The President's Award is among the highest distinctions given to an individual or organization that has made extraordinary contributions to the community college movement on a regional or national basis, particularly in the areas of marketing and public relations. Established in 2000, the award is presented by the board of directors at the national conference. It is not given every year.
Dr. Pam Cox-Otto
Founder, Interact Communications, Inc.
La Crosse, WI
If you’ve ever been to an NCMPR event before – a district conference, a national one, even a webinar – there’s a high likelihood you’ve seen Dr. Pam Cox-Otto’s name on the program. Maybe you sought it out, circled the session, got there early to ensure you got a seat.
Because it’s not uncommon for a Cox-Otto session to be standing-room only.
Cox-Otto, who founded Interact Communications in 1999, is the recipient of NCMPR’s 2025 President’s Award. It’s one of the highest distinctions presented to a person who or organization that has made extraordinary contributions to community colleges on a regional or national level. The award is given at the discretion of that year’s NCMPR president, and it isn’t awarded every year.
Early on, NCMPR’s 2024-25 president, Virginia Moreland, knew she wanted to honor Cox-Otto, who she calls “basically a legend among NCMPR members.” Cox-Otto was one of the first speakers Moreland saw at an NCMPR conference, she remembers, back when she was new to the industry.
“Her room was jam-packed, and while her style is so engaging, the information that she gave was so concrete in a way that you could take it back to your job and implement it, and it would instantly help you do your job better,” Moreland says.
Cox-Otto stepped down as Interact’s CEO three years ago, and today, she serves as its senior strategist. Before Interact, however, Cox-Otto worked at community colleges, eventually as a VP of advancement, overseeing marketing and fundraising.
“(It was) one of those jobs where they had private jets, and you fly everywhere being their marketing director, so I did that,” she says. “It was fun for a couple of years, but then I discovered the magic, which is if you don’t like what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter how much money they pay you. It’s just not worth it.”
She and a collection of coworkers decided to form their own business. They wanted to work closely with companies, forming relationships and helping to solve pain points. Three months in, they narrowed “companies” a bit to focus on community and technical colleges.
Cox-Otto started presenting at NCMPR pretty early in Interact’s existence – “1 billion years ago,” she estimates – at a national conference in San Diego. (We did some digging and are pretty sure that had to have been the 2007 San Diego conference. Which, frankly, might as well have been a billion years ago.) The topic: “target marketing so your office isn’t the target.” The idea: using data to figure out what programs to market by focusing on low-enrollment programs with high success rates.
“I think marketing folks were getting tired of being forced to market programs that were low enrollment for good reasons, like out-of-date programs, changes in the environment and faculty that were less than in-touch with their student needs,” she says.
Since that first presentation 18 years ago, Cox-Otto estimates that she’s presented at NCMPR national and district events more than 25 times, but less than 150. That means, Cox-Otto has been around for close to half of NCMPR’s 50-year existence.
As she looks toward the next 50 years, she says she’d like to see community colleges move back toward being a center of the community.
“Any message I want to get out, I don’t have to come see you. You don’t have to know me,” she says. “I can put information in your pocket without there ever being a connection.”
Once, that connection was personal, down to colleges setting up booths at every city event.
“It’s rare to see that now because one, we don’t have the people to do it and two, because we have all these ways directly into your pocket,” she says. “There’s no personal relationship.
“Just like the hospital is a critical part of our community, we are the critical center of learning and changing and meeting the future right here in town. We say we do that, but we do it all with social media, so it’s always filtered. We have built a communication system around a kind of media that allows us to be emotionally distanced, and it doesn’t build relationships. We need to go back to being the heart of the community. We need to take that seriously. And we need to recommit ourselves to our communities.”
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