The D. Richard Petrizzo Award for Career Achievement honors a professional for career accomplishments in community college marketing and public relations. It is named after the award’s first recipient, a former NCMPR president who helped shape the organization in its early years. It is presented by the NCMPR board of directors at the national conference.
2026 Petrizzo Award Recipient
Ron Taber
Chief Marketing Officer (ret.)
Northern Essex Community College
Haverhill, MA
When you retired, you were chief marketing officer at Northern Essex Community College in Massachusetts. How long had you been in that role? I worked at the college from ’98 to 2022. The title changed a couple of times, but it really was the same role. This sort of showcases how much things changed in that quarter century—I was hired with a title that was “director of publications and advertising.” It wasn’t even really considered marketing. Over the years, that transitioned and changed to CMO, and marketing became more prevalent.?
Sticking with the theme of changes, marketing evolves so quickly, even month to month. Talk to me about a big chance in the field from those 24 years. It’s kind of crazy to even imagine, but when I started at Northern Essex in 1998, there was no college website, certainly there was no social media, no Facebook or anything. If I were to think of the things that changed the most in that time, the one I always thought was the most interesting was digital marketing and the ability to fine-tune messaging, to send those targeted messages, whether it’s “start here and transfer” or how affordable it might be to train for a new career, and in some cases, you can do it in less than a year. If you had told me in 1998 that by the time you got to 2010 and beyond we’d be able to do that, I would have shook my head and said, “How is that even possible?”?
What did you do before Northern Essex? I was a marketer and worked at ad agencies for many, many years, and my own educational journey was at a four-year college. So my personal experience with community colleges was nil. My knowledge of the uniqueness of community colleges was extremely limited.?
When you were in college, what did you think you were going to do after graduation? My dream as a young lad, even in high school, was to be a sports writer and to cover professional sports. I dreamed of covering the Red Sox or the Celtics. So I went to Syracuse University as a journalism major. I was a sportswriter for a couple of years after college, and I quickly realized that it was going to take more than a lifetime to go from covering high school sports in upstate New York to working in Boston. There were people who had been covering professional teams for 20 years and 40 years. So, I moved back to New Hampshire, where I was from, and started working at a small ad agency. I worked at four or five different agencies and small marketing firms?over a 15-year period before I got my job at Northern Essex Community College.?
You were NCMPR’s 2014-15 president. When you think of your tenure with the organization, tell me about a favorite memory. The first conference I ever went to was in Chicago. It must have been late ’90s. There was a blizzard happening, and only about half the people got in, but it was just amazing to be there. I sat in a ballroom filled with a couple hundred people and never in my wildest dreams thought, “I’m gonna be the guy up there emceeing this thing as president of NCMPR one day.” But it just all evolved. I have a bit of a phobia of public speaking and being in the spotlight. Going down that path was incredibly scary, but I knew it would be good for me to push myself outside of my comfort zone.?
In recent years, we have so many first-time district and national conference attendees. I bet it can be hard to see yourself as NCMPR president when you’re new. What advice do you have for those new members to push through that shyness or hesitation to get involved? Another big one is their fear of the time commitments involved in volunteering with something bigger. Their jobs are so overwhelming, 24/7 these days. The advice that I would give people is to start small. Start out at the district level. The way I went from the guy in the back of the room to somebody involved was a mentor saying to me, “You’d be really good helping us with the Medallion Awards in District 1.” “You’d be really good as the assistant district director.” Then it was, “You’d be really good at being the D1 director.” And you start to say, “Well, jeez, they think I can. Maybe I can.” I think also think some people would learn quickly, “This isn’t for me.” That would be my advice: Don’t map out a big, huge master plan. Just get involved at your district level and see what that feels like and see how inspired you get by that.?
How do you like retirement? I highly recommend it. It’s interesting because my wife is still working. So we have these conversations on occasion. I think the key is, do you have something that you’re passionate about that you can do on a regular basis? I think if you have that and you fully embrace that that’s what your retirement life’s gonna be about, then that’s huge. I’ve always enjoyed golfing. I was a once-a-week golfer during my working career, and now I golf five or six times a week in the summer. It’s something that I’m passionate about, and there’s a group of guys that I play with now. It’s almost like having a job every day, but it’s outdoors, and the sun’s shining, and the grass is green, and we’re laughing. If you have something that you’re passionate about, you basically wake up every day saying to yourself, “I can’t wait to do this again today.”?