Tess Coody-Anders officially joined the Office of Marketing and Communications at Trinity University on Tuesday, bringing with her a long track record of consumer-oriented success in San Antonio. The new vice president for strategic communications and marketing will continue the department’s recent success in creative storytelling to set the small liberal arts university apart in a “crowded field,” Trinity President Danny Anderson said.
“Tess is a confident spokesperson who can help us tell the Trinity story,” Anderson said. He hired Coody-Anders, a Trinity alumna, following a national search.
While at Trinity, Coody-Anders wrote and served as an editor for the Trinitonian, the university newspaper. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communication in 1993. She then took her talents into the business world after college, co-founding Guerra Deberry Coody, a boutique marketing agency that grew into a $100 million firm over the next 15 years. While leading the firm, Coody-Anders focused on the health care sector and quality of life issues at the corporate and legislative level.
Coody-Anders went on to serve as CEO of two companies in the health care sector: Resolute Health and Wellvana. Both companies brought a patient-based perspective to the health care process, streamlining the complicated bureaucracy for families and those with chronic illness.
Throughout her career, Coody-Anders has joined advocacy groups in Austin and Washington, D.C., to represent patients and consumers in the health care system. The social component of her entrepreneurship makes her an example of Trinity’s dual focus on social responsibility and enterprise, a combination that has led many alumni to invest in the San Antonio community as business leaders and philanthropists.
In her new role, Coody-Anders will be in charge of the university’s outreach to both alumni and future students, with the goal of supporting a leadership team that already has increased the quality and quantity of Trinity’s incoming applications.
“I feel that Trinity, and higher education in general, is at an important inflection point,” Coody-Anders told the Trinitonian. “There may be no better time than now for me to give back to my alma mater.”
