The CCA Q&A With Higher Ed Leader Allison Turcio
For nearly a decade, our team has partnered closely with Siena University (previously Siena College). Throughout that entire partnership, Allison Turcio has been a constant—leading with clarity, championing innovation, and elevating every project we tackle together.
In fact, Allison has been working at Siena, (her alma mater!) for almost 20 years.
Today, she’s Dean of Enrollment and Marketing at Siena. She’s also a nationally recognized voice in higher ed marketing—speaking at conferences, hosting Enrollify’s much-loved The Application podcast, publishing the Higher Ed Marketer’s Digest, and leading one of the most collaborative enrollment teams in the industry.
(And with two kids, she’s also a soccer mom, dance mom, gymnastics mom, basketball mom… all of it.)
So let’s get to it. We sat down with Allison to talk about what’s working in higher ed marketing, the misconceptions she wishes the industry would let go of, and why the Siena–CCA partnership has thrived for so many years.
Q: Twenty years is a long time at one institution. What’s kept you at Siena?
Allison: Loving Siena is part of it, but love alone isn’t enough—this work is challenging. The real reason is the team. I don’t even like having a day where I work from home, because I genuinely miss the people I normally see on campus.
There are also new challenges every day. I can’t say working here has ever been boring. I’ve always had opportunities to tackle new projects and lead new initiatives. Siena has always been very giving in that way.
Q: You meet so many higher ed marketers through your work. What makes someone really stand out in this field?
Allison: It’s always the people who deeply understand their audiences. Their ideas aren’t necessarily things you can adopt industry-wide, but they work really well for their audiences and their institution.
You can never go wrong being as in tune as possible with your audience, even if that means sometimes going against the data or not having any data yet. You have to start somewhere. And remember that going to a college fair and talking to students—that’s just as much data as application numbers. Think about data broadly, and let all of those experiences inform your understanding of your audience.
Q: What’s something you wish every higher ed marketer knew?
Allison: Higher ed marketers need to understand enrollment. I’m very fortunate to have a dual role where marketing and enrollment feed each other and work in tandem easily. Not everyone has that luxury, but you still have to understand whether what you’re doing is impacting enrollment, because enrollment is where the revenue is. Whether it’s brand marketing or performance marketing, you’ve got to find ways to make that connection. Otherwise, you really don’t know if your work is positively impacting the institution.
Q: Higher ed tends to be collaborative—even among “competitors.” Why do you think people are willing to share so much?
Allison: Because some issues are industry-wide. We can’t fix the perception problems in higher ed alone. The way students are communicated with—their entire experience across institutions—shapes how they view college as a whole. So the better we all do, the stronger the industry becomes.
That’s why I share so much through the podcast, newsletter, and conferences. If we believe higher ed is the greatest engine of social mobility, then we should all want more students to go, and go successfully.
Q: Let’s talk about Siena. What’s one of the best ideas you and your team have implemented?
Allison: One that comes to mind is the Siena Guarantee—an idea we developed with CCA. We were already doing everything included in the guarantee: offering generous merit scholarships, graduating students in four years, and providing robust career experiences.
Packaging it all together simply made the value clearer. It wasn’t anything new; it was clarity. And it helped the value proposition resonate more with our audience.
Q: What’s keeping higher ed marketers up at night right now?
Allison: A big one is when institutions don’t fully understand the value of marketing or trust the experts doing the work. Marketing is highly visible, so everyone has an opinion, and not everyone is going to like every choice you make. But without strategic alignment from leadership, and without understanding how marketing ties to enrollment and revenue, teams struggle.
We’re very lucky at Siena—that alignment and support is absolutely there. Everything we do stems from strategy. When there’s clarity on strategy, the brand and the marketing naturally follow. And that strategy is set at the college and leadership level.
Q: You’ve worked with a lot of agencies. What advice would you give institutions looking for the right partner?
Allison: Know your internal strengths. Understand what’s best to keep in-house and what gaps need to be filled—whether those gaps are skills or simply capacity.
Start with your strategy:
- What can your team advance really well?
- Where do you need expertise or bandwidth?
- Which partners can enhance what you already do?
And don’t discount how important coordination is. Students don’t know (or care) that multiple partners are involved. The experience has to feel cohesive. So someone internal must be fully in tune with everything that’s happening across partners.
Q: You’ve been working with CCA for more than a decade now. What’s the secret to our long partnership?
Allison: When we come together, it just works. We always come out of our brainstorms with exciting ideas, and then we actually do something about them. Whether the action comes from the partner side, the internal side, or a combination, we rarely let an idea just drop—unless there’s a strategic reason it shouldn’t move forward. It’s never because we “didn’t feel like doing it.” Even when it’s hard, we find a way.
We see results from the partnership on both sides, which is why the relationship feels so strong.
Sign up for The Higher Ed Market’s Digest now.
Get a bi-weekly dose of what Allison’s reading, thinking about, and planning for. And check out her podcast! (Perhaps begin with this one… Why Content Marketing is Essential for Higher Education Marketing. 😉)
Thanks for your time, Allison!