Okay, let's get going. Hi everyone, I'm Jennifer Cunningham, and I work in alumni relations and I'm here today with Brian Piper and Jennifer Campbell, I'll let them do more extensive introductions of themselves in just a second, but I'm so glad you're here today. We talk a lot in our industry about breaking down silos, and often we talk about that in terms of within advancement. So how do development officers work with engagement officers, how do development officers work with donor relations and so on. Well, today we're breaking even bigger silos and talking about university communications and advancement communications and how those departments can work together, and maybe even some college communications will float in here as well. Our success is based not just on what Jennifer and Brian impart on us, their wisdom, but also the contributions that you make. So I hope that you'll ask lots of questions via the chat, and that you'll also contribute ways that you found within your institutions of working together through your communications teams. So just a couple housekeeping things, we are recording this, and I think it'll be available afterwards if you have to check out early or share it with friends after we're finished. Again, if you want to ask questions or make comments, please put them in the comments and use chat with everyone, not just the panelists, so that we can get a good back channel going there. Okay, so we're going to ask Jenny and Brian a few questions to get us warmed up, and then I'll say, okay, now it's really time for the big dialogue, but do put in your questions anytime. Okay, so Jennifer Campbell, please introduce yourself. Sure, so I forgot to put Cornell in my name and in Zoom, sorry about that, but I am currently the Senior Director for Strategic Communications in Advancement at Cornell University, which is a wildly decentralized place where there are many different pockets of advancement and pockets of communications. And so we're sort of a hub and a spoke when it comes to the relationship with central university communications. I have also worked in the central operation of communications and university relations at Cornell, in a business college at Cornell. And I also spent a few years leading the entire suite of marketing communications from enrollment through advancement and everything in between at Ithaca College, which is a more centralized undergraduate focused college nearby. So I have kind of all those hats, so I try not to wear all at the same time, but hopefully some of them will show up. Brian. I'm Brian Piper. I'm the Director of Content Strategy and Assessment in University Marketing and Communications at the University of Rochester. Most of my job is spent looking at content performance data and figuring out what content we should do more of and what we should do less of. We are central marketing, and we are also very siloed as an institution. But being in Central MarCom, we have the opportunity to work with all sorts of different schools. And so I'm sure we'll be talking about some of the ways that we do that. Fabulous. Okay. Jacob from CASE. Did we figure out how to do a poll? Jacob from CASE. I believe so. Boom. There we go. There we go. All right. Tell us in which department you work, please. And Jacob, I see some people are also waiting in the waiting room. So if you could let them in, that'd be awesome. OK, well, we have a nice balance here. About half work in advancement, Markham, half 8% in university marketing, 8% in college. We don't have any consultants, which is surprising because you'd think they'd want to creep on how this is working and how they could help us. Other advanced departments, about 30% and other 5%. Fabulous. So Jennifer and Brian, that gives you a nice view of who you're talking to. And I will end the poll now. And I hit share results. I don't know what that did, but in any event, let's get going. OK, so could you both describe the audiences that you primarily focus on? And what happens when there's overlap or decisions to make among those departments? Say, who should post on what social channels? What's the timing of that? Which newsletter do things go in? What is the angle? If you could just kind of set things off with that answer to that question. So Brian, why don't you go first? You're unmuted. Yeah, so most in university marketing communications, our primary audience is prospective undergraduate students and what we call knowledge seekers. So our strategic goals are really focused around admissions and working more closely with our admissions team, and then also brand reputation and awareness. So we do partner closely with lots of other groups across the campus. We create content for a large number of audiences, but those are really our primary audiences. We work a lot with our friends in advancement to when they have certain stories that align with institutional strategic goals or that lend themselves to connecting with the audiences that we're focused on, we make sure we work with them to elevate their work. But we run the flagship social channels for the institution, and then advancement also has their social channels that they promote on as well. And we're always looking for opportunities to help elevate each other's messaging and stories when it aligns with the work we're doing and the goals that we have. Jennifer. Yeah, so our area is really focused on university level alumni and other families and friends who are family members, mainly being those who have some kind of connection either as a parent of a current student who has some potential for giving her engagement or things like that. So we do span alumni, the business purposes of alumni engagement and also development. They're increasingly integrated for us, which is really helpful. In terms of those kind of decisions, it's interesting because we have, in terms of the direct recipients of communications, direct channels, we have the biggest audience. We have something like 185,000 emailable alumni, for example, contactable alumni. But the university itself has the bigger platform in terms of breadth of eyeballs. And so if we have, if there's a big announcement to make, even if it's about giving, for example, the university really takes the lead on that because they're sort of the source of record in a way for things like this. University publications on social channels and their news website. And we, even though it might be a development story, are generally the amplifiers of something like that. We'll include it in the next logical alumni newsletter that comes up or the development communications teams in the college that maybe is a beneficiary of that gift will then rerun it. So when there's something with university implications, that tends to be the case. Similarly with kind of sensitive leadership messages and things of that nature. So we've kind of worked that out over time. I would say there've maybe been a little bit of turfiness in the past about whose story something is. What we do in the advancement side, in addition to amplifying something like that is we may then decide what sort of derivative content does it make sense for us to follow up with based on our audiences and our objectives. So if there's a big announcement about a mental health initiative that was a gift, are there people that we now wanna interview about efforts on campus and what it might be like now versus when people were here 20 years ago? So we'll kind of add that more, I guess, targeted or niche sort of spin on something if we want our audiences to engage with it as more than simply, oh, good, you have a big announcement to make. Okay, fantastic. I did wanna address a definition that someone in the chat is asking about. Just advancement generally refers to the department within a university that focuses on fundraising and engagement alumni, but increasingly parents and friends and other people in the universe of the university. So there's a saying about never wasting a good crisis and that in my experience, that tends to force the two departments together even if they don't interlap as much as yours do. So can you talk a little bit about how you've used crises to shape and clarify your processes and how you work together? Sure, I can jump in. Go ahead, Jennifer. I can start. I will try not to go down too many rabbit holes on this. It's kind of a weird topic I geek out on. I think what really becomes evident when there are institutional crises, I think is mostly what we'll be talking about here is the value that advancement shops, and especially the advancement communication shops, the value that we bring to central university communications or university relations in times like this can really yield long-term improvements in processes, how we coordinate both with the central unit and also with the office of the president, with other kind of leadership level organizations. We have, what I think we've been able to take advantage of, if I can use that term, even though it sounds a little crass, is we've got kind of on the street in immediate data about how a large swath of the university's audiences are reacting to things. Sometimes we can flag, hey, there's some chatter that you might wanna be aware of and it turns out, I think sometimes to my surprise, they were not in fact aware yet. Other times- Sorry, the university communications were not aware. Yeah, yeah, I've been really, really surprised about that, but sometimes they're very focused on what's going on with media and dealing with or trying to get a message out the door, which requires 70,000 stakeholder sign-offs and things like that. And so we can provide a little bit of that immediate on the street kind of knowledge. Conversely, if there is a perception in somewhat of an echo chamber that people are freaking out about a certain thing, we have data that can show to the extent to which that is true. And that has been incredibly helpful, not just for our own leadership, but for central leadership to be able to contextualize for trustees or for other people who are convinced that hair is on fire when maybe it's only a couple of people. But sometimes they're also right. So we're useful there. I think also we have a really tried and true set of influencers, peer influencers in our alumni volunteers, in some donors who are not even necessarily volunteers, who have trusted relationships with people who don't necessarily believe what the university says, or frankly, don't even notice what the university says. They see something in the New York Post or in a closed Facebook channel, and they don't know what the rest of the story is. And so for good or for ill, we have a body of influencers that we can lend to the cause and that we can also kind of use as awareness about what's being said out there. And so that those kinds of things, I think have just been incredibly helpful in times of crisis, and of course, in non-crisis moments as well. It's those posts that start with, actually. Yeah, never undervalue a community self-policing itself. Like that is far better than any interventions that we could design. Absolutely. Brian, how would you answer that question? How do you harness a good crisis? So, yeah, we run into a lot of crisis situations and we have crisis comms within our MarCom department. We also do, we handle most of the communications out from the president as well. So as soon as something is happening, we immediately reach out to the different offices to make sure that any communications that are coming out from anywhere in the university are consistent and they're on message and they understand who is speaking about those things. We're lucky that two years ago, our vice president of communications left and then the interim vice president was the current and is now again, the AVP of marketing communications and donor relations from advancement. So she came over and got an integral look at the workings of our team and we got to know her very well. So that really helped increase the cooperation and the collaboration between those groups. But as Jennifer was saying, it's critical to reach out and connect with all those different teams because they all have different access to data, to different technologies, to different audiences that they're connected with. So being able to leverage that social listening that other departments and other groups across the institution are doing has been incredibly beneficial in helping us inform our messaging and as well as making sure that we're not delivering the same messages to the same audience on multiple different channels because that's the last thing they need in a crisis is to get five different emails from different people across the institution. So we always try to plan as much as we can for crisis situations, but that's only works some of the time. So it's really important to make sure that we have these open lines of communication between other people on other teams. And we really help facilitate that outside of any crisis situation, we attend each other's and we have content officers from the different groups and editors from the different teams that all meet together. We all come to each other's meetings so that we understand what content's being created, what messages are being delivered. And that's just been incredibly helpful. We also have a lot of different groups that we've created for governance. We have a web governance group, we have a AI community of practice, accessibility community of practice that include members from all of those different areas across the institution. So we're trying to foster those relationships as much as we can so that when something does happen, instead of trying to react to the situation immediately, we reach out to the rest of our network to make sure that everybody is on the same page and delivering the same message. Ryan, you said something really interesting that made me think maybe the solution to all this silo breaking is just having staff members do a little job swap for a while, like little internships in each other's shops to see what they really do. It sounds like that was really helpful at Rochester to have somebody who knew. And Jennifer, you've gone in a bunch of different departments so that's why you're here sharing your insights. Yeah, I've kind of orchestrated my own little job swap journey. You bring up a great point too, I think both of you about empathy. I think there's a, not just in crisis moments, but certainly in any kind of big news moment, there's a really good opportunities to understand what different pressures people are responding like are really on people. And that can pay off for a long time to come is just simply understanding where people are coming from and what they have to deal with. Our vice president for university relations during the recent year of issues related to student protests and related matters. We wound up getting his agreement to do a series of town halls with alumni volunteers. I think all told we reached a few hundred people, maybe up to four or 500 people. And it was really eyeopening to him in terms of, wow, these are the kind of questions that your gift officers are getting every day. These are the sorts of things people don't understand or don't realize is out there, sort of the value of repetition, breaking through the noise and storytelling. We all know this, but just the misinformation that the sort of customer service kind of orientation that I think alumni affairs and fundraising people are really kind of obligated to in a way that sometimes you don't have to be if you're more kind of up in the upstairs office, pushing things out, it's really eyeopening. Right. Jennifer, I'm gonna stick with you. Allison has a great question. Wondering if you can speak more to the data points you use to prove or disprove if your audience is freaking out, hair on fire. Yeah, one of the big things that we rely on honestly is an email analysis. We wait social media a little differently just because keyboard warriors are, there's a difference in quality of keyboard warriors, motivation if they're just on social, but if they're emailing you, it's like a little bit higher. So we keep track of every email that comes in about any certain kind of crisis topics. And we look at who they are, whether do they have any sort of engagement history with us or do they have any sort of giving history with us? Not simply the top tier people, but just broadly are these people who ordinarily are engaging with us. And quickly, what kind of, as best we can, a quick and dirty sentiment analysis. The number alone has been helpful. I think during last year's crisis, Fred, our vice president was asking sometimes daily for us to update on the numbers so that he could communicate that to the president, the board chair, for a sense of, okay, like you're hearing from 20 people who are already close into the university and who have your number. How representative are those 20 people? But it also helped us validate if people are upset or supportive, or is there anything about them, what's in common about them, if anything? Is it a regional thing? Is it a demographic thing, et cetera? We also do a lot of data gathering a little less quantitatively from our alumni relations staff. What are they hearing from their volunteers? What kind of hard questions are their volunteers getting? How many volunteers have said that they're resigning from their position? So in the moment, metrics like that can be a little tough to gauge what the real implication is, and sometimes they change. And people say they're never gonna engage again, and then they do, but it still provides a good snapshot. Yeah, well on the topic of data, Brian, your specialty is finding insights in the data. In fact, you've written a few books using data in the background there. So how do you work with Rochester's advancement team to help them boost their content using the data? Or if you'd like to talk about, I know you do some consulting with other universities, you maybe use some of those schools as an example. Yeah, and I think, you know, a big part of that is just raising people's awareness about the opportunities that, you know, I mean, we do search engine optimization workshops across the campus. So I've done several of those within the advancement team. And we do the same thing. We do AI workshops, analytics workshops. Then the other thing we do is we'll do regular audits against their content. So we're always looking for opportunities to, you know, help them find those, you know, high performing or potentially high performing pieces of content. We're always monitoring organic keywords like that are institutionally relevant. We're looking at search and what people are searching on to find their pages as well as our pages. We've created dashboards for them to help them monitor those on their own. And then we work with them to make sure that they're, you know, that they understand like when an opportunity arises. So we're always looking for ways to help them elevate their content. You know, whether that's either doing the optimization work or helping them do that work, or, you know, connecting their content to the pillar pages that we've created across the institution or promoting it on social channels. And always looking for ways to help like repurpose, reuse, retarget quality content that is already out there. And even beyond data, just structure, structurally, there's a lot that can be done to help create better coordination and collaboration between these groups. So we're looking at ways to, you know, tag our content more effectively so that we can share it across the teams. We're coming up with content calendars so that, you know, not only are we collaborating around the different content that we're putting out, but we're also looking for opportunities to be able to, you know, better inventory and know what's available from, you know, photo standpoints and videos and stories that we're collecting. So really trying to think less about, you know, individual pieces of content or individual sets of data, but really looking strategically at where can we have the most impact and where can we add the most value for our students and for our, you know, the students of the future who are alumni, so. Yeah, great. So it sounds like, if we're looking at an org chart, would university communications be at the top, or do you consider yourself more of a partner, but you do take some leadership in those things you were talking about, offering the learnings and things? Is that, what's the structure there? Yeah, we're definitely a partner with those other groups and the other teams where we work really closely with admissions, but we also see ourselves as, you know, kind of a center of excellence where we're trying to bring the people with the most, you know, with any knowledge that we have that's deep knowledge about particular topic areas, whether it's, you know, web development or information architecture, SEO, what's the other, oh, accessibility. We're trying to make sure that we create an opportunity. We're building those communities of practice out from central marketing to really be a resource for any teams that need that help, that need that guidance, or that want to bring their expertise to the table as well. Okay, yeah, that center of excellence, I like that term. All right, Jennifer, you've worked on all sides of the coin, so, and we are recording this, but I'm not going to hold you to it if you ever become the queen of all the things, but if you were building a marketing vertical from scratch, how would you structure that dream team so that it best served the institution's need to communicate and all the audience's desires to engage with content according to their interests? So forget university comms, college comms, advancement, like what is the dream hierarchy or partnership? Oh, man, that's, yeah, that's tough. I actually, I like that phrase, center of excellence. I want to pull that again because I think there's a few kind of philosophies that are smart to have. I think this is particularly true if you're in an organization where the same team is responsible for anything from enrollment to advancement and to media, et cetera, but it also plays in more decentralized places. I think first and foremost, I think we have to start with who our audiences are that are most relevant to our business purposes. At Ithaca College, for example, they were so heavily dependent on yearly enrollment numbers, so heavily tuition dependent that it had an enormous, it took up an enormous share of attention from the communicators who also had advancement on their plates, for example, but so I think understanding what our audiences really need to do and feel and experience in order for our purposes to be met. I would then look next, and honestly, before I even look at people, I'm looking at the tech stack. What do we have? What do we not have? What do we maybe can get in terms of things like content syndication, shared CMS or not, shared DAM or not, let alone the marketing analytics and things that Brian just spoke to. If I were designing this from scratch, I would design that before I designed the people part, honestly. And you just described to those who might not know, what is a tech stack? Well, I guess I'm thinking more about the, I'm thinking primarily about what your web environment is, front end and back end, what your analytics operation is like, and other kind of communication tools, for example, CRM, your email marketing suite, things along those lines. So the kind of tools that are required for communication is what I was mainly thinking of. You can get into other tech issues too, of course, that affect all of us, but that was what I said, what I meant when I said it. And I think from there, I do favor a little more centralization when it comes to, there are capabilities that don't need to be replicated in 2,500 different spots around the university or the college. There's content that doesn't need to be created multiple times over, like Brian was talking about an inventory, and just knowing what people are creating so you can be a better scavenger or repurposer. So I generally would favor a little more centralization than not when it comes to core capabilities, core tools, and even core storytelling, because a good brand story can be adapted to many different audience purposes. Where I would localize talent is in those areas where you really need to create an offering for your audience that's going to land with them, where does something need to reflect personal knowledge of your audience or understanding of what to deliver to them that is tailored to them that's going to make them feel seen and heard and preferred. And those are the places where I would really localize. And then, and honestly, the other piece, which is the kind of creator side, it's moving constantly in terms of what's better to, what's easier and better and more efficient to outsource versus easier, better, more efficient to insource. Yeah. And probably an area where the tools are advancing really quickly, making it easier for any schmo to create something versus the talent development. Sometimes, yeah. But then there's things like really high quality video is ridiculously expensive externally. And if you make a lot of video, you maybe you want to have a decent generalist on your team, even if you're not going to have all of the $70,000 worth of equipment. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. We have a couple of questions coming in for the rest of you on this webinar. Now's the time you could put in the meeting chat, your specific questions. I'll start with Joan Marie. This is a good one. How do you respond to the shift in media preferences among the communities like emails versus text or laptop versus mobile print versus digital? Brian, you want to take that question first? Yeah. I mean, so we're looking at it from several different perspectives. So not only in the type of content that we put out, which has been shifting significantly the last few years, especially, you know, focusing on Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they don't search the way that they used to. So used to be able to just do some SEO on your website and you would drive organic traffic. And now SEO is search engine optimization. Sorry. So now, you know, we have those audiences are searching through voice, they're searching and social, they're searching in communities, they're searching using AI. So now we are repurposing and redistributing our content to make sure that it is out on all those channels and optimized for all of those channels. So that's like content that we're delivering out. But then as far as messaging, or our internal audiences, we focus on making sure that all of our content and all of our, you know, websites are mobile first. So really focusing especially for, you know, any any student communications, but it just makes good sense. If it's mobile first, then it will perform better on desktops as well. And we still primarily use email. I mean, it's still been shown that students will open their emails and alumni will open their emails. So it's just a matter of how many communications you're sending out and making sure you're coordinating so that you're not sending the same messages out on multiple different, you know, channels to the same audience members. And like Jennifer was saying, you know, tool selection is so critical. I mean, when we're evaluating a tool, one tool is not going to make or break your process. But having six of the same tools across your campus is going to create a lot of different problems from a data standpoint, from a coordination standpoint. So just trying to pay attention to, you know, I mean, more communication internally is the key to kind of all of that. And speaking of email, I have to put in a plug for the book behind you, Mailed It by Ashley Budd and Dana Kibbles. I think I'm saying her name correctly. Phenomenal book about email, even if you're not an email professional. I learned a ton just about best practices. So Mailed It by Ashley Budd and Dana Kibbles. So Mike from Carnegie Mellon is asking, my predecessor ran a series of campus-wide communicators meetings. I think they were quarterly, and I'm hoping to get them restarted. They resolved writers on the, I'm assuming, advancement team, central comms, and those doing comms for colleges and schools. Can anybody else talk about those and what's helpful, what doesn't work? Jennifer, I know that Cornell does that. I'm also going to ask if you here in the webinar, if you're a guest here, type how you do it here in the chat, because I know Jennifer and Brian would like your ideas as well. Oh, and thank you, Kristen, for putting in the Amazon link to Mailed It. So Jennifer, can you talk about your quarterly? Yeah, I think they're fantastic. If you're not doing them and you're in a position to, go for it. Even if you're not in a job where it looks like you should be the convener, start with whatever network you have. And this is one of those areas where you can lead from the middle really beautifully, especially if you're in a highly siloed organization. I think people tend to welcome the opportunity to maybe not duplicate work, to piggyback on somebody's idea, to just honestly network and figure out who has similar interests and needs and problems. I think, in my experience, they've worked best when there's a little bit of structure, but that that structure isn't determined by people with titles that are too authoritative. I've been in these meetings and series where conversation is disturbingly quiet because there's a sort of passivity that sets in if too many directors are talking or too much is being shared about this rule or that policy or the right way to do stuff. So I think about maybe separating the purposes of information sharing from learning about policies and things. That'd be my big advice, but I'd love to hear what other people think on that one too. Yeah, Brian, do you do that at Rochester? We don't do it regularly, although we would love to and we're actually working on creating a community of practice around all the content officers and content creators on campus. But the ones that we did were extremely helpful and great ways to get people to understand what everyone else is working on and what the priorities are. We did, like Jennifer was saying, it's good to have some structure. So we would start with a featured presentation from one group talking about the things they work on, the processes they use for maybe 15 or 20 minutes, and then we would send people into different breakout groups. So they would be outside of their own team and just we'd come up with a topic and then they would share around that topic for 10 or 15 minutes and then we would switch those up and then we'd have kind of open discussion at the end. But incredibly insightful to be able to see who else was working on what other things and where the crossovers and connections were. Right. Okay. Well, while we wait for people to put their questions in the chat, everything is about AI these days. So I feel like I have to pick your brains about how you are using or not using AI in your communications, Brian, especially how you're advising, if there's policies and things that you're advising the other groups on campus of how to use this new tool. Yeah. So I lead the MarCom AI committee and I'm part of the AI council. So one of the first things we did was establish guidelines around AI usage. So we have those posted up on our website. And we are working through integrating AI into as much of our workflows and processes as we can. We're starting off kind of with marketing communications and then on our medical center is also running pilot programs there as well. But as we're working through the process with different teams and looking through their workflows, we're creating within ChatGPT, you can create these custom GPTs. They're like little mini models that are good for solving, doing one specific task. So we're creating those and then sharing those within the teams. So we're building kind of this library of resources that anyone across the institution will be able to use once we get to the point where we can start working with their teams and integrating into those teams. But we're seeing like 20 to 30% time savings from using these tools. We're very careful to make sure that everyone understands that these are not replacing jobs. These are helping you be more efficient at your job. They're getting rid of a lot of the repetitive monotonous or data related work that we're doing. But yeah, and we're trying to do, you know, the integration in a very ethical and responsible way. We're making sure that any tools that we create or any workflows that we automate don't remove the human element from the work. So we're still focusing on storytelling and creativity at the heart of it. We're not using any AI tools to create work that we copy and paste into any of our channels, but we are using it for ideation, brainstorming, gap analysis. We have a one custom GPT that helps put things in the brand voice and helps adhere to our web style guides. So you can write your article and then run it through this and it makes sure that everything aligns with our university best practices so that when it goes to the editor, there's less work that they have to do with each piece of content. So those are some of the ways that we're using it. Wow. Jennifer, how about Cornell? Yeah, I was actually looking, we have a recently developed university level policy about a generative AI, but I of course wasn't able to find it while we were talking. So I'll see if I can find it after this and share. But I think what we're finding right now, we're doing some interesting experiments to see how good AI is at this stage with sentiment analysis. It's been a mixed bag before. So I think we're trying to dip into that, especially with more complex datasets and how good sentiment analysis is, especially with a large amount of input. Jerry's out on that, but it's fun. A lot of what we are using it right now for is very back office kind of stuff, a lot like what Brian was saying. It's great for the white screen of death when you're getting started on something, tell it to get you started. You're going to hate most of it. AI is still not a great writer, but that's really useful if you just need a crappy first draft to work on. So it's helping communications teams do things like that. And certainly people who are not official communicators, but certainly are like literally every gift officer, literally every engagement officer. We have nothing but communicators on our staff, honestly. I think the other thing where it's very helpful is in critiquing drafts, whether it's a story written by a professional writer or some other product like that, that's maybe less formal. It's a far better critiquer than it is a creator. And that's kind of great and can really help, especially people who need to try to figure out how to write something that's a little shorter than they usually do or things like that. So we're still in an experimentation stage, but it's really useful as a process tool, as a helper. Fantastic. So Ashley has a question from Moravian right down the street from me here. Hi, Ashley. She says, our team handles development pre-communications, which is separate from the main university, MarCom. And we often encounter issues where the main university communications highly focused on admissions and feels like donors and alumni are not their responsibility. I've had this happen quite a bit. My team understands the importance of donor and alumni engagement, especially for money, but do other people encounter that? And what is a good rhetoric or how do you talk to the MarCom team at the university level or how do you divide that? Jennifer, I think you were talking about that at Ithaca College. Maybe you can address that first. Yeah, the pressures are huge in that kind of environment and kind of impossible to argue against in many ways. I think where I've found the biggest success when I was in that boat, trying to make the advancement side a little stronger, honestly, so that maybe enrollment could be a little less of a make or break. And Ithaca College still struggles with that. But I think part of it comes back to brand. Your prospective students can sniff in authenticity in micron levels of visibility. So the more authentic of a brand story you're telling, the more your alumni audiences, your donor audiences, and your prospective student audiences are going to identify with what you're saying you are. They're going to see that what you say you are is what you really are. That builds trust over time. That kind of trust can translate into stronger relationships with alumni and donors if there is weak trust now. So part of the job, I think, on the advancement people's side, the advancement communications people's sides, is to figure out how they can take what looks like enrollment material or what looks like some other purpose material and find what the fundraising story is under there. Did this amazing student who just did this amazing thing, and they're on the brochure, did they have an endowed scholarship? Is the department they're in led by somebody who is a named professor or whatever kind of annual funds witchery is behind the scenes? So I think there's ways where you can take a real story and say, hey, there's this development angle. And so you can be scrappy in how you use things that aren't made for you. The converse of that, I think, too, is there's a liveliness and an authenticity that alumni and donors can bring to the story that prospective students or their parents, and maybe more importantly, their parents can pick up on. Obviously, there's some relevance there. If someone's talking about the institution as it was in 1978, that might not be what you want. But there's value that our alumni and our donors bring to what the school feels like now for prospective students and their parents. And I've seen it. I've seen the clash happen, too, where there are not so much with advancement communications, but with colleges and smaller departments that need a website, for example, they don't have their own comms team. And so they get put way down in the queue. And the Markham University is saying, we need to attract students. I don't have time to write about your departmental new hire or whatever. So maybe going back to the tech stack that you were talking about, are there more DIY tools or something like that? Yeah. And honestly, it also goes back to my firm contention that plenty of people are communicators who don't have communications in their job title. It's a great opportunity for kind of federated systems to be set up. The Markham team, who mostly looks at enrollment, maybe they can set up a governance system so that some deputized, trained people in fundraising can do a little more of their own work. Guardrails that can be set up, and it can be a really nice share the wealth and share the co-creation kind of stuff. It can be really good. It takes time to set up, and they would need to convince that that's worth it for them, I think, when they're dealing with yearly goals. But yeah. And it comes into play where there's 16,000 constant contact accounts all over the university. Brian, can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So, I mean, working in central communications marketing, we do have to be careful about what content we put out there because our goals are different than the goals in advancement. But we have to also remember that the journey of any community, anyone that we want to bring into our community, we want to commit them to a lifelong journey with our institution. So they may start out with enrollment as students, but then we want them to stay and complete their journey and become alumni and try to engage them at every point throughout that process that we can. And alumni can be a huge resource for students. They can have an impact on enrollment. And it's also, from an alumni perspective, from an advancement perspective, it's important to, when you're presenting stories like these to central marketing, to look for an angle that will help with the promotion of the brand or with the promotion of enrollment opportunities. You look at what Purdue is doing, they are telling alumni stories as a way to showcase the value that their institution has brought to their students. So it's, in a roundabout way, it's helping with enrollment by telling the stories of alumni. So I think it's critical to kind of have that perspective when you're looking at these opportunities and understand that the communications that go out and the marketing that goes out from advancement is different. That's why they're a separate team, but there's so much crossover and so much alignment with the goal of the institution. And I know communicating that can be difficult sometimes, but just finding that angle sometimes can make a huge difference. Right, right. And Joan Marie is saying we've experienced the same when we struggle with obtaining buy-in from the UConn or university marketing team on what's newsworthy. It helps to do things like share a story via a person's voice message instead of an article, for example. So yeah, you can imagine, you know, something that's really, really important to alumni, a favorite bar closes in Collegetown, you know, which generates a ton of chatter from the alums and don't you remember the combats and don't you, you know, like, but the university communications is like, no, that doesn't matter to us. Jennifer, could you speak to that a little bit? Yeah, I'm old enough to remember the era where for something to exist as a story, it needed a URL. And so we would sometimes write the dumbest stories just because we needed a link to send to people. Like, some people came and talked in an event, like, you know, stop the presses. And I think happily, we're a little past that requirement. In fact, I think you wrote stories for my events at Cornell. Oh, yeah, we needed URLs. We needed a thing to send people. But I think we've crossed through that era, largely unscathed. And there's, especially when people are inundated with so much just talking to people actually can sometimes be a way to share things that like, like, honestly, just what you were pointing out, Jennifer, like, something that is newsworthy for alumni, but isn't like an institutional thing. But talking is so low tech. Yeah, also, therefore, it can sometimes fly under the radar of people who maybe want to control more stuff. I didn't say that. But it could be it could be your vice president for advancement or alumni relations, it could be a volunteer, like a volunteer leader who has has a platform, you could jot a message and have a whole network of volunteer leaders share it with their clubs or whoever they manage. You know, activating, you know, it's like a good old fashioned phone tree, activating that kind of stuff can be great. And peer to peer is often more trusted anyway. So you might find that you can get better results out of it. Social media, of course, is still not nothing to sneeze at either. Although, Joanne Marie, I'm guessing that you probably don't have your own social accounts based on what you're saying about the about the focus of your institution. But yeah, maybe she should start one. Yeah, so maybe what I'm really saying there is, think, think about what how you could share something if it's if you don't get us if you don't get a formal story, how could the news get out anyway? Yeah, yeah. And track and track the performance of it, though, so that you can go back to your people, your mark on people and be like, well, actually, a whole lot of people are interested in this. And and these are those people, they are parents, they are potential students. Yeah. Okay. Well, anything else? We didn't talk about Brian and Jennifer that you want to impart. We've got about six minutes left. So anything you want people to know or any questions you have for the group? Brian, you go first. You're unmuted. Yeah, I mean, my biggest thing is just look for opportunities to have conversations within the teams and make sure that you understand the priorities of the other group. Because once you understand those priorities, you can reframe content a lot of times in a way that makes sense to them. We even do that, like a lot of times one of our like researchers will get a grant and they'll come to us and say, oh, I got this grant. This is a story like not really. And we have the data to show that it doesn't get, you know, the time that we spend is not a good investment. Now, the results of what's going to happen because of that grant money or the opportunities that are going to be presented to students. There's the story that we will be glad to tell. But if you if you come to us without that framing, a lot of times, you know, depending on who you come to, they might just say, this is a social post. This is a newsletter item. This is not. And we always give them alternatives. We don't just say, no, we're not doing this story. We say, here's another channel. Here's another opportunity. And, you know, one of the things I feel is a huge missed opportunity in higher ed kind of across the board is the opportunity for us to kind of grow our own creators, our own influencers out of our staff, our faculty. You know, we have all these people with all these stories to tell. And, you know, especially students want to be creators. They want to work on their personal brand. They want to get their content out there. We can help them with that. We can help them figure out how to tell stories better on their different channels. We have the, you know, expertise around those different areas. We should be sharing that knowledge with everyone and building these creators within our own networks. Yeah. Jennifer, anything we missed that you want to impart? I couldn't agree more with what Brian said. I feel like we ought to be more, those of us who are communicators in job title, we're really more, I'd love to see us be more like scouts and casting agents and directors than creators. Let's not let productivity metrics drive our sense of how valuable we've been to the university. I would say too that you have a lot more colleagues than you might realize you have. That is whether you feel like you're in a central team and you don't know what all is going on or you're in a, you know, what you feel like is the hinterlands of priorities. There are colleagues all over the place that you may not necessarily realize are your colleagues. And so it can be a lot of fun to find them. Yeah. Fantastic. I like that a lot. You're almost a force multiplier and a director instead of an actor, which can be more fun sometimes to watch how other people interpret the news and do it versus what you would do. Oh, one more thing. Sorry. You just reminded me. Don't forget about external media hits. Faculty member is, you know, we had this guy who made a mushroom walk, some kind of mushroom robot thing. It was all over CNN. That's a story right there. Oh my God. A faculty member is all over the news because he made a mushroom robot. Wow. Done. Like I don't have to go interview them. Like just tell what's already out there. Well, and that also gives you a little more gravitas if you're, you know, in a respected publication, you know, per the New York Times or per whatever. Yeah, that's an easy win. Cool. Mike saw that story all the way in Pittsburgh. Fantastic. All right. Well, thank you, Brian and Jennifer so much. This was great. And thank you to everybody who's listening and who participated here in our chat. I learned a ton and I'm really grateful that you spent your time with us today, everybody. All right. And thank you, Case, for hosting us and the District to Cabinet for your work. And we're signing off.

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