A Shared Effort, a Stronger Story for Higher Ed: Interdisciplinarity Across MarComm, Advancement and Institutional Planning

It’s been energizing to see all the social media posts from people who are committing to telling the story of higher education in new ways. I feel such a sense of togetherness in this work, seeing all the institutional and agency colleagues pulling in the same direction. At the same time, I’ve had some recent experiences that have concretized how marcomm, advancement and strategic planning can build on each other’s rootedness in institutional mission, core values and constituent needs to make sure the right stories are told at the right times to the right audiences.  

Thank you to Dr. Melissa Morriss-Olson for her thoughtful discussion of rebuilding public trust in higher ed as someone who was a first-generation college student who then became a university provost and trusted educator of other higher education leaders. I read Melissa’s piece as more inspiration to work for a paradigm-shifting moment, in the Kuhnian sense of a radical break from past habits of thought and practice, moving us toward a greater sense of duty to speak about why higher education matters. 

Melissa’s piece also reminded me of a brief but painful interaction with my father several years ago. We were sitting on the porch at his house. I thought we were enjoying a delightful, shared silence observing a nearby mountain range as the morning sun lit its peaks.  

He was having a completely different experience. He turned to me and with great emotion said, “I don’t know how to talk to you anymore.” I had completed a master’s degree and was in a Ph.D. program. He dropped out of college to join the Army during the conflict in Vietnam.  

I inhabited a different world than he did. I spoke differently and talked about different things and had a different set of beliefs than the ones he taught me. 

I was stunned. I didn’t feel that different to me. We know higher education opens up the world to us. For some people, it also creates new cleavages and conflicts.   

Coming from the experience of standing on the edge of one such cleavage, I perceive that the path forward has to be a deeply interdisciplinary one. If we are to create greater connections with audiences to help them understand the transformation that higher ed creates, we’ll have to work beyond our imagined functional boundaries and settle more comfortably into spaces where we share expertise. 

The experience you share with your colleagues 

This summer, I attended the 2025 CASE Annual Conference for Marketing and Branding (CASE ACMB) where I co-presented with Maria Elena Kuntz, the director of content marketing strategy and communications at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Office of Advancement.  

Our presentation explored how institutions make space for alumni to talk about themselves in their preferred terms. Maria presented a brand storytelling case study that dove into the complexity of using the word “legacy” in a story when it’s claimed by an alumnus to talk about the Baca family’s relationship to this beloved university, but “legacy” is a word many predominantly white institutions avoid for strong ethical reasons. 

I brought both an anthropological and industry-wide consultant’s perspective about how we negotiate with others which stories get told, how to tell those stories and when it’s best to engage in collaborative storytelling. This is a method for doing research or creating relationships with communities that requires us to think about why certain stories might be important or useful in which contexts.  

We also have to be clear about the language choices we make to tell stories. Maria and I collectively discussed how brand standards are one way in which identities can be validated or ignored. Documents like style guides provide useful clarity about institutional principles and priorities but also can make some things, like self-descriptors, unspeakable. 

I also just finished a year in the 2024-2025 cohort of the Society of College and University Planning (SCUP) Emerging Leaders program. As a cohort of professionals from a range of institutions and architecture and design firms, we learned to implement the principles of integrated planning: a sustainable, unified model for institutional planning and plan activation in which constituent voices are well represented and unit-level plans feed into the institutional plan.  

These professional development experiences covered higher education functions that seem different on the surface, but there are some definite similarities: 

• First, the work of marcomm, advancement, alumni relations and strategic or integrated planning requires knowing the institution’s mission, values, goals and constituent needs. The work you do in one of these functions should shape your organization’s future by correctly identifying your present position in the landscape and the places where you’ve historically found both success and challenges. You are also responsible for identifying solutions to those challenges and the best ways to track and report on your progress. Strategic marketing and communications plans can be great models to adapt in other units or divisions. (And we’ve advocated for having marcomm  and advancement leaders present in the early planning stages for these reasons and more.) 
• There’s also a parallel wherein some of your colleagues may think they know what your job entails. Some may also think that they can do your job themselves or that historical practice will always be better than an innovative or different practice. Others may think it’s not worth understanding what your role is. Or, they create unnecessary obstacles to collaboration because they are afraid that means ceding territory. So, it can feel like a lot of your work is explaining the work, why it matters and why you don’t want to own a colleague’s territory. You just want to help maximize what they can do within it. (We’ve written about the gift embedded in comments from people who believe they know marcomm as well as you do.) 
• Finally, these activities reinforced the importance of intelligently chosen and articulated core values in figuring out how you should do your work. Core values point us toward what is important and how to behave and treat each other as a collective. Our strategic planning research shows that discussions of core values are becoming a more frequent feature in strategic plans. Core values are frequently discussed in brand style guides, campaign case statements and messages to alumni to increase their affinity for your institution. We can make a choice to act in accordance with our values, even if we can’t control the context in which we operate. 

It’s time to share what hasn’t been shared 

This is what’s been on my mind as I reflect on how important it is for higher education to be clear in its purpose and to speak about it with purpose.  

Morriss-Olson writes, “The relationship between the university and the public is shifting. Trust is shaky. Expectations are changing. And let’s be honest—some of that is on us. Higher ed hasn’t always been great at listening, adapting, or communicating our value.” This is work we must do to “rebuild the social compact.” 

It’s interesting, from a certain distance, to observe that I lived the part about not being “great at listening, adapting or communicating” at a micro level. On some level, the distance between my father and I was due to things I didn’t say. If we extrapolate all the combined micro-level conversations that should have happened but didn’t to the macro level, we observe all the empty conversational space that was left open to be filled by speakers who weren’t there to tell a full story.  

This is the ultimate shared thread between my CASE ACMB and SCUP experiences: we need to pull together our shared expertise to tell the truth about higher education. Thank you to everyone posting on LinkedIn and on institutional social media accounts, claiming space to describe the amazing work faculty, staff and students are doing. To make this a paradigm shift, we must plan to do this endlessly, to make it a core value that guides the choices we make. 

We’re walking that path, too, so if you’re interested in some company during your institution’s journey, we’re ready to meet you wherever you are.