Job Description

Vice President for Marketing and Communications

Marketing and Communications, Lincoln Center

Fordham University

Fordham University has an excellent reputation as a dynamic institution located in New York City. Founded in 1841, Fordham enrolls more than 16,000 undergraduate and graduate students in its 9 Colleges and Schools.

• Fordham University offers a comprehensive and competitive benefits package to its employees, which includes medical, dental, vision, life, and disability insurance.
• We offer tuition remission for employees and their dependents
• A generous immediate employer match towards a 403(b) retirement plan.
• As a tax-exempt organization under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code (IRC), Fordham is considered a qualifying employer for the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, a federal program designed to forgive student loan debt for employees of certain public and certain nonprofit employers.
• As part of its work-life balance program, the University provides generous PTO including 15 vacation days, 12 sick days, 2 personal days, 6 summer Fridays, and holidays that include paid time off between Christmas and New year.
• University employees have access to the Employee Assistance Program (EAP). EAP provides no-cost, professional, and confidential services, to help employees and family members address a variety of personal, family, life, and work-related issues.

Position Summary

This new Cabinet-level position—Vice President for Marketing and Communications—offers an exciting opportunity to unite and lead all University-level marketing and communications in one cohesive unit reporting directly to President Tania Tetlow. The creation of this position reflects Fordham’s desire to more strategically use marketing and communications approaches to improve its global visibility and reputation, and its commitment of additional resources to do so.

The Vice President will build the University’s image as a powerhouse in research, teaching, and service informed by Jesuit traditions: respect and care for all people, producing far-reaching and long-lasting social change, and pursuing ever-greater achievement and excellence. The Vice President will identify a unique market positioning for Fordham, an especially crucial pursuit at a time when a growing group of universities is adopting messaging that has been at the heart of Fordham’s value proposition for more than a century. In general, the Vice President will bring a spotlight to the University that centers on its location in New York City but radiates worldwide.

This position calls for someone who is a strategist and visionary: a leader who can work with the President and colleagues to continue to establish Fordham’s place on the global stage. Fordham is evolving beyond its role as a regional University and now aspires to be a global institution in terms of its social and research impact and its student, faculty, and alumni populations. The Vice President will develop approaches that sharpen the University’s global presence and expand and strengthen its broad network of relationships.

The Vice President will have a gift for seeing the big picture while identifying the individual narratives that capture Fordham’s story both in the United States and internationally. The Vice President will craft unique, compelling marketing and communications programs that convey this story to all audiences and will use analytical skills to evaluate and continually refine those programs.

The marketing and communications team will be composed of about 30 professionals who report to the Vice President. Until now, these team members were divided into a marketing unit and a communications unit. The Vice President will have the chance to determine a structure, allocation of responsibilities, and operating relationships that will yield an integrated marketing and communications team. The Vice President will serve as a mentor to all team members, identifying ways to help each individual tap into their potential and exceed expectations.

In addition to the University President, the Vice President will maintain working relationships with the other Vice Presidents and Senior Vice Presidents who form the president’s Cabinet, the deans of the schools and colleges, and other members of the University’s leadership.

President Tania Tetlow

A Catholic who was born in New York and grew up in New Orleans, Tania Tetlow has deep family ties to the Jesuits and to Fordham, where her parents met as graduate students in the late 1960s. The first woman and the first layperson to be named president of Fordham University, she graduated cum laude from Tulane University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American studies and is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where she earned a Juris Doctor degree and was a Harry S. Truman Fellow.

Prior to beginning her tenure at Fordham on July 1, 2022, she was the first woman and first layperson to lead Loyola University New Orleans, where she had served as president since 2018. Before Loyola, Tetlow served as the Felder-Fayard Professor of Law at Tulane University, where she was also Senior Vice President and a key strategic advisor to President Michael Fitts. As a law professor, her research helped persuade the Department of Justice to reimagine its regulation of constitutional policing. She also directed Tulane’s Domestic Violence Law Clinic, for which she raised millions of dollars in federal grant funds.

University Marketing and Communications

The Fordham University Marketing and Communications department helps ensure that our unique character, brand, reputation, and community are presented in a clear and vibrant way. In addition to institutional communications, branding, and promotion, this group centrally supports the marketing and communication needs of our schools, centers, development, and administrative departments. Visit the University Marketing and Communications website for more information.

Strategic Plan

At Fordham, strategic planning is an integrated enterprise. Both the University as a whole and each of its schools and divisions continuously pursue initiatives that are grounded in Fordham’s Jesuit identity and mission, and designed to meet the present and future needs of the world. In 2020, the Board of Trustees endorsed a University-wide strategy for 2021 to 2026.

Educating for Justice sets forth an inspirational and aspirational agenda for the next five years, one that will distinguish Fordham as a University focused on teaching and research for justice.

The University crafted the plan to respond to the pressing challenges of our day and to ensure that Fordham is recognized as an outstanding Jesuit research university deeply grounded in the life and renewal of New York City, and committed not only to dismantling racism and other forms of discrimination and oppression but also to recruiting and retaining students in an increasingly competitive environment.

The goals of the strategic plan are to:

• Educate students as global citizens and transformative leaders for justice in the innovation age.
• Excel across the natural and applied sciences and allied fields to promote social change and equity.
• Cultivate a diverse, equitable, inclusive, caring, and connected community that promotes each member’s development as a whole person.

Essential Functions

• Provide overall leadership of marketing and communications, mentoring and inspiring a staff of about 30 professionals with expertise in a range of functions across these fields.
• Build a cohesive team that will take full advantage of print and digital media, advertising, and media relations to increase the national and global visibility of Fordham University and generate wide-ranging support for the institution. The Vice President will oversee all marketing and communications efforts for undergraduate admissions and University relations. In addition, for the first time, they will have the chance to unify, guide, and improve enrollment-focused marketing efforts across Fordham’s graduate and professional schools by working in cooperation with school-level team members.
• Develop and implement an overarching strategic marketing and communications plan, with a special emphasis on developing a distinct and compelling brand identity for the University in an environment where a greater number of institutions are competing for market share in Fordham’s historic differentiators.
• Ensure that all Fordham communications and marketing initiatives align with the University’s mission and vision.
• Provide insight and innovation to develop Fordham’s global identity and build its reputation for leadership in research, teaching, and service. Determine measures for success in reputation-building through marketing and communications initiatives and provide regular reporting on these measures.
• Develop a keen awareness of all the ways in which Fordham students, alumni, faculty, and staff make positive contributions to society and develop comprehensive, far-reaching campaigns that raise awareness of the University’s impact on the world.
• Devise ways to balance the University’s marketing and communications needs on the global, national, and local levels. These efforts should lead to a better sense of shared identity among Fordham’s four campuses in the Bronx, midtown Manhattan, Westchester County, and London.
• Collaborate with the marketing and communications leaders of Fordham’s schools and colleges, athletics, and WFUV to ensure consistency in branding, messaging, and identity. Work with school and campus leaders to find common ground and identify synergies between University and school efforts. Build a strong understanding of the unique positions, value propositions, and audiences of each school and college so that these factors inform and enhance our overall marketing and communications.
• Manage the University-wide marketing and communications budget and make informed choices to maximize the impact and effectiveness of expenditures. Conduct competitor and market research as needed to provide recommendations on calibrating spend to match strategic objectives.
• Serve as the University’s premier topic expert on trends in marketing and communications and how Fordham can best take advantage of new developments and innovations to meet its goals. Ensure that University marketing and communications programs adapt to the needs of specific target audiences and take advantage of the evolving tools available to reach them.
• Rethink and reenergize Fordham’s media relations efforts to increase the University’s share of earned media. Identify approaches that will resonate with the New York press, the national media, and the international press in areas where Fordham has a presence, especially the United Kingdom. In particular, raise the visibility of faculty research and the prevalence of faculty as topic experts.
• Assume ultimate responsibility for any crisis communications needs that the University and its schools may face, providing guidance on immediate response (both to the internal community and the outside world) as well as long-range reputation and relationship rebuilding/repair.
• Oversee contracts with external service providers in aspects of marketing and communications where those relationships are appropriate. Review existing vendor relationships, identify new vendors when needed, and negotiate the most advantageous contracts for the University.
• Devise ways to improve internal communications to students, faculty, staff, alumni, and families. Offer leadership and mentorship to fellow communicators throughout the University whose work focuses primarily on these internal audiences.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in business management, communications, marketing or another related field.
• 10+ years of high-level marketing and communications leadership experience, including a successful track record in crafting, implementing, and evaluating marketing and communications strategies.
• Strategic vision: the ability to sense trends, to “see around corners,” to chart territory and identify innovations before others do.
• The ability to harness data, technology, and analytics for informed decision-making and continuous improvement.
• Depth and breadth in all skill areas of marketing and communications, including but not limited to visual branding, messaging, press relations, paid advertising (out-of-home, print, digital, social), crisis communications, web communications, and email. The successful candidate will intuit how to design cross-platform initiatives to serve key functions such as reputation-building, admissions and enrollment, alumni relations, and fundraising. The ideal candidate will be a consummate writer and editor, have innate visual acumen (especially for brand identity), and know how to best employ emerging forms of communication such as video, multimedia, and new social platforms.
• The ability to problem-solve and act decisively in an environment where there is often no clear best answer and in which ambiguity is a constant.
• Leadership and management skills: the ability to organize, to motivate, to inspire. The ideal candidate will know how to bring together diverse teams, encourage those teams to do their best work, and recognize and reward shared successes.
• A command of the issues and challenges facing higher education in the United States and globally. A background in higher education is preferred, but the committee welcomes candidates from other fields who can demonstrate a strong understanding of the needs and issues facing universities, research and teaching faculty, and prospective and current students and families.
• Experience in working with fellow high-level leaders in cross-functional teams. The Vice President should be able to work on a peer-to-peer level with the President, fellow Vice Presidents, trustees, and other significant alumni and donors.
• A commitment to doing work that seeks to advance the greater good of society. The ideal candidate will have a desire to be involved in the community and the world and will feel personal resonance with Fordham’s mission to educate students who are prepared to go out and change the world for the better.
• This is a full-time, in-person position, primarily based out of our Lincoln Center campus. Candidates must be willing to travel to all campuses as needed.
• Successful candidates should have a knowledge of and commitment to the goals of Jesuit Education.

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in Marketing

Minimum Starting Salary: $300,000

Maximum Starting Salary: $350,000

Note: Salary is commensurate with qualifications, experience, and skills.

FLSA CATEGORY: Exempt

START DATE: ASAP

APPLY HERE: https://careers.fordham.edu/postings/4839

For fullest consideration, please apply by May 1, 2023.

ABOUT FORDHAM

Founded in 1841, Fordham is the Jesuit University of New York, offering an exceptional education distinguished by the Jesuit tradition to more than 16,000 students in its 9 colleges and schools. It has residential campuses in the Bronx and Manhattan, a campus in West Harrison, N.Y., the Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station in Armonk, N.Y., and the London Centre in the United Kingdom.

Fordham University is committed to excellence through diversity and welcomes candidates of all backgrounds.

Fordham is an Equal Opportunity Employer – Veterans/Disabled and other protected categories

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