At a Glance
- Buyer: Eastern Kentucky University
- Industry: Higher education
- Location/markets: Richmond, Kentucky; statewide Kentucky; southern Ohio; southern Indiana; eastern West Virginia; northern Tennessee; select national metropolitan areas
- Primary scope: Advertising and related communications services for undergraduate and GOAT recruitment, plus college search strategy
- Key deliverables/channels: Strategic planning, media strategy, media buying and placement, performance analysis, college search services, audience segmentation, reporting, digital, broadcast, print, search, social, and other traditional and emerging media
- Budget: $1.1M annual all-inclusive budget
- Contract type/term: Not specified
- Key dates: Proposal deadline: Not specified
- Eligibility/must-haves: Higher education marketing experience strongly preferred; ability to support local, regional, and national campaigns; comfort collaborating within the University’s internal project environment; vendors not required to be locally based but must be properly registered to conduct business in the Commonwealth of Kentucky
Why This Could Be Interesting
Eastern Kentucky University is looking for an agency partner to support enrollment growth across undergraduate and GOAT audiences — graduate, online, adult, and transfer. This is a public university engagement tied directly to recruitment performance, market expansion, and long-term audience development.
The assignment is broader than a basic media-buying brief. EKU wants strategic planning, channel strategy, media placement, performance reporting, and a full college search approach that spans students from freshman through senior year of high school, with segmented outreach built around different recruitment pathways.
What makes this notable is the mix of scale and complexity. The University is planning across local, statewide, bordering-state, and select national markets, while also pushing harder into online, hybrid, graduate, adult, and transfer enrollment. It also wants employer-partnership thinking folded into the GOAT strategy, which gives the work a stronger growth and pipeline-building angle than a typical awareness assignment.
Best suited for agencies with higher education enrollment marketing experience, strong paid media and search capabilities, and the ability to plan across traditional students, adult learners, online audiences, and employer-connected recruitment efforts.
Proposal deadline: April, 06, 2026
Download the full RFP here.
Apply to the RFP here.
