Insights

A broader view of alumni engagement requires openness to new organizational models that will best support and mobilize alumni to advance an institution’s goals.

I often refer to that classic story of the man who spent his life in search of riches only to discover that his own home sat over a diamond mine. The lesson from the story popularized in the late 19th century by Russell Conwell, founder of Temple University, suggests that what we seek, particularly in…Read more

During presentations about brand architecture, I often pose a couple of questions to attendees. How many aspire for their institution to be a branded house (leveraging a single master brand or parent brand across an entire organization and the organization’s multiple offerings)? Nearly every hand goes up. Next, how many of their institutions actually operate…Read more

For much of my early career, I was engaged by clients to research and consult on the best way to communicate with millennials. Typically, this meant identifying a set of characteristics and preferences that afforded our clients the opportunity to better communicate with this target audience. It started with Neil Howe’s Millennials Rising, and then…Read more

Two hot-potato terms that higher ed leaders would just as soon not handle are “sales” and “marketing.” Many colleges and universities avoid them all together, doing their best to disassociate with anything from the world of business. In days still available to recent memory, it was possible to not engage those terms at all. Higher…Read more

Congratulations, you’re getting Slate! You’ve read about it in forums, heard counselors gush over it at fairs, and quietly side-eyed that college down the road as they launched a new app and weirdly celebrated with a Slate-themed cake. Can it really be THAT good? If you’re good to to your Slate instance, the answer from…Read more