Sabrina Zimara Enhanced the Image of Dining at Concordia College.

Sabrina Zimara

Sabrina Zimara has increased visibility and enhanced the image of dining services at Concordia College.

Sabrina Zimara, Concordia College Details:

Marketing Supervisor, Concordia College, Moorhead

Age: 26

Education: B.S. in mass communications with an emphasis in public relations from Minnesota State University in Moorhead

Years at Concordia College: 3

Why Selected?

Janet Paul Rice, associate director, says: Sabrina has increased visibility and enhanced the image of dining services among key stakeholders by significantly increasing the use of social media, reformatting the webpage, refreshing the brand image, submitting news releases to local media and trade press, and helping prepare and submit entries for award competitions. Sabrina has helped increase sales by preparing marketing plans for each division within dining services and by quantitatively measuring the effectiveness of marketing efforts. Finally, Sabrina has helped to integrate marketing practices into departmental planning processes, thereby increasing their effectiveness. By having marketing involved from the beginning, we are able to consider in advance how we will market the products and programs, what customer perceptions will be and plan for surveys to gather feedback.

Get to know :

What has been your proudest accomplishment?

Seeing a constant increase in our NACUFS customer service benchmarking scores. Our students really see our efforts and see that we respond to their suggestions. You can tell they pay attention to the marketing because their level of education about the things we do keeps going up.

What would you say you excel at over more seasoned colleagues?

I think a lot of students can be pretty open with me because I’m not that much older than they are. Being younger also helps with some of the newer ways of communicating, like with social media.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve had to overcome?

Deciding the best way to align our goals in dining services and our marketing strategy with the overall college strategies. It took awhile to understand how different departments on campus interact with each other.

What’s been your most rewarding moment?

The past three years we’ve gotten several NACUFS Loyal E. Horton awards. The department hadn’t ever won one before I came here so it’s really cool to see students giving tours and bragging about how the department has all these awards.

What would you like to accomplish in your career in the next two years?

One of my goals is to grow our catering division. When I started I would go to networking events and everyone I met would say, “Oh, I didn’t even know you guys catered.” Now I’m hearing, “Oh, I’ve heard of you guys.” Over the past three years our off-campus catering increased at least threefold.