Ron Gossen is the senior associate vice chancellor and chief marketing officer at UMSL. (Photo by August Jennewein)

With just a week to spare, registration numbers for the spring 2013 UMSL Day hovered at about 50 percent of what they were from the previous year. Ron Gossen, senior associate vice chancellor and chief marketing officer at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, knew this because he tracked the metrics daily. And he knew he had to do something to jolt the registration numbers.

Gossen increased the radio ad buy and the registration chart ascended and pushed past the 2012 UMSL Day attendance record, according to the July/August issue of CURRENTS, a national magazine produced by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. 

“We measure, deploy and readjust our resources to a big degree on where things are at the time,” Gossen told CURRENTS. “If you don’t use metrics to make your decisions, then you’re going to make decisions on things that you don’t know.”

His anecdote was featured prominently toward the beginning of Theresa Walker’s eight-page article on measuring advancement, titled “Proving your success.” Gossen also weighed in on how marketing has evolved over the years.

“I used to say that marketing was an art and a science; it’s a science when it works and an art when it doesn’t,” he said in the article. “Now it’s all science. The numbers that I build into my marketing plan today, five years ago I wouldn’t have the slightest idea what they meant.

“The whole thing has changed,” he said. “We live on metrics – we live on converted metrics.”

Visit the CURRENTS website or click here to read the full article.