back and he was like, okay, I have ten programs. Well, then guess what? Like, five more programs got upset that they weren't included. So he had 15 programs to work with, and we had an overall paid media budget of $63,479. So we met with these programs, and we talked about, like, what's your comparative advantage? What type of student is interested in this program? How should we reach these students? What we found, and this is not a big surprise, is that students who are interested in construction are very different than the type of students who are interested in nutrition.

Cheryl Broom [00:25:05]:
And students who are interested in administration of justice are very different than students who might be interested in cloud computing. So for each one of these programs, we wrote a mini marketing plan. They each got $5,000. That's it, $5,000. And we ran a campaign for three months. And every strategy was slightly different from each program. But because it was such a low amount of money, most of what we did was working off past lists from the college, buying lists, doing emails, doing texts, doing social media, doing pay per click. So most of what we did was digital, with a few exceptions.

Cheryl Broom [00:25:46]:
At the end of the campaign, we had the college go back and compare enrollments. We saw that most programs grew in the double digits. Administration of justice grew 9%. Cloud computing went from 363 students to 609, a 68% increase. Commercial music, 75%. Fashion, 18%. Fire science, 18%. Game design, 29%.

Cheryl Broom [00:26:17]:
Homeland security, 36%. Social work, 16%. Huge enrollment growths. Overall, college enrollment was 3% increase, which is fantastic. But to see these type of numbers just goes to show how powerful it is if you can identify your audience and target them effectively through ads that actually speak to what they're interested in and show them why this particular program is meant for them. So you're busy. But if you can take a time to identify programs or services and the right audiences to target, then you are going to see great results in your marketing. In the intro to this, I mentioned an article I sent out this morning to my clients, and that was an article in the Atlantic that talked about the whole new FAFSA mess.

Cheryl Broom [00:27:08]:
And basically, like, FAFSA redid its form and then it had to push the deadline back for when it's due, and the form's still having problems and people can't fill it out and it's just a mess. And it's like there's something like 2 million fewer FAFSA applications this year than last year. And now experts are warning we're going to have like an even bigger enrollment cliff this fall. But what a great opportunity for community colleges. I mean, this is who you want to target, high school parents and seniors. Are you having a problem with a fafsa? Are you not going to get your FAFSA and your financial aid this year? Come to us. You don't need a FAFSA. We've got the promise, like, you go for free and you can transfer.

Cheryl Broom [00:27:47]:
So think about your audiences and the messages that will resonate with them and always do your brand marketing. Clearly super important, but you got to do more. So our number one mistake community college marketing is making is stopping and starting their advertising and not keeping it going year round. The number two mistake is being too busy, and the number three is thinking that marketing is a magic bullet. So I gave you some great numbers from Long beach about all these programs and their amazing enrollment growth. Well, there were two programs that didn't have enrollment growth. Nutrition and radio. Tv actually shrunk a little bit.

Cheryl Broom [00:28:24]:
Now, if I were to pull that data apart and see if it was retention versus new students, that would give me a lot more information on those programs. Were we able to maybe grow new students, but we didn't retain them, the students that were already there. Or maybe students were interested in this program but got derailed somehow. Maybe the class offerings weren't at the time that they wanted. Or maybe nobody answered the phone when they called the campus. They couldn't get their questions answered. So marketing is not always going to solve your enrollment problems. You have to take a holistic approach across campus.

Cheryl Broom [00:29:02]:
It takes months to find a customer and seconds just to lose one. So if you're thinking that maybe there's some processes on campus that need to be improved so that you have better outcomes, with students. Maybe do a secret shopper project. Take a look at the student enrollment pipeline. Like, we did a secret shopper project for a college all the way down in San Diego on the border, and we had our secret shopper call the college to see how long it would take for someone to answer the phone. She left 29 voicemails and nobody called her back. 29. We had another student who was told she had to bring her Social Security card to campus for somebody to look at it before she could enroll, which, frankly, kind of scared her.

Cheryl Broom [00:29:51]:
She didn't want to do that. So there's processes and things happening on your campus that might prevent students or make it more difficult for them to enroll. And you have to take a holistic view and approach and see what you can do to improve the entire student experience, not just marketing. So this is like something that all of us marketers know. But if you're not a marketer and you're still listening, this part of the solo cast marketing's job is to get people interested in your college. Their benchmark is inquiries in the college and applications. After that, marketing doesn't do much. It's the college that gets students to enroll.

Cheryl Broom [00:30:27]:
So if you look at your application numbers and your enrollment numbers and there's something funky happening there, it's time to survey those students. Do a secret shopper project. Do something to figure out where all the students are going. All right. Whew. Solo casts are hard. Like, I have been talking nonstop for a half an hour. So just to recap, and then I'm going to tell you my story and send you on your way three ways that community college marketing is failing.

Cheryl Broom [00:30:53]:
Stopping and starting, being too generic and thinking that marketing is a magic bullet. If you want to get more examples and have some fun reading about online dating, I really encourage you to download my ebook on Amazon. The ebook is called why your community college marketing is failing lessons from online dating. Take a screenshot of a review. Maybe you leave a review for the ebook or for this podcast. Send it to me and I'll give you that ebook code and you can download it for free. So last funny story about online dating. Part of the reason that I'm so interested in it is that I met my husband and business partner, Chris on Match.com years ago.

Cheryl Broom [00:31:31]:
I was a single mom and I didn't have time to date, so I used match.com as my platform to meet people. And Chris didn't have any pictures. He had pictures, but they were all like, either. He was like snowboarding down a mountain, and he was all the way up at the top of the mountain, or he had, like, an extreme close up of his face, so I didn't really know, like, what he looked like. And so after we had been texting and we talked on the phone a couple times, I asked him. I was like, hey, you know, like, you don't have very many, like, pictures. I can't tell, like, what do you look like? And he was like, well, I didn't want to tell you this. I wanted to get to know you first, but I don't have any, like, good pictures of me on the dating site because I'm actually a little person, and part of me is like, this guy is totally joking with me, because if any of you have met Chris, he has a fantastic sense of humor.

Cheryl Broom [00:32:25]:
And so far, in our courtship, he had made me laugh a lot, but I didn't know because he was so serious, and there weren't any, like, great pictures. The way he wrote his profile was so amazing, and that's what made me interested him in the first place, was that his writing was beautiful and thoughtful, and he talked about his family and his sister and golfing and surfing and guitar. And I was like, wow, this guy sounds great. So I go just like, oh, are you really? Okay, that's interesting. So he's like, yeah, you know, I really hope you still want to meet up. And I'm like, oh, yeah, of course, of course. And so, like, I call my mom. Like, oh, my God.

Cheryl Broom [00:33:04]:
This guy I've been talking to, like, I think he's a little person. Like, and my mom's like, oh, you've talked about him so much over the last couple weeks. Like, just go on a date with him. Like, who knows what could happen? And I'm like, you're right. Okay, I'm not gonna. I'm just gonna do it. I'm just gonna. This is something new to me.

Cheryl Broom [00:33:21]:
I'm just gonna do it. Well, the next day, Chris texts me a picture, and it's of him djing, and it's a little person, and he's like, hey, here's a picture of me djing. And he proceeds to send me all these pictures of. Of the same guy. Like, he's djing, he's playing guitar. So at this point, I'm like, okay, I'm pretty sure, like, this isn't a joke. So I show up at the restaurant, we went to sushi, and I was the first one there. And I sat down, and he walks in, and he goes, ta da.

Cheryl Broom [00:33:53]:
And he was not a little person. So needless to say, it was quite a practical joke. And I'm glad that I was not shallow because he ended up being my husband and we've been married and have children now I have a great life and own a business and it all was because he made me. He made me laugh and he's a great guy. So, random story about little people and the power of a great online profile. Anyway, fun story that you won't find in the book. I hope you enjoyed it and I hope you enjoy this first solo cast. Maybe I'll do some more of them in the future.

Cheryl Broom [00:34:29]:
Thanks so much for listening to higher ed conversations, and I can't wait until next time.

Cheryl Broom [00:34:37]:
And that wraps up this episode of the Higher Education Conversations podcast. I'm host and Gradcom CEO Cheryl Broome. A big thank you to our sponsor, edtech Connect. Edtech Connect is free, so anyone with the email address can sign up and list the software and services they use in their role at their school. So visit edtechconnect.com and set up your free profile to get a pulse for what's happening with higher ed technology today. And while you're online, take a few minutes to leave our podcast, a five star review. It will help other colleges and universities find us and learn from the great experts we have on the show. That's it for now.

Cheryl Broom [00:35:17]:
Until next time. Time.