Interact Has Your Back
25 Years of 2-Year College Expertise
Interact is celebrating 25 years of being the premier, full-service marketing and enrollment agency exclusively serving two-year colleges in North America. Our team has extensive experience within the two-year college market, supporting colleges, consortia, and statewide systems, at every level – from a student’s first inquiry to graduation.
To us, two-year colleges aren’t simply a subcategory of higher education. We are deeply passionate about the community college mission and choose to only work with two-year colleges, providing research, strategy, creative, and technology support to help improve the overall student experience.
What makes Interact unique:
- We only work with two-year schools (principals have 100+ years combined experience with two-year schools), and we are completely focused on enhancing your student outcomes.
- We are research-driven and have an in-house research team that delivers academic-quality research that will be believed by your team and within your institution.
- Our proprietary Media Prefs software gives us more than 15 years of longitudinal data that shows us the consumption habits and communication preferences of community college student to enhance your students’ experience and outcomes.
The Inspiration for Interact
Our Story
Dr. Pamela Cox-Otto, Ph.D., started Interact Communications in 1996 as a small community college consulting firm, focused on meeting the marketing needs of the community and technical colleges. From that small beginning, Interact has grown to a national company, serving more than 700 two-year colleges and college organizations during its history.
Throughout the years, as Interact gained more clients and additional experience, the company expanded into full research services, a full strategy and creative team, and has developed full products focused on solving the issues of community colleges.
And if you ask Dr. Cox-Otto what inspired her creation of Interact Communications, you’ll likely see her tear up as she shares her dear, departed mother’s own life-changing community college journey.
Dr. Cox-Otto recounts how her mother, whom she fondly describes as “the heart of our family,” traveled throughout Europe, India, and South America with her young children, often serving as an embassy hostess, while Dr. Cox-Otto’s father served as a construction engineer building dams in third-world countries.
When the family moved into the jungle, closer to her husband’s work site, she became a philanthropist, growing garden food to share and recruiting her nurse friend to visit small villages in need of modern healthcare.
“She was forthright, warm, and a problem solver,” says Dr. Cox-Otto. “She was also a high school dropout, having married my father when she was 15 and never returning to finish school.”
“All of my life, I saw her as somebody who was smart and wise, but she did not see herself that way,” Dr. Cox-Otto remembers. “Finally, when I was a junior in high school in California, she went back to night school at the local community college (Thank you, College of the Redwoods!) to finish her GED.”
And the rest, as they say, is history—a new history written, not just for Dr. Cox-Otto’s mom, who continued on to earn a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree, but for Dr. Cox-Otto, her sister, and generations to come.
“It started with my mother and my sister, and it started at a community college. From that time on, everyone in my family has graduated college. Some of us have master’s degrees and others have terminal degrees. But whatever the degree, it is clear the entire trajectory of my family changed when my mother and my sister went to community college.”
Dr. Cox-Otto remains grateful to College of the Redwoods. “They showed my mom that she had what it took. They nurtured her abilities. They helped push back against her fears. That’s why I love two-year schools. Had they not been there, had they not offered the support and opportunity to my family when it was needed, we would not be where we are.”
