Services
Distinctive positioning starts with a deep understanding of your core audiences and what they need, your school’s unique ability to meet that need, and your competition’s positioning. It also doesn’t have to take a year to get there.
Insight Development
Conduct 1:1 and group qualitative sessions, audit the current brand and activations, develop a deep competitive positioning review, and mine secondary research tools for industry and competitive insights.
Brand Platform and Messaging Architecture
Develop a brand platform comprised of the brand promise, pillars, personality, as well as a messaging toolkit that includes audience-based messages, talking points, and the elevator pitch.
Content Strategy and Activation Planning
Bring the brand platform to life through creative content ideas across owned, paid, earned and shared channels.
Brand Strategy and Messaging Architecture
The need for sustained philanthropic effort has hit an all-time high. Campaigns are a long, slow burn before the public launch, and the needs in that time frame demand agile resources. It’s not as simple as crafting a case for support and letting the campus run with it. We’ll start with creating solid foundational elements to guide the strategy, allowing us to address in-the-moment needs like focused case statements and content activations.
Discovery and Immersion
Interviews with key campaign leadership, review of previous research and feasibility work, and a peer/aspirant institution audit.
Campaign Platforms
Development of the framework that organizes the campaign’s priorities and goals and the narrative that builds the case for support.
Case Statements
Creation of cases for support for the institution, colleges and schools, and specific initiatives.
Content Strategy and Activation Planning
Creative content ideas to bring the campaign to life across owned, paid, earned, and shared channels.
Comprehensive Fundraising Campaigns
Marketing and Communications Organizational Effectiveness
Because every higher education marketing and communications office is truly unique, it’s critical to view them in their current and historical context. That means understanding goals, constraints, market conditions, competitive landscape, resources, campus culture, and more. Over the years, my thinking has shifted increasingly away from focusing heavily on organizational structure (although that’s a critical component) to a more holistic review of organizational effectiveness — how is the marketing and communications function of the institution, not simply the MarComm office, performing? We’ve developed what we call the BRIDGE Scale, which measures a school’s current state across 6 key components, provides direction for the next two to three years, and serves as a benchmarking tool to measure progress year-over-year.
Brand
Audit of brand strategy and brand guidelines, as well as their utilization and adherence, centrally and across campus.
Resources
Review of the current central marketing and communications organization, technology and platforms, and marketing budgets and expenditures.
Industry Landscape
Analysis of peer and aspirant organizations for roles and resources, comparison of competition content performance and engagement, and secondary research for relevant industry and market trends impacting your institution.
Direction
Alignment with institutional leadership, including marketing and communications role in cabinet, integration into strategic planning, and connection to key partners such as advancement and enrollment.
Goals
Setting or recontextualizing current goals as well as mapping a measurable two to three-year plan to grow in the needed areas, create budget efficiencies, and measurably improve marketing and communications efforts.
Experience
Review of current marketing activations and campaigns for audience engagement and to uncover new areas for those audiences to experience the institution’s brand.
Workshops & Speaking
I’ve worked at the intersection of market research, brand positioning, and creative activation. Through that, we’ve developed and worked through a multitude of frameworks to distill key insights into amazingly impactful strategic creative. On top of that, we’ve spoken frequently at national organization events as well as university marketing and communications conferences.
Insight Development
This workshop will help teams understand how to distill multiple data points into sharp and actionable creative briefs.
Content Strategy and Creative Activation
Over the years, we’ve developed plenty of frameworks that help bring brand and creative strategy to life. This workshop will help your team align their content to the most important brand messages and guide them to creative more engaging content activations.
Annual Communicators and Marketers Conferences
In the last 12 months, we helped to kick off conferences or speak at Western Michigan University, the Big 12 Communicators Conference, and the University of Colorado, Boulder.
National and Regional Organizations
We’ve spoken frequently at conferences such as CASE, Digital Summit, and most recently at the 2024 AMA Symposium with colleagues from the University of Michigan and Baylor University.
New Project Scope and Support
Hiring outside partners is no easy feat for the CMO. Your team has good connections and will want a say in who you pick, not to mention possibly involving a lot of people who have never been through this process. we’ve scoped hundreds of projects and helped VPs/CMOs develop countless scopes of work across research, brand strategy, creative, digital, and media.
RFP writing
Scoping and writing the RFP, including working with procurement to ensure adherence to institutional processes.