CareerFocus Consortium

CareerFocus Consortium began over twenty years ago with a simple idea.

Dr. Larry Whitworth produced the first issue of CareerFocus magazine in 1995, while president of Tidewater Community College in Norfolk, Virginia. As an expert in enrollment growth for community colleges, Larry noticed many of their marketing strategies lacked a key feature. While many schools spent thousands of dollars printing and mailing class schedules to their communities, the catalog alone didn’t make a compelling case for why students should enroll.

Meanwhile, marketing initiatives consisted of brochures designed to sell programs. The connection between a costly two-year degree and preparation for a future career was largely lost on student audiences. Community colleges needed a more student-friendly publication that could use relevant facts and figures to make the case for a career-focused education.

Larry’s marketing department at Tidewater Community College produced the first issue of CareerFocus to make this connection. The experiment proved a rousing success, receiving positive feedback from the community, and resulting in a 10% growth in enrollment.

When Larry moved from Tidewater to Cumberland County College in 1997, and then again to Washtenaw Community College in 1998, he had the opportunity to test his content marketing strategy again with other communities. The magazine proved equally successful in engaging communities and raising enrollment in these other locations. Even better, Larry realized the same content could be repurposed for each community.

Growing the consortium through Academic Marketing Services.

CareerFocus magazine became a staple of Washtenaw Community College’s marketing strategy during Larry’s tenure as president. Its success soon drew interest from other Michigan community colleges who wanted to emulate its success.

Because community colleges rarely compete for students, Larry realized they had more to gain from sharing content than by operating independently. Accordingly, he began the CareerFocus Consortium as a loose federation of community colleges, united in their mission to grow student enrollment through thoughtful, timely marketing campaigns.

In 2010, the consortium had grown enough that it became necessary to establish Academic Marketing Services to better manage the marketing and production of the CareerFocus magazine, and to create new marketing tools for community colleges.

Academic Marketing Services continued to innovate, developing more targeted content and campaigns while offering an expanded range of digital marketing services to promote CareerFocus. Nevertheless some colleges viewed it as a print magazine only. Therefore we began to consider how to clarify our customers and better demonstrate the potential of our marketing concepts to community colleges.

Dismantling the Obstacle Course: How Community Colleges Can Use Content Marketing to Help Students Negotiate Enrollment Barriers

Aperture Content Marketing: new brand, same mission.

The addition of SmartStart in 2016, as well as the new EditionBuilder tool for publishing online versions of both SmartStart and CareerFocus content, brought home the need for a rebrand.

Furthermore, SmartStart expanded our vision for which communities might benefit from a shared content strategy. We knew community colleges could share content because they weren’t in competition with each other. However, we also realized there were other organizations that could similarly benefit from a shared content strategy, and that to reach these communities, we needed a more encompassing brand.

Aperture Content Marketing is our response to this shifting need. We hope that by broadening our focus, we can provide content for more communities interested in sharing marketing resources.

CareerFocus Consortium