Hi everyone, welcome to the CASE Demonstrating the Value of Higher Education Seminar. My name is Lauren Briscoe and I'm the Education Programs here at CASE and I'm delighted to have you with us. Before we get started, I just have a few housekeeping notes. This webinar will be recorded and it will be provided for all registrants. You'll receive a follow up email after this event with instructions to access this recording. This webinar is also available for one CFRE credit. And you can find the points tracker to claim those credits under the courses tab for this event at learn.case.org. The presentation slide was also available for use in that same courses tab. We'll be taking questions, so please feel free to use the Q&A chat to submit questions as they come in. And at the end of the session, we'll feel free to get those questions in and we'll answer as many as we can. So without further ado, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to our incredible presenter, Andrew Shull. Thank you, Lauren. Happy to be here with everyone today. Get the screen share going here. My name is Andrew Shull. As Lauren said, I'm the project manager for value of higher education at CASE based in our Washington, D.C. headquarters. I've been in this role since February 2021, developing plans and keeping an eye on the day to day operations of a Gates Foundation grant that you'll hear more about in a bit. I've been a case for five years, including some time in the volunteer member engagement division. So I may have crossed paths with some of you who are dialing in today. And that's a brief introduction about me, but I'd like to get to know you all a little bit better. And I know we have a poll question that will help see who's all in the virtual room with us today. So if you could run that poll, please. And thank you all for sharing a little bit more about yourselves. Just good to know who's in the room and who all is with us today. So today we're going to start with setting some background, the history of public trust in higher education, and segue into cases engagement with the topic past, present, and future. And I'll certainly, as Lauren mentioned, leave time for your questions at the end also. I have some overall goals for this session that can apply to everyone in this meeting. One, providing some context and insight on an issue that's impacting education in ways like funding and fundraising, enrollment, overall reputation of an institution. Secondly, letting you know how CASE is involved in ways that may be helpful at your job. This is a member webinar, we certainly want to highlight some benefits of CASE membership and ways we can all learn from one another. Thirdly, I want to make that connection about where you see what we're talking about here as part of the evolution of the role of advancement leadership. Meaning looking beyond the day-to-day work. Meaning that you're trusted to lead thanks to your knowledge of these impactful, trending issues. And when I say you, I refer to both you individually and to the entire advancement office within an institution. The interactions advancement has with other offices around campus, where you're looked to as a key voice on these school-wide issues. Let's set the stage by reviewing the types of surveys that we looked at in realizing there was a need to talk about the value of higher education. Now with any data-related presentation, you start with a few caveats. But there will be a broad swath of question types and issues highlighted, even if it means jumping from poll to poll. Higher ed, and particularly a less tangible concept like trust in higher ed, it's not a subject like election polling, where you get many surveys every year asking the same question. Some of the data that you'll see will be linear over a few years, some will be just at one moment in time. But overall, it's representative of what we at CASE have been looking at these last few years. Another caveat, since we have people joining us from multiple countries throughout the world, I want to say at the outset a little about where this falls in across international borders. And that the main motivation for CASE's entry into this work was public opinion in the United States. We saw a decline in trust in higher education that was a trend we wanted to address, just like we'd look into any other issue that affects the advancement profession. And we know there are common threads that can apply elsewhere, and ways we can all learn from each other, and always want our work to have a global mindset, too. In fact, as you'll see, we looked at the UK and Australia as models for our work. For purposes of this presentation, I'm more heavily focused on the U.S. research to set that context. But I'd hope the messaging areas and the ways of talking about what higher ed means and does that we'll get to toward the end, I hope that can apply universally. And for those of you interested in Canadian data, I do have a few surveys there. If you want to follow up with me separately, I can share a few things that may be of interest to you there. So to anyone on the webinar from outside U.S. higher ed, including independent schools or educational associates within the U.S., certainly appreciate your interest and understanding and hope it's a great learning opportunity ahead. It's easy anecdotally to feel like higher education is under attack, or at least making negative headlines. And we do have some data that backs up these assumptions and the headlines that you see on screen from the last handful of months here. Overall, there's a declining level of public trust in higher education. As you'll see, it's in a variety of surveys, a variety of question wordings. The reputation is slipping overall, as you see in this. And there's a partisan divide on top of that. So right now we've got just over half of adults saying that colleges and universities have a positive effect on this country. We've got three years of data in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic that you see on screen here. So you might be taking it with a grain of salt. But if you zoom out to 10 years, we've got more declines and especially among Republicans, complete reversal in just seven years. Democrats' views have remained relatively constant, which you might think of higher education had truly turned into a partisan cultural wedge. You'd expect a parallel increase in support. And it shows that Democrats have concerns about the sector, too. Moving to the chart on the right with the green bars, you can see what's a 12 percentage point increase in negativity since 2012 to 2019. We also have 2021 data that is more recent, hasn't made it into that graph. The positive was up to 57 percent, but the negative was up to 41 percent. So all in all, from 2012 to 2021, you have a three percentage point decline in positivity and a 15 percent increase in negativity over the last 10 years. The previous questions talked more about overall effect on society. This question talks more about the impact it has on the individual and that cost is a concern for everybody. There's no enthusiastic group in the demographics that says college no matter what. And look specifically at the adults without degrees, second from the bottom there. So for those of you who have a lot of learners outside that 18 to 22 demographic in your college or university business model, it may be continually difficult and something for you to monitor down the line. There are a variety of reasons that people have less trust in higher ed. This Gallup poll was taken in 2017 with some perceptions about colleges and universities. And 2017, that's predating the Varsity Blues admissions scandal and it's before COVID. I'm not presenting these here to say whether these are accurate perceptions or not, or the degree institutions may be responsible directly versus other factors. But a variety of things affect perception, not just one single issue. It's classroom related, it's campus related, it's business and operations related. There are a lot of areas to sort through, think through, work through together. And lack of accountability is something that we also see mentioned a lot in these types of survey wordings. There is very strong support. I'm sure many of you know about the college scorecard, publicly available data compiled by the Federal Department of Education. Polling shows over 90% support for keeping this type of data. And depending on how the question is worded, between two thirds and three quarters support for losing taxpayer funding if the scorecard results don't meet certain metrics. So lack of accountability is something that maybe cuts across many of the factors that you see in this poll here, but also something to keep in mind. I don't want to be entirely negative. We do want to talk about how to work on this issue together. So we do have some optimistic takeaways in the data that we can carry forward. One of them is that the sector higher ed still holds its own compared to other industries. There is declining institutional trust all across the board, declining trust in concepts like expertise and science, which tie in with academia. But here on the balance, you see higher ed ranked fourth in overall confidence behind military, small business and police. Higher ed even being on the list might tell us a story in its own right. There is a public confidence poll that Gallup has done every four years since 1977. So that's right after Watergate, right after the Vietnam War. People felt there was distrust in these big societal institutions. Higher ed was only added for the 2017 survey. It had not made any of the ones before and then was taken off for 2021. So my inference, there just wasn't as much cooperation and cohesion across schools. Higher ed was thought of as less of an industry than it might be today. Case, for instance, was only around for four years prior to 1977. Maybe people don't know what to make about colleges in the collective or generic sense versus one college in the individual and specific sense. And I want to get a little bit deeper on that with an example on that point about colleges in the generic versus colleges in the specific. Because anecdotally, I've heard some of that when speaking with government relations or alumni advocacy professionals as part of sharing info about cases, work, doing some fact finding that when those professionals meet with elected officials, the official will be enthusiastic about their own alma mater or the college in their district, say lots of nice things about it. But then when they consider legislation about higher ed as a whole, that personal and local sentiment doesn't carry over. They look upon colleges and universities unfavorably, paint with a really broad brush, lots of generalizations. The graph on the left is hot off the presses for 2023. And what you see there is that every member of the Senate has a college degree. 94% of the members of the House do. And the same study found that 48 senators and almost 300 representatives have at least one degree from an institution in their state. There's that local connection there. In the graph on the right, we have some state legislature demographics. Light blue means the info wasn't available. Dark blue means less than bachelor's degree. And obviously, we would have liked to have seen who had an associate's degree or a certificate. But focusing on the red and the gray for bachelor's and graduate degrees and looking at all the states collectively, it's clear that educational attainment for elected officials at the state level outpaces the general population. They could be allies and advocates for higher ed. They've been more exposed to higher ed and could be champions in that way. Another optimistic takeaway, 80% in this poll, if you add up all the green bars, they think that pursuing education after high school is a good life choice for someone they love and want the best for. So even people who bash higher ed to score political points, they still likely want their kids to go. As I just mentioned, there's a lot of declining trust and higher ed isn't necessarily unique there. The difference for us is that people are still engaging with us and know our institutions offer something people need. When there's a decline in trust in organized religion, you see people identify themselves as less religious. When there's a decline in trust in mainstream news, you see a less engaged population in terms of current events knowledge or civics knowledge. Even if the trust is declining, there's an element of underlying belief that's still there when it comes to higher ed. One last slide of optimism, broad public support for spending at both the state and federal level to make education more affordable. The first and the third group of bars from the top are supportive. The second and the fourth disagree and it's broken down by partisan affiliation. The questions you see in this poll are vaguely worded, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it leaves me wanting more about more specific insights about what making education opportunities more affordable entails. Are there policy ideas or narratives that would be good to aim for? For instance, increasing the funding for pilgrims that would affect private colleges and universities more explicitly. And the question also words it as spend more tax dollars, not pay higher taxes. And that's a key distinction and sometimes where we run into roadblocks. Overall, though, this is a good summary as we transition away from the data heavy part of the presentation. There's plenty of support out there for higher ed, but there are some partisan differences to be mindful of. And there's an affordability element to be mindful of. Overall, though, we do have this implication that developing an educated population is beneficial for everybody and it's a worthy way to use resources. Opportunity is there for us as an industry. I want to next transition into some background about CASE's interest in this topic, where we've come from and how we've gotten to where we are today. CASE has been interested in this issue for a few years now. The photo you see is a panel event held at American University in March 2018 and live streamed across the world. That's one example. I include this not to brag or be promotional, but to show it's our responsibility as a professional association to stay on top of emerging issues that affect the profession. We can be conveners. We can have a panel that has multiple university presidents, multiple former high ranking cabinet officials, media personalities. We really see this as something that we can do, like the same thing at our CASE conferences, bring people together. And we see it as a strategic and inclusive topic that's relevant to all institutions, whether it's two-year or four-year, public and private, regardless of your enrollment size, geography, religious or academic mission, any of those demographics. We see it as something that can be helpful to you. For some, declining public trust may manifest itself in lower enrollments. For others, it may be funding issues, conversations with donors or state governments, reputational issues, just to name a couple of examples. So we had great turnout at this webinar and in the room. We thought there was momentum. We saw there was interest and we decided to dive a little bit deeper. We did our research, looked into other ways the topic had been addressed. And for those of you who don't know, CASE is a global association. In addition to Washington, D.C., we have offices in Mexico City, London, Singapore, and Perth. So we looked at examples internationally of the higher education sector speaking with one voice to reinforce the benefits that they bring to society. Made at Uni is a campaign of Universities UK. Keep it Clever is from Universities Australia. And their member institutions are coming together to share stories of how they benefit society. And what we liked also is that they're doing it in kind of universal ways, themes like creativity and breakthroughs and energy. Things that can, again, apply to all institution types and represent the entirety of higher ed. While we were doing our homework, we also heard about a bill that was making its way through the Washington state legislature called the Workforce Education Investment Act. And it's a higher business and occupation tax that's levied on about 20 percent of the businesses in Washington state to fund the Washington College Grant. And that provides full tuition expenses almost anywhere in state, public or private, for students from lowest income households and partial aid for low middle income families. And what stood out to us were three things. An effort called Yes, It's Possible, where colleges and universities came together to lay the groundwork for this law. And again, private and public, they did it individually and through existing groups like the State Board of Community and Technical Colleges or the Council of Presidents, which is for four year institutions. Secondly, they mobilized their alumni bases to speak out as concerned citizens and support. And when you mobilize alumni, inherently you get a diverse range of ages, occupations, political affiliations, locations within the state speaking out in unison and reaching a lot of legislators. Microsoft and Amazon were some of the biggest supporters from the beginning on this. Now, college and university support for this law, that's self-interested. We're acting in our own best interests. The industry voice makes it clear that it's about the greater needs of the state. These companies said, raise our taxes. They raised their hand. They said, please do this. We'll still benefit in the long run by having more talented students remaining in state. So this law is an example that informed our thinking, and not in a super specific way. We're not going to lobby for identical bills like this in every state. A number of reasons why we wouldn't do that. But it showed what can happen when colleges and universities are working collectively to talk about their value. This is the type of impact that can be had in a place which values higher education. And it's already had impact for the students in Washington. We have a few graduating classes already who are soon to be in the workforce making a difference. And I'm excited to see what the long term impacts of this law are going to be. So with that awareness and momentum, we applied for and received a grant in late 2020 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to build messaging around the positive impact of higher education, which we've developed under the brand name Discover the Next. We want to amplify and complement the findings of one of the Gates Foundation's projects, the Post-Secondary Value Commission. And that focuses primarily on the individual financial benefits of higher education. We want to reinforce that, but also branch out and spotlight the ways society at large benefits. And those benefits are going to be regardless of an individual's educational experience. That even if somebody didn't go to college, they still benefit from the work being done at colleges and universities, from the work of people who have pursued post-secondary education, from having a college or university in their local community. Our partner associations in the effort are ACE and AGB. They're professional associations just like CASE. ACE is for presidents and chancellors. AGB is for trustees and regents. And those groups are very similar to CASE's membership in some ways. They work across the whole institution and all institution types are represented in their membership. Discover the Next is going to be a unified campaign of colleges and universities sharing stories of achievement, innovation, and distinction. And we can provide a framework, but the stories are yours. The external supporters and champions are yours. Success to us is engagement-based and reach-based. The number of institutions participating, use of the material you come up with, communicating with us what you're doing around this issue on your campus. We know we can't sway the Pew or the Gallup polling by tons of percentage points in one year. And even if it did swing, we wouldn't be wholly responsible for a shift in either direction. Some of the causes and sentiments about public trust or the political dynamics have been in progress for decades. And sometimes with great financial backing or political organization behind it. It'll take sustained effort to reverse it and speak about the positive impacts of higher ed. I want to now turn to what exactly we're doing and what exactly we're talking about when we communicate the value of higher education. Some of you on this webinar may have been part of a conference committee, a district cabinet, other groups. That's a big part of case culture, volunteer leadership. So we put together a steering committee to guide this work and help build the messaging. You can see a partial screenshot of one of our meetings on the right there. There are alumni and comms professionals, some government relations folks as well. And all institution types are represented, which is something that was important to us. We know the TV or movie depiction of college is usually very narrow or that news media can focus on elements of the student experience that aren't universally applicable. Maybe only applied to a handful of institutions. And we know when we talk about higher ed or the sector, a part of that storytelling is making sure everybody is represented. Keeping with that theme of members being the drivers, what the Gates Foundation recognized that case can bring to the table is all of you. Cases membership being professionals in comms, alumni relations, development, advocacy, just to name a few. That's a stakeholder focused, externally facing audience. It's not caught up in academia or jargon. You work directly with highly active and engaged alumni advocates and partners in the local or business community who can be these champions for higher ed. By telling our story collectively, we amplify the value of higher ed to our communities. And as you know, storytelling is a great stewardship opportunity. It's a chance to shine and connect with alums or community leaders or donors. We wanted this work to be grounded in experience and research. You've heard about the other associations and the steering committees who have helped shape this work. Our messaging goal is to find specific talking points that build the case for the support of value of higher ed in communities at the local level, together, broadly, nationally and internationally. And that you can tell that story with the support of all of our institutions. So as you're doing the work of coalition building and working in community and enrollment strategy, so within your own local context, you have the support, the research and the messaging behind you to lift the sector as a whole along with you. And use the power of all of higher ed as you do that work. Focus group testing can help complement that messaging. Now, our focus group testing was not the surveys that I showed you earlier in the presentation. We weren't asking for their general thoughts about higher ed. We were asking more specifically about tangible benefits and phrasing of how those tangible benefits are communicated. Overall, though, we were optimistic about what we saw. The messages are heading in the right direction. There's a baseline of support out there for higher ed. Though there are some things to be mindful of here and there, and we'll get to that in our next slides. Between the steering committee discussion and focus group testing, we coalesced around four broadly applicable areas that show the tangible benefits of what higher ed means and does. A lot of the stories can fall into personal achievement, economic advancement, scientific innovation, and community connection. I'll get into each one in a little more detail. I'll show some examples of each pillar in action. And then just briefly have the more extended talking points on the screen. I know it's a lot of text, and don't worry about reading every word of it in the moment. I just wanted to have them on there so when you get the slides and the link to the recording afterwards, you can read and digest them more fully and at your own pace. Now, personal achievement, that's not just getting the credential and the job readiness, but it's fulfillment aspects of things, too, building new skills and talents, interacting with people of different backgrounds. Originally, we wanted to go very heavy on the credentials, but focus group testing, that did help. They said it didn't have to be an either-or between credentials and personal development skills. And if anything, they took it a step further, that they pointed out, why haven't you talked about people who met their spouse at college, people who have met lifelong friends, the pride that people have when they graduate or when a loved one graduates? They also talked about jobs that don't exist today. And the messaging overall, it ties in with so much that we can do at the institutional level. Innovation, particularly innovations that increase affordability or reduce the time to credential, like breaking down barriers around transfer credits, those can go a long way. People want to hear about that. And by sharing actions we have taken to address affordability, access, and attainment, we demonstrate our responsibility and it helps us build public support. I also want to point out the bullet point about bringing together students with different perspectives, helping students expand their worldview and promote creative thinking. That tested very well, and I think it really fits in with the conversations that you might be having on your campuses around diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging. That's a great fit there. Economic advancement refers to the business angle, the idea of creating an educated and credentialed workforce, and that research and development done on college campuses can make better products. There's certainly the competitive angle, both regionally and globally, that's a part of economic advancement too. And we found that alumni are very capable messengers who are already well-versed in the societal benefits of colleges and universities, not just their own alma mater, that if you have alumni advocacy networks, you can leverage people in a variety of businesses to be enthusiastic about the whole sector. Anecdotally, again, it's like what we were talking about before, the difference between college in the specific and college in the generic. Alumni advocates are really good at making that connection and making that case. Scientific innovation, certainly that category has the pandemic front and center right now. Medical might take on a larger role in people's minds, but we intend it to be inclusive of all types of personnel and scientific initiatives. And indeed in our research, our focus group testing, people found a variety of occupations and a variety of sites to be valuable when talking about scientific innovation. So not all R1 PhD level personnel, first responders to these like clinics as well as labs, but one precaution that we would take with the messaging is that, and same thing applies to economic advancement too, that there are other places where innovations happen. We can't take the entirety of the credit. There are national labs, there are corporate R&D facilities. So we should be conscious of that, that we're a place, colleges and universities are places where innovations do happen, but not at the expense of other people who are contributing to the effort. Community connection refers to local economic impact certainly, but also cultural arts, sports access, the benefits of research and internships and community service from the college community as well. We definitely recommend going tangible and narrative, avoiding that all-in-one economic impact number and seeking out specific examples of where your college or university has made an impact locally. Of the four messaging pillars, this didn't resonate the best in the focus group testing, not that it was a negative or a drain, but sometimes we just need to make that extra effort to connect the dots, particularly with the K-12 example, for instance, or the cultural activities like concerts and theater, people might not realize that is owned by the local college or university, or there might be student teachers or externships or things like that. Certainly for around this time of year with March Madness, I know I had the epiphany working on this project a few months ago when I was kind of preparing a presentation like this and realizing I'm a big basketball fan because there was a local college or university where I had no family connection or anything, but tickets were free, went with family, and a lifelong basketball fan to this day, thanks to a university that neither parent worked at, I didn't enroll in, nothing like that, but there's that community connection. So applicable this time of year, and I'm sure there are plenty of examples on your campuses as well. Let's walk through where we are specifically with Discover the Next at this point, kind of what we have coming down the line and ways that you can get involved as well. Since we received the grant, we've been in what we like to call the quiet phase. I'm sure that's familiar for those of you working on the development side of the house, really doing our homework, doing our background research, building out infrastructure and materials behind the initiative, certainly developing the brand, the logo, everything behind that, that was part of our process. We've built out discoverthenext.org, although certainly hoping to keep updating it as much as we can. We're in the phase where we're engaging a lot now with lots of interested groups, individual institutions, associations, conferences, panels, webinars like this, really want to surface the issue to as many people as we can and share what we're doing to address it and to provide solutions for colleges and universities that may be helpful. And over time, we wanna build out engagement with other external audiences as well. We wanna keep producing templates and tools and resources for participants to share messages of the value they're providing with their own stakeholders and in their own contexts. We wanna take advantage of times when the eyes of the community are on higher ed. So for instance, having a suite of tools ready to go around commencement season, ways to incorporate value-related messaging into, let's say, a commencement program or on the commencement website, speaker remarks, things like that. We'll wanna do targeted prompts around story themes. Remember, I had talked about in the UK and Australia, they have these prompts of stories around creativity or breakthroughs or energy, just to name three. Things like that where we can show colleges and universities acting collectively and synchronously to talk about the value they bring. We also had a recent event called Perceptions of Higher Education. Some of you may have seen it, and thank you to all who either dialed in or were in the room at our District 8 Conference in Bellevue, Washington at the beginning of February. It was a really energetic, thoughtful panel. As you can see from the titles there, we have college and university representation. We have association representation, corporate representation and the backgrounds of the panelists too. We had a variety of fields represented. Really interesting discussion. Would encourage you to go to discoverthenext.org slash perceptions. You can read a write-up. You can read some background reading and discussion questions around it. And of course the full video is on there too. But that's something, it's kind of a midway point or a bookend of sorts to that panel at American University that we had in 2018, which I talked about before. Similar idea of having an in-person panel that's live streamed to folks around the world. We had 15 different countries participating this time around. And we want to continue to have opportunities to talk about the topic, such as this one. Again, being that convener, bringing folks together to think through the general topic of trust in higher education and value of higher education and what we can do about it together. There are some steps that you can be involved with too. We'd love to have your participation. And the first step would be to share the stories that you saw on those previous slides. You all saw images of story headlines when we went through the four main messaging areas. They came to us from institutions who are signed on as participants in Discover the Next. We really want discoverthenext.org to be this hub of the great work that's being done at colleges and universities. They can serve as story ideas to share with one another, certainly. You might see something that resonates with you, something that you know you have on your campus that would be worth highlighting. But it's also an element of proof of concept for external audiences, that these are individual stories and solutions, but we're talking collectively to advance the sector, really putting a larger framework around that localized expertise. So if you want us to link to your stories, you can certainly scan the QR code or go to discoverthenext.org, click join. You just fill out a brief form and provide us with one piece, and again, existing content, stories you already have already on your website that align with those four main messaging pillars. And I will say self-publicing as the person who monitors that inbox and gets to post the stories. It's really, it's been a fun part of this job too, just seeing all the creative, innovative, impactful things that are happening at a variety of institutions all across the country and world. So I definitely enjoy reading through it and would be happy to see what you've got and then to highlight it on discoverthenext.org as an example of the value that your institutions provide. There are other resources we have on the website, certainly the messaging, those talking points that we've developed. Those are online. The story I just mentioned. A variety of suggested activities, ways to bring up the value of higher education and talk about public perceptions of higher education with your own constituents. So they could range from activities like putting it on the agenda at an advancement team meeting, a presidential cabinet meeting, Rotary Club, consortium, wherever it is. Ways that you can begin to have these conversations with an audience and really share out. When I've given presentations in the past in person, it's great to have people talking to one another, learning from one another, finding that common ground of things that they may have seen before and things that have been successful in building trust in the local community and with your local audiences. We have some tools and resources already on the website and hoping are coming soon. I mentioned a toolkit around commencement, for instance. We have some op-ed and video things that should be on there within the next few weeks. So examples of op-eds and videos, but also kind of peeking behind the curtain, the how-to or kind of dissecting what went into it and what can be effective in reinforcing value messaging. So we'll have those paired side by side and we should have those up within the next few weeks. And none of these templates or tools are designed to be heavy lifts or diverge too much from the work you're already doing. Certainly we know you're busy and budgets and personnel might be what they are. So again, not a change in pace from what you're doing, but that you can do it with the full strength and support of the higher education sector behind you. And we can make the case for the value of higher education and the value that your institution brings. We can do that together. And again, to reiterate, our success on this is reach and engagement based. So definitely want you to let us know what you're using, how you're talking about value, what response you're getting from your local stakeholders. It's really good to keep that dialogue going. Certainly grateful to have the participation of a lot of institutions, and again, a diverse institutions from all around the country and the world. Glad that we're currently at two slides worth of participating institutions right now. Would love to add even more. Would love to talk with many of you, hear what it's like at your institutions and what strategies you may have found effective in the past too. So I'll open it up to Q&A, but definitely want to thank you for your time today and looking forward to keeping the conversation going and staying in touch. So with that, I'll turn it over to Lauren, who I believe will be facilitating. Yeah, thank you, Andrew, for the phenomenal information that was shared. So one of the questions that we have in the chat box is, do you have any suggestions for institutions in higher ed in Florida? Yeah, I would say that Florida does provide certainly a wide range of institutions and cooperation. Specifically, I haven't looked at public opinion polling from there, but I would say having that statewide look is a good way to start, both with systems and public private. Speaking from my legislatively, as far as community connection, I know the all-in-one impact number doesn't resonate as much with the legislature. At a previous job, we spent a lot of time coming up with an economic impact number and it kind of fell a little bit flat because the legislature at the time said we don't believe in this amount of public funding. And it doesn't matter if it's a good return on investment or not, they didn't want to fund it. And that was related to tourism funding, but I feel like a lot of those lessons would carry over as far as perceptions in Florida that the narrative and tangible case makes the difference more than thinking about it in purely economic number terms because that hasn't persuaded them in the past. But definitely I would say statewide working together colleges and universities, that's a great place to start because you have similar external stakeholders and you can show the broad coalition of support among a variety of institutions. So it helps build your case because you can kind of enumerate the differences between institutions. That's something that we've found that there's been a general lack of awareness among the public about institution types, that the general public might not be able to distinguish let's say liberal arts from research university. There's not a lot of knowledge about that our institutions are nonprofit, that a surprising number of people think colleges and universities are only for profit. So I think it's a good place to start when you're talking collectively and show the diverse range of missions and outcomes that you have. So definitely think about it in geographic terms. That's a good start. You're already taking that good first step. Awesome. You shared some really great data in the beginning of your presentation. If people are interested in looking more into data, what are some tools or where are some places that people can go to find more information about such? Sure. The two or I'd say the three pollsters that we used, Pew Research does great work and I'm a past employee of the Pew Charitable Trust which is the umbrella organizations. But I don't say that out of self-interest. There's no conflict of interest. We didn't work with the center at all but they have a higher ed topic page that I find the data are good but also they wrap it up nicely and explain context that the actual write-ups are very easy to digest. Gallup is a little bit hit or miss with higher ed polling. They'll not knocking the survey quality or anything but we can't expect higher ed stuff from Gallup every year but when they do have something, it is good. And then the New America Varying Degrees Study, I really like and I cited a few times in the presentation. And what's useful for your audiences too is that they have an online, the data visualization online is great that you can slice and dice the data up in so many ways by age of the respondent, by ethnic group, by geographic location, by income, by education attainment. There are almost too many categories that I can't include it in the presentation because there are just so many ways to slice up the data but I definitely recommend that and playing around with their interactive data tool. So New America Varying Degrees in addition to Pew and Gallup. Awesome, thank you. And then our last question is, did you have a sense of why the focus was on scientific innovation or why the questioning was focused that way rather than technological or societal solutions or any other area of innovation? Part of that was that technology we saw as factoring in with economic advancement that people associate technology with business rather than scientific innovation as much. We definitely did change it from medical innovation to scientific innovation, again, trying to be more expansive that way but there certainly are stories that, and these messaging pillars, there are definitely some that straddle multiple lines and can cross over. So technology, we saw it as economic advancement because it relates to kind of newer things, discovering newer innovations and solutions but I'm sure there are some where it can fit into the scientific category as well and there can be overlap. Awesome, so we still have some questions rolling in. It seems like people are really interested. Someone else said, maybe you saw what happened at Stanford recently, a student shouted down a guest speaker and a judge. That's not a good look for the university according to many people and it seems anti-unethical to free speech and critical thinking from a public information standpoint. How do you present that in a more flattering way? Sure, and on that one, I would say I sort of defer to the communications professionals in the room, folks who are used to kind of handling media inquiries for the immediate short-term but from where I sit, I see that as part of the growth and discovery angle that it's something that can be played up kind of in that personal achievement pillar of hopefully that it's something about growth, that free information exchange of ideas but certainly as far as addressing if there's an incident like that that happens on campus or a controversial speaker, I would certainly trust your judgment and experience on that or your colleagues who are in that department but that's definitely something that's contributed to some of the perceptions. So on the slide that had the various reasons that people might have negative perceptions of higher ed and free speech and politicization is something that's concerned and in a bipartisan way, obviously people have different interpretations of it but it's definitely something that is an issue that people want to ask about. And I'd also say that it gets back to kind of painting with a broad brush or college in the generic versus college in the specific that maybe at your institution, you're asked those questions about incidents like that and it's not something that happens on your campus or taking hot button political issues of the day that don't necessarily apply to your institution. For instance, I've had folks who are at technical college and they're asked about tenure by people who have political opinions about tenure and they say, that's not our business model as much that we don't have tenure track faculty. So it's an educational opportunity that way also to talk about the things that people see in the news that may or may not apply to your institution. So there are multiple ways of going about it but it's definitely an issue to, an issue within the issue to keep in mind. So you referred to some resources that people can use to gather data. And someone said they knew about Gallup and PW but what was the third resource that you suggested that participants utilize? Sure, that was new America and the survey is called varying degrees. Awesome, and then someone else listed that they noticed that there wasn't a community college on your list of participants. Do you welcome their stories as well? Just confirmation or if not, why? Oh, absolutely. And we have a number of community colleges on the list and trying to scroll. Actually, maybe I'll reshare but, and you can see on our website too we do have a list of participating institutions but multiple community colleges and the stories are very much welcome. I think some of our colleges they don't say community college in the full name it's just location and college. So that might be why but certainly stories from all institution types are welcomed and it'll make us speaking together more effective when we have a diverse range of institutions. Great, someone else commented referring to your last question that ratings would be helpful to turn to in those instances. And then someone else said that they don't work in communications which area of university should participants share discover the next with two who are considering joining? Should we just share the link or do you have any other ways for them to get connected? Sure, I'm happy to connect with anybody as needed you know, even directly I can drop my email in the chat or share my contact information and Brian Flavin who's our VP who's also been involved in cases thought leadership work. So you can get back in touch with us but happy to talk with anybody. We've found that communications folks are usually good facilitators of sharing those stories but certainly having an advocate for the institution whether it's at in any other department who can loop us in with them or at the presidential level too. Sometimes somebody like a chief of staff or board liaison can be an effective facilitator that way but certainly happy to have your expertise around it no matter what part of advancement wherever you sit. Awesome, so our last question goes back to one of the beginning questions that we had about technological versus societal solutions in terms of innovation. She said, well, what about societal solutions in innovation such as conflict resolution? And other advancements that we all benefit from? Could you elaborate on it? Sure, and I think the overall the names of the pillars they're good summaries but certainly we want the focus to be on kind of the talking points or the narrative elements within and the stories that are your examples of it. So I don't anticipate our aside from on the Discover the Next website but I don't anticipate the titles of the four pillars if you will, making it up its way out to the public and outside stakeholders. So we want them to be summaries without let's say full-fledged marketing taglines or anything like that. Awesome, so it sounds, yep, Maya said, thank you for explaining. So it sounds like we have some great questions that came through. I wanna remind you that this recording will be available after this session is over within about a week or so you can find it at learn.case.org in addition to those other resources that I stated such as the presentation slides in the CFRE credit. Andrew, if there's anything else that you wanna add. Just my gratitude to all of you for joining today. I hope you enjoyed the session and I would look forward to staying in touch answering any follow-up questions you might have and appreciate your time. Agreed, I hope you guys had a great time and enjoy the rest of your afternoon. Thank you.

higher education

seminar

CASE

value

public trust

Andrew Shull

Discover the Next

messaging