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.
Terri Giltner
Chief Marketing Officer (ret.)
Kentucky Community & Technical College System
Versailles, KY
If you reviewed Terri Giltner’s résumé, you would be forgiven for wondering if some copy-and-paste error had occurred, for wondering if three completely different people’s jobs had somehow been listed under experience.
There’s her bulk of years in the private sector, working in the national marketing department at KFC. (Any chance you recall KFC’s first sandwich, the Chicken Little? That was Giltner.) And her time as the executive director of communications for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. Those years as Kentucky Gov. Paul Patton’s deputy communications director.
And then she spent 18 years as the chief marketing officer at the Kentucky Community and Technical College System, better known as KCTCS.
Giltner is the 2025 recipient of NCMPR’s Petrizzo Award, a career achievement honor for accomplishments in community and technical college marcom and PR. She can see how her experiences in the private and government sectors aided her in the educational sector – and ultimately benefited her team and KCTCS students.
There’s the lessons on research-based marketing, how to be the voice of the customer, and the framework to build and manage a brand from the private sector. With the public sector, it was all about crisis comms and media relations – plus the rules of spending money and using vendors.
“I also got a taste of the general lack of understanding about marketing and its role within an organization,” she says.
Which underlined the importance of marketing getting a seat at the table, a phrase that might be a community college cliché if it weren’t for the fact that marcom teams across the country have been trying to get that seat for, truly, decades. When Giltner started at KCTCS, she couldn’t even use the word “marketing” because the college thought it was too business-oriented, too manipulative.
“They thought it was all about profit,” she says. By comparason, in marketing at KFC, “marketing ran the organization, and that has continued to be a shock (because) marketing still struggles to have a seat at the table in higher ed. I feel like, in the last couple years, it has almost gone backward as we see so many new presidents come in.”
Because with a new president comes the time it takes for them to understand marketing’s role. Presidents, Giltner points out, don’t learn about promoting the insitution or protecting the brand in their doctoral programs.
“Which is one of their No. 1 jobs,” she says. “They are the living embodiment, the human embodiment, of what the brand is at the instiution.”
One project that wouldn’t have been possible without the support of Giltner’s KCTCS president was an enrollment marketing effort at all of the system’s 16 colleges that focused on digital campaigns. It was a hard sell to the presidents, she says, because they struggled to see how digital marketing worked without being able to see something like a billboard or television.
So marketing developed a dashboard to track leads, applicants, enrolled students and return on ad spend, or ROA. The results? For every advertising dollar KCTCS spent, it made $18 in revenue. And it gained 7,000 annual enrollments.
“That is why I think it is so important that marketing become much more inolved in enrollment management and bringing students into the institution,” she says. “Linking themselves to enrollment and revenue really does help.”
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