Rob Zinkan asks rooms full of higher ed marketers to raise their hand if they’re happy with their org chart. Nobody ever does.
Rob has spent his career on the part of marketing most people never see: the organization that has to deliver the work. At Indiana University East, a campus where only 5% of local high school students chose to enroll, he put marketing, fundraising, alumni relations, and campus life under one roof. Enrollment grew 85% in five years. He went on to lead brand strategy for the IU system and a network of more than 200 marketers spread across it, then spent years studying how colleges plan.
He has read more than 240 strategic plans and nearly 100 marketing org charts. Today he runs Navigate Gray, a firm that designs higher ed marketing organizations, and co-edits Inside Higher Ed’s Call to Action column. If higher ed marketing has an architect, it’s Rob.
Rob walks Mallory and Voltaire through the “baby gift to legacy gift” model he built at IU East and what happened to it after he left. He makes a case you won’t hear at many conferences: higher ed needs its silos, and the real work happens in the gray space between them. He explains why the org chart is the first place leaders look when something breaks, and why the answer usually lives somewhere else. And he talks about how his thinking on the CMO role changed in five years, landing on the line of the episode: we’ve expanded our view of the function faster than our view of the leader.
We also get into his idea of a culture of coherence, marketing’s version of advancement’s culture of philanthropy, and why he thinks lifetime engagement belongs to the CMO.
🔑 What You’ll Take Away
Why there’s no perfect org chart, and what to look at before you redraw a single box
Why a program built around 1 person often leaves when that person does
What a “culture of coherence” asks of everyone on campus outside marketing
Why marketing keeps getting handed problems it had no seat at the table to shape
One thing any marketing leader can do this week: name the top priority and what it pushes off the list