Overview

St. Norbert College, Inc.
100 Grant St
De Pere, Wisconsin, 54115-2099
+1-920-337-3181
www.snc.edu

🔥 See Harry’s write-up on this job. 🔥

Business Description

St. Norbert College is a private, Catholic, liberal arts institution offering undergraduate and graduate programs to approximately 2,200 students. The school offers more than 40 undergraduate programs of study in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities and fine arts.

It also confers Master’s degrees in Science in Education and Theological Studies. The college is one of only a handful of institutions in the US that offer a Peace Corps Preparatory Program. St. Norbert College was founded in 1898 by Abbot Bernard Pennings, a Dutch immigrant priest, as a school to ready men for the priesthood.

SNC became coeducational in 1952.

St. Norbert College (SNC) seeks a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). This is an on-site position and serves as the senior leader responsible for developing and executing an institution-wide marketing and communications strategy aligned with the College’s mission, values, and long-term vision.

Reporting directly to the President and serving as a member of the President’s Cabinet, the CMO provides strategic leadership that advances institutional goals, strengthens brand identity, and elevates the College’s regional and national profile.

Specific responsibilities:

Strategic Marketing Leadership: The CMO leads the creation and implementation of bold, forward-thinking marketing initiatives that position the College distinctively within the evolving higher education landscape. This includes guiding brand strategy through the integration of neuromarketing, storytelling, experiential marketing, and archetypal frameworks, while ensuring all messaging is aligned with the College’s core values and aspirations.

The CMO serves as the President’s chief marketing advisor, offering insights and direction on opportunities for innovation and brand amplification.

Executive and Institutional Communications: This role is responsible for directing executive communications, including the development of thought leadership platforms and institutional messaging for the President. The CMO oversees the creation of speeches, internal communications, and responses to strategic or sensitive matters, ensuring that communications are timely, consistent, and reflective of the College’s mission and priorities.

Enrollment and Advancement Marketing: A key area of focus for the CMO is leading data-informed marketing campaigns that drive undergraduate and graduate enrollment growth. The CMO also oversees advancement communications that engage alumni, cultivate donors, and support comprehensive institutional fundraising campaigns. These efforts are designed to expand the College’s reach, strengthen relationships, and generate measurable outcomes in enrollment and philanthropy.

Media and Public Relations: The Chief Marketing Officer serves as the lead architect of the College’s media relations strategy, working to elevate institutional visibility and reputation through regional and national earned media. This role includes acting as spokesperson or media strategist during moments of opportunity or crisis, as well as liaising with external partners and cultivating relationships with key journalists and media outlets to secure meaningful coverage and build public trust.

Digital and Multi-channel Strategy: The CMO directs the College’s digital and multi-channel marketing strategies across paid, earned, owned, and shared platforms. The role includes oversight of major initiatives such as the upcoming Drupal website launch, with a strong focus on optimizing user experience and driving conversion for enrollment and advancement. The CMO champions innovation in content strategy, experimenting with emerging formats and platforms, including video, podcasting, and social media.

Marketing Operations and Team Leadership: The CMO oversees the College’s marketing technology stack and ensures the implementation of scalable, efficient operations. This includes CRM, CMS, marketing automation, analytics, project management tools, and selected vendor management.

The CMO leads a cross-functional team of strategists, creatives, media specialists, and operational professionals, fostering a high-performing culture rooted in accountability, collaboration, and mission alignment. The CMO also collaborates extensively with Cabinet members and other institutional stakeholders, presenting regularly at town halls, Board of Trustees meetings, and strategic planning sessions.

Required Minimum Qualifications:

Bachelor’s Degree Required

Master’s Degree Preferred (or commensurate experience)

  • Minimum of ten years of progressive experience in marketing and communications, including at least five years in a senior leadership role.
  • Demonstrated success leading brand strategy and integrated marketing campaigns that drive measurable outcomes.
  • Proven experience in executive communications, including speechwriting, internal messaging, and crisis communication.
  • Expertise in digital marketing strategy, including web, social, paid media, SEO, and analytics.
  • Familiarity with marketing technologies such as CMS (Drupal preferred), email marketing (Slate, Raiser’s Edge, and Emma knowledge preferred), and project management tools.
  • Strong media relations skills and ability to serve as spokesperson or media strategist.
  • Exceptional collaboration and communication skills, with a track record of influencing across stakeholder groups.
  • Commitment to mission-driven work, with experience in higher education, nonprofit, or values-based organizations preferred.
  • Dedicated to working in a mission-driven environment, with a profound respect for and commitment to preserving the rich traditions of Catholicism, Norbertine values, and the liberal arts.

Benefits package:

The College offers an outstanding benefits package including health, dental, vision, and life insurance; retirement plan; paid time-off and tuition waiver. For more information, please visit: https://www.snc.edu/hr/workinghere.html

Application instructions:

Applications received by September 2 will be given full consideration. However, applications will continue to be accepted until the position has been filled. Please submit a cover letter and resume with your application.

St. Norbert College, a Catholic, Norbertine, and Liberal Arts College, provides an educational environment that fosters intellectual, spiritual, and personal development. As the only Norbertine institution of higher learning in the world, our roots, traditions, and commitments create a unique and enriching educational experience for our students.

At SNC, our commitment to communio – the Norbertine ideal of a community united as one – is grounded in the principles of dignity, truth, and justice. Consistent with these principles, St. Norbert is proud to provide equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment.



🔥 RESEARCH & INSIGHT 🔥 :

  • Institution: St. Norbert College, De Pere, Wisconsin
  • Sector: Private Liberal Arts, Higher Education
  • Revenue: $72.39M | Enrollment: ~2,200 | Endowment: Significant but volatile
  • Role Reporting To: President | Organizational Level: Cabinet

EXECUTIVE OVERVIEW

St. Norbert College (SNC) is a faith-based, mission-driven liberal arts college facing the classic “liberal arts squeeze” at a time when higher education is undergoing profound disruption. Falling application volumes, increasing tuition discount rates, changing student priorities, and generative AI's impact on search discovery have all altered the marketing landscape — and SNC is not exempt. The college has real strengths — a unique Peace Corps Preparatory Program, strong student outcomes, and a genuine Catholic mission — but these have yet to be fully capitalized upon.

The CMO role here is not ornamental. This is a strategic leadership position, seated on the President’s Cabinet, and expected to translate SNC’s institutional promise into enrollment and advancement outcomes. The person stepping into this role will inherit a brand with deep roots but limited visibility, a lean team with powerful tools but unclear alignment, and a school with an authentic identity that’s being out-marketed by louder, better-funded peers.

The right CMO will need to build a durable marketing engine under pressure. That means reconciling brand purpose with enrollment math. It means turning legacy systems into performance infrastructure. And most of all, it means delivering measurable pipeline growth in an environment where marketing’s credibility is still being earned.

STRENGTHS

1. Mission-Driven Differentiation: Peace Corps Prep Meets Catholic Values

St. Norbert College’s most compelling and underleveraged asset is its unique institutional identity. It is one of a very small number of colleges in the country offering a certified Peace Corps Preparatory Program — a distinction with growing relevance in a world where values-based careers, global citizenship, and public service are gaining traction among purpose-driven students. Combined with its Catholic liberal arts tradition, SNC occupies a valuable positioning territory: education in the service of others.

This is not just messaging fluff — it is built into the curriculum and institutional fabric. That means the right CMO isn’t starting from scratch. Instead, they’re building around a powerful “why” that already exists, and shaping it into a national recruitment narrative.

2. Strong Student Outcomes: 90%+ Success Rate Post-Graduation

In a higher-ed environment marked by skepticism, St. Norbert stands out with tangible results. More than 90% of graduates are employed or enrolled in graduate programs within nine months. That’s not typical for small liberal arts colleges, especially outside the top tier. For a marketer, this is gold. These numbers don’t just signal quality — they are social proof in an age where outcomes are everything. It means the college can anchor its brand in performance, not just philosophy.

3. Executive Buy-In and Presidential Access

Unlike many college CMOs who are tucked into enrollment or advancement org charts, this role reports directly to the President and is a member of the Cabinet. That’s rare and valuable. It signals that marketing is viewed — or is being asked to be viewed — as a strategic function tied to institutional survival, not just an internal service department. This reporting structure gives the CMO air cover to make hard decisions, push cross-departmental change, and shape the voice of the institution at the highest level.

4. Modern Tools Are in Place — If Not Yet Integrated

The college already uses a suite of modern marketing and engagement tools: Drupal for the website, Slate for enrollment CRM, Raiser’s Edge for advancement, and Emma for email marketing. A CMO who knows how to consolidate and orchestrate these platforms can extract enormous leverage. With the right digital infrastructure playbook, these tools can drive full-funnel enrollment, support donor engagement, and inform real-time decision-making with better analytics.

5. Underused Content Opportunities: Faculty, Facilities, Alumni

From a small student-to-faculty ratio (14:1) to state-of-the-art academic buildings (e.g., the Gehl-Mulva Science Center), and a broad global reach in student origin and study-abroad partnerships, SNC has an abundance of “earned media” assets. The school’s faculty, alumni, and students offer dozens of potential voices for digital storytelling, testimonial-based landing pages, and brand journalism. These voices are largely quiet today — but ready to be mobilized with the right content strategy.

What this means for CMO candidates: This is a rare opportunity to lead a marketing rebuild from a position of core strength. The job is not to invent credibility — it's to amplify and operationalize it.

WEAKNESSES

1. Heavy Tuition Dependence Makes Marketing Performance Existential

Like most small liberal arts colleges, SNC’s financial model depends on tuition revenue. This means that enrollment volumes are not just growth levers — they’re survival metrics. But enrollment marketing is not solely owned by Marketing; it’s fragmented across departments, leading to a lack of accountability. That’s a problem. The next CMO will need to influence — or assume ownership of — enrollment pipelines without necessarily controlling all inputs (e.g., admissions practices, aid packaging, academic positioning).

2. Fragmented Brand Expression Across Campus Units

Currently, SNC’s departments, faculty, and program owners operate with a high degree of autonomy. While that decentralization encourages innovation, it also results in fractured messaging and inconsistent visuals. There is no clear system for brand governance or internal comms coordination. Prospective students may get different stories from different touchpoints. For a CMO trying to drive message clarity and cross-channel impact, this is a serious operational drag.

3. Budget Reductions Create Internal Distrust and External Reputational Risk

In the past year, SNC implemented a $12M budget cut. While communicated as part of a "Preserving the Legacy" initiative, it has created underlying uncertainty among staff, students, and alumni. Rumors and half-truths fill the vacuum left by delayed or inconsistent communication. The CMO inherits a challenge here: to tell a forward-facing growth story while quietly rebuilding trust and morale across internal stakeholders. Marketing may be blamed for misperceptions it didn’t create but will need to fix.

4. Lack of Funnel Visibility or Attribution Infrastructure

SNC’s tools (Slate, Raiser’s Edge, Emma) are capable of delivering granular funnel data, but the institution lacks integrated reporting across marketing and enrollment systems. As a result, it's difficult to answer basic performance questions: Where are inquiries falling off? Which touchpoints correlate with deposits? What’s the CAC per channel? This makes budgeting, testing, and forecasting far harder than it should be.

5. Strong Programs, Weak Market Visibility

The college offers several high-potential academic assets — including a digital marketing minor with Google and HubSpot certifications, and new online certificate programs in high-demand fields like cybersecurity and healthcare. These programs align with student demand and labor market outcomes. But the market doesn’t know they exist. They're buried in web subpages and missing from ad spend. Turning these into branded acquisition funnels is a major untapped opportunity — and a current weakness.

What this means for candidates: You’ll need to build operational credibility quickly. Expect friction between cross-functional optimism and on-the-ground marketing fragmentation.

OPPORTUNITIES

1. AI Search (GEO) as the New SEO — and a First-Mover Advantage

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is emerging as the successor to traditional search. With students increasingly using ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews to research colleges, the first schools to optimize for generative AI will enjoy disproportionate visibility. SNC’s Peace Corps Prep angle is tailormade for this environment. A CMO who can GEO-optimize landing pages, faculty bios, and program content could dominate search results for “Catholic colleges with global service” and related queries — and spend less on paid search in the process.

2. Turn Every Program into Its Own Demand Gen Funnel

With over 40 undergraduate programs and several online certificates, SNC has the raw material for a funnel-based marketing system. A forward-leaning CMO can build a campaign architecture where each program has:

  • Its own landing page (with SEO-optimized copy and outcomes data),
  • Its own email nurture track (based on interest and engagement),
  • And its own retargeting campaign (based on video views or page visits).

This creates personalized pathways that outperform one-size-fits-all admissions pages and can measurably boost inquiry-to-applicant conversion.

3. YouTube Video Series to Drive SEO, Trust, and Social Proof

As YouTube increasingly becomes the "second search engine," prospective students are turning to video for campus culture cues and outcomes stories. SNC is sitting on a goldmine: 90%+ job/grad school rate, compelling alumni, charismatic faculty, and a beautiful campus. The right CMO will develop flagship series: “Why I Chose SNC,” “Where Are They Now,” “Faculty in 5,” or “Peace Corps Prep Profiles.” These can be chopped into short-form for TikTok and Instagram, feeding a full funnel.

4. Unlock Alumni as Influencers, Not Just Donors

Alumni with mission-aligned careers (Peace Corps, education, nonprofit leadership) are often passionate storytellers. The marketing team can create systems to turn these graduates into social proof assets: hosting webinars, creating testimonials, or participating in digital ambassador programs. Most alumni programs focus on fundraising. A smart CMO can turn these same people into enrollment drivers.

5. Drive Cost Savings Through Platform Consolidation

Today, the college operates multiple marketing platforms with overlapping features. This creates unnecessary spend and inefficiencies. Consolidating tools can reduce licensing fees, improve team training, streamline data pipelines, and improve governance. The time saved can be reallocated to campaign building and creative production — both of which are needed.

What this means for candidates: You won’t lack levers to pull. But you’ll need to move fast, stack wins, and prove that marketing can move the enrollment needle — not just craft better brochures.

THREATS

1. Structural Headwinds for Small Private Colleges

The market is shifting against small, tuition-dependent liberal arts colleges. Demographic decline, skepticism about ROI, and rising operating costs all threaten SNC’s model. Even colleges with strong outcomes are struggling to make themselves heard — and seen as worth the cost. If SNC doesn’t differentiate digitally, it risks becoming part of the noise.

2. Overexposure to Enrollment Volatility

SNC lacks financial buffers from research grants, large-scale athletics, or auxiliary businesses. This means a 5% dip in enrollment could lead to painful downstream effects: layoffs, program cuts, loss of donor confidence. That turns the CMO into a front-line revenue officer. And it means results won’t be judged just by brand health, but by enrollment outcomes quarter over quarter.

3. “Tactical Legacy” Traps and Inertia

The institution has invested heavily in tactical marketing efforts over the years — microsites, brochures, niche email series — many of which are still running today but no longer serve the new strategy. Without firm leadership and strong data, staff and faculty may resist turning off old programs. The CMO must navigate this minefield delicately but assertively, or risk drowning in low-impact execution.

4. Insufficient Culture of Performance Marketing

There is not yet a campus-wide understanding of marketing as a data-driven, test-and-learn function. Legacy stakeholders may see marketing as comms, not revenue-driving infrastructure. Until that changes, the CMO may have to over-communicate ROI wins and justify even modest experiments.

5. Reputation Risks from Communication Misfires

The recent $12M budget reduction has created underlying reputational fragility. If messaging is not tightly coordinated — especially during crises or leadership transitions — misinformation will fill the gaps. The CMO must lead both internal and external messaging discipline, or risk making marketing the scapegoat for institutional volatility.

What this means for candidates: This is not a brand sandbox. This is a strategic, high-expectation role. Success will require strong data skills, political acumen, and enrollment-impact orientation.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

This is a CMO role for a builder — not a steward. The brand is real, the mission is compelling, and the President seems ready to invest. But this is not a “position the logo” job. It’s a “drive enrollment or else” job, with clear upsides and clear risks.

The best candidate will be equal parts strategist, operator, and evangelist. They’ll know how to protect the mission — while transforming the systems that deliver on it.

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