2022 Program

Tuesday | Wednesday | Thursday

Tuesday, July 26, 2022

Time

Presentation

9 - 10:30 am

Workshop #1

How Your Content Can Strengthen Democracy This Election Season

Jenna Spinelle, Communications Specialist, Penn State University

Does the thought of another election season make you cringe? You’re not alone. American politics is more polarized than ever, and higher ed can’t help but get caught up in it. However, that doesn’t mean you must stop discussing the election in your content strategy. It’s perhaps never been more important to do just the opposite. This workshop will show you why it’s important to lean into democratic values and how you can work with partners on and off campus to create content that promotes voting and civic engagement in a nonpartisan, uplifting way. We’ll cover high-level framing, nitty-gritty messaging, and resources to help with both.

Workshop #2

Visit Singularity: Bridging the Gap Between the Virtual and On-Campus Visit Experience

Jeff Kallay, SVP of Enrollment Consulting

Jarrett Smith, SVP of Strategy & Partner, EchoDelta

The pandemic, Gen X parents and their Gen Z students have altered the campus visit. They view on-campus and virtual visits as one singular brand experience with high and specific expectations for both. In this workshop, we’ll bring you up to speed on the current state of the campus visit and explain the critical differences between today’s prospective families and those of years past. Then, we’ll explore the art and science of crafting a standout campus visit. Attendees will walk away with a strong grounding in how to reach today’s prospective families and actionable steps to unify virtual and in-person visits into one cohesive brand experience.

Workshop #3

How to build student relationships through conversations: Digital strategies to meet your enrollment and retention goals

Osayi Lasisi, Head of Demand Generation, Olark

Lindsey Johnson, Customer Support Specialist, Olark

In this workshop, participants learned:

The most effective ways to build a digital strategy that engages with prospective and current students.
About creative approaches, other colleges and universities have used live chat implementations.
Strategies for implementing a new communication platform.

12:45 - 2 pm

All Hands/Keynote

Finding Your Anchor: Tools for Weary yet Hopeful Higher Ed Marcom Leaders

Dr. Josie Ahlquist, Digital Engagement & Leadership Consultant

Within one week, as a higher ed marketing and communications leader in higher education, you may experience multiple rocky terrains. Peaks, valleys, summits, and maybe even a rock bottom. These ups and downs may leave you weary yet hopeful for what comes next. So, where do we go from here? And what if you didn’t have to take on this path alone? With joy and excitement, this keynote will kick off the first in-person eduWeb conference since 2019 - and such will call us collectively into the community to be seen, heard, and supported. This keynote aims to equip and empower you with an anchor that can ground you, no matter your challenges.

3:15 - 4:45 pm

Challenge Track Previews

Track Experts presented the Challenge Tracks they developed based on your input. They'll share their plans for the Challenge, ColLABoration, and Beyond the Summit sessions to help you plan your schedule for Wednesday and Thursday.

Challenge Tracks & Descriptions:

Addressing the Digital Equity divide should be the top priority of our DEI efforts

Representation can’t be felt if people don’t have the tools, bandwidth, or ability to find it. What is the point of spending hours picking photos of diverse groups if the mobile experience doesn’t translate to low bandwidth internet or older phones without data plans? As marketers, we do our best to create experiences that are accessible, but in reality, most are still too complex to navigate and create a deep sense of "unwelcomeness."

Team Healing and Wellness

We are all finding our way through unprecedented challenges in every corner of our lives. This track will focus on the importance of caring for our teams and ourselves and provide several approaches and modalities to use on your campus.

Innovation

When problems are real, the stakes are high, and time is short you need to innovate effectively. Sound familiar? Higher education is ripe for disruption. There is no lack of great ideas on our campuses, but unfortunately, process failings and lack of discipline can lead to failure. This session will survey the 10 Types of Innovation and leave attendees with a proven framework that can be implemented within teams or institution-wide to speed up the innovation process, yield stronger results, and create better value for our audiences.

Web Strategy

Why do colleges and universities have websites? Who is your website intended to support? Lead generation, brand impression, informing audiences – the purpose is at the center of every web strategy. This session will explore how you can define and leverage purpose to inform web governance development, content strategy, lead generation, and more.

Make the Move: GA4 Implementation Strategies

Google Analytics 4 represents a major paradigm shift in how we measure the success of our websites and marketing campaigns. This session will walk you through exactly what’s changed, how measurement and user-centric privacy concerns can peacefully coexist, and how GA4 can easily plug into your other dashboards and reporting tools. We’ll also provide a framework for how to approach migration to GA4 from Universal Analytics.

Reputation vs. Recruitment?

How do we pursue increasing brand reputation and enrollment growth at the same time? And when these organizational goals are prioritized differently, how can marketing and admission teams collaborate to keep things moving forward? Do we lean on technology, systems, and organizational processes, or is it something else? Join track experts in this session to discuss strategies and tactics on how you can balance increasing your brand’s reputation while finding success in enrollment growth.

Lead Generation

As we all know, generating leads for your college or university has gotten more difficult as channels such as search have gotten more competitive and expensive. While search should absolutely remain a core component of any EDU’s lead gen strategy, it can’t be the only approach. In this session, we will explore how new and emerging channels such as Connected TV, Digital Out of Home, Performance Max, Programmatic Display, and native can not only drive conversions on their own but how they can help build brand awareness and efficient branded search volume that’s both more qualified and more efficient.

Wednesday, July 27, 2022

Time

Presentation

8:30 - 9:30 am

All Hands / Keynote

Outside-In Strategies for Your Website: It's All About the User

Nick DeNardis, Senior Director of Digital Communications, Wayne State University

The curse of knowledge is real and we can’t avoid it. As soon as you work on a piece of communication you can no longer experience it from the perspective of a first-time visitor.

We’ll explore three strategies you can employ on digital content. The first will help identify the signal from the noise. In the second, we’ll consume the content using a different medium. And finally, we’ll work to validate our assumptions with real users.

With these strategies, you’ll learn to re-see your website with new eyes again. Bring a site you have some familiarity with, you’ll slow down and pay attention to the details you often overlook.

Presentation

9:45 am - 10: 45 am

Challenge Track Seminar 1

Lead Generation

Lee Goldberg, President, Marketing & Strategy, Happy Cog

Fernando Bergas-Coria, Executive Director, Digital & Media, Ologie

Challenge Track Seminar 2

Reputation vs. Recruitment?

Kin Sejpal, VP, Marketing and Communications/CMO University of Redlands

Zac Vineyard, Director of Enrollment Marketing Technology, Miami University

Challenge Track Seminar 3

Innovation

Mallory Willsea, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Operations, PlatformQ Education

Challenge Track Seminar 4

Web Strategy

Joshua Charles, Director of Web Strategy & Technology, Rutgers Business School

Georgy Cohen, Director of Digital Strategy, OHO Interactive

11 am - Noon

Challenge Track Seminar 5

Make the Move: GA4 Implementation Strategies

Joshua Charles, Director of Web Strategy & Technology, Rutgers Business School

Lee Goldberg, President, Marketing & Strategy, Happy Cog

Challenge Track Seminar 6

Team Healing and Wellness

Jenny Petty, Vice President of Marketing and Communications, University of Montana

Josie Ahlquist, Digital Leadership and Engagement Consultant

Challenge Track Seminar 7

Addressing the digital equity divide should be the top priority for our DEI efforts

Fernando Bergas-Coria, Executive Director, Digital & Media, Ologie

12:15 - 1:30 pm

Lunch & All Hands

The Critical Need for SEO and Sustainable Higher Ed Marketing

Tony Fraga, CEO, DD Agency

Jamie Gleason, Vice President of Strategy, Enrollment, DD Agency

There is a serious problem facing the higher education industry, and it isn’t about changes in the market demand for going to college or the latest trends in prospect behaviors. The problem is that too many institutions are addicted to paid advertising strategies that are outdated, underperforming, and not held accountable to the bottom line. This self-indulging marketing practice has grown to take up an epic proportion of most schools’ budgets, but fortunately, there are tools and strategies that are becoming the new norm and helping schools to break free from last year’s overpriced and underwhelming communications plan.

While there is no silver bullet for any institution, the antidote to vanity metrics and analog tactics is rooted in Sustainable Marketing, and within that methodology Search Engine Optimization plays a critical role. Join us at this All Hands session co-presented by two higher education industry veterans who share experiences and data from both the institutional and agency perspectives on this issue!

2:00 - 3:00 pm

Give Me a Minute Sessions — 20-minute TED-style talks

Never take a message when the Universe calls you to collect: Following your path even when other people think it’s the worst idea ever - Julie L. Sheldon, Marketing and Communication Specialist, Graduate Education, University of Wyoming

In 2017, I left what most people would see from the outside as an idyllic situation. It looked great: Nice home. Strong education. Professional job. Pets. Vacations. Friends. Even a few bucks in the bank. But, what most people didn’t realize was that my idyllic life looked much different from the one that I was living in. In this presentation, I will share the story of how I went from trying to ignore a small ember of an idea burning in the back of my mind to the giant explosion of learning my self-worth and starting to walk the path that felt right – even when most people thought it was the worst idea. I guess you could say - this is the story of how I rebranded myself.

Mastering Redesign Discovery By Watching True Crimes - Mandee Englert, Solutions Consultant, FFW (formerly of Penn State)

Protect yourself from unpredictable results in your next website redesign and feel confident that you've solved what isn't working for your users by taking a data-informed approach and focusing on what your users need. This presentation will provide an overview of how to find hidden insights about your users in your data.

Integrate Digitally to Maximize Your Direct Mail Campaigns - Richard McNamara, Vice President, Safeguard

The success of Direct Mail campaigns is now perfected and powered by The Web “DM 2.0 from Safeguard” is an omnichannel suite of technologies that allows you to turn a single direct mail piece into multiple impressions of the same display to the same audience over integrated digital platforms. Our TED-style talk will introduce you to this powerful new marketing solution to enhance a conventional mail approach.

Is This Fine? Higher Ed's Massive Marketing Retention Problem - Steve App, AVP Marketing & Business Development, SimpsonScarborough

Higher education has faced a dizzying number of challenges in the past two years. Questions about affordability, accessibility, free speech, and Title IX, to name a few. Not to mention a global pandemic. Now, a new problem emerges. At the same time that society finds itself questioning the value of higher education like never before, new research from SimpsonScarborough shows that more than half of higher education communicators and marketers--the professionals chiefly responsible for communicating that value--are considering leaving the industry. Join Simpson Scarborough's Steve App in this session as he walks you through new data that shows how the Great Resignation is playing out in higher ed marketing. You'll learn what is driving marketers at different seniority levels out of the industry and why salary levels explain only part of this potential exodus. You'll also get a preview of other insights from this not-yet-released report.

Inside the Minds of IT: How to Start a Digital Transformation - Chad Durr, Development Manager, and Jeff Dillon, IT Director, Squiz

Learn how IT Leaders and Marketers in higher education work together to form a digital-first approach to ensure long-term student success. We'll discuss what it takes to kickstart a digital transformation and how to overcome common data challenges at universities.

I Name that Brand—the Game Show - Tom Cherrey, CoFounder, and Ineke Caycedo, Brand Strategist, BrandTruth

In today's crowded marketplace, connecting with student prospects is key to meeting your enrollment goals. Standing out is no longer enough. Today's prospects want, even expect, to connect emotionally with the college they choose to attend. For many, that connection is made when they visit campus. What if you can make that connection when they first start to look at colleges? You'd be way ahead of the crowd! The secret to creating that connection is by defining an authentic brand persona with which student prospects can relate. Sound impossible or expensive? With modern technology and years of proven personality science, the art and science of creating a brand personality are now possible for all. Come and play Play 'Name That Brand' on Wednesday, July 27 during the 'Give me a Minute' sessions from 2:00-3:00 pm. See if you can identify the brand personalities of some of the most well-known brands in the world. Learn the secret to how they connect with audiences and how you can do the same. The winner gets a prize!

How to Stand Out In a Sea of Sameness - Allison Lanier, Senior Account Executive, and Taylor Poole, Account Executive, Up&Up

The holy grail of branding is differentiation–to actually be different and stand out above the crowd. How does a college or university standout, truly standout, when most look, talk, and act the same? The good news is that attaining true differentiation for your school may be more realistic than you think. In this presentation, Up&Up will reveal several tips on how to stand out. We will also cover the secrect to differentation–that the only thing you really need to make your school stand out–is you.

Bringing teams together: Leveraging technology to create a seamless work environment between Marketing and Admissions - Murray Simpson, Chief Growth Officer, and Ben Shoemaker, Senior Director, Enrollment & Marketing, Net Natives

Every university dreams of that perfect work environment. An environment where recruitment campaigns are tracked centrally, and marketing and admissions teams work together seamlessly in a collaborative environment where everyone is aware of their shared enrollment goals and responsibilities. What does your team’s current workflow look like? Is your funnel data fragmented across different platforms and departments throughout your institution? Are you bouncing from project queue to project queue, while trying to track your progress using a variety of programs, spreadsheets, or dashboards?

Well here’s the good news. There is a solution to address these challenges that improves enrollment attribution, while encouraging university-wide collaboration!

Join Net Natives as we explore how to leverage technology to remove the blind spots in your pipeline, while optimizing your enrollment strategy towards the channels that are generating the most applications, allowing you to maximize your marketing budget and achieve your enrollment targets.

3:30 - 4:30 pm

ColLABoration Group - Description (per Challenge)

One of the themes for the eduWeb Summit is engagement. Another is to move sessions beyond the podium and PowerPoint play to an experience that connects faculty and attendees to the conversation. After attending a Challenge Track session, move into these CoLABorations ready to share, question, and explore ideas from other attendees, industry experts, and faculty.

3:30 - 4:30 pm

ColLABoration Group 1 / Challenge Track 1

Lead Generation

Lee Goldberg, President, Marketing & Strategy, Happy Cog

Fernando Bergas-Coria, Executive Director, Digital & Media, Ologie

3:30 - 4:30 pm

ColLABoration Group 2 / Challenge Track 2

Reputation vs. Recruitment?

Kin Sejpal, VP, Marketing and Communications/CMO University of Redlands

Zac Vineyard, Director of Enrollment Marketing Technology, Miami University

3:30 - 4:30 pm

ColLABoration Group 3 / Challenge Track 3

Innovation

Mallory Willsea, Executive Vice President of Strategy and Operations, PlatformQ Education

3:30 - 4:30 pm

ColLABoration Group 4 / Challenge Track 4

Web Strategy

Joshua Charles, Director of Web Strategy & Technology, Rutgers Business School

Georgy Cohen, Director of Digital Strategy, OHO Interactive

4:45 - 5:45 pm

ColLABoration Group 5 / Challenge Track 5

Make the Move: GA4 Implementation Strategies

Joshua Charles, Director of Web Strategy & Technology, Rutgers Business School

Lee Goldberg, President, Marketing & Strategy, Happy Cog

4:45 - 5:45 pm

ColLABoration Group 6 / Challenge Track 6

Team Healing and Wellness

Jenny Petty, Vice President of Marketing and Communications, University of Montana

Josie Ahlquist, Digital Leadership and Engagement Consultant

4:45 - 5:45 pm

ColLABoration Group 7 / Challenge Track 7

Addressing the digital equity divide should be the top priority for our DEI efforts

Fernando Bergas-Coria, Executive Director, Digital & Media, Ologie

Thursday, July 28, 2022

Time

Presentation

8:30 - 9:30 am

All Hands/ Keynote

From Campus to Consulting: Lessons from the Journey to the Dark Side

Chaney Kourouniotis, Lead Consultant, FFW (formerly UC Berkeley & Stanford University)

Mandee Englert, Solutions Consultant, FFW (formerly Penn State)

What does it take to get a political scientist to approve a half-million-dollar web replatforming budget?

How do you promote diversity at your institution when the reality doesn’t yet reflect the goal?

Are you the only one struggling to implement a coherent digital strategy at your institution? (Quick answer: no.)

In this fireside chat, two veterans of higher education who made the move to consulting share their experiences, strategies and recommendations for successful web and digital strategy at universities. Between them, Chaney and Mandee have almost two decades of experience working in and around higher education, from for-profit organizations to world-renowned institutions - and in their consulting roles, they see common themes across a variety of higher ed projects. The floor is open to discuss everything from development best practices and new technologies to perennial people problems and the unique challenges and opportunities that come with practicing technology in this 1,000-year-old sector.

Chaney and Mandee will bring their experience from both higher ed and the digital industry to help attendees think and talk through some of the most pressing issues faced by web professionals in this sector today. Conversation topics will include some of the Challenge Tracks identified by EduWeb participants this year:

-- Implementing innovation. Retreats and whiteboarding sessions are fantastic drivers of innovative ideas. What happens when you put the markers down and you need to start an actual project? When one implementation is successful, how can you scale it across units or across campus?

-- Web strategy. How can you take this from a pleasing buzzword to an actual work process that supports your institution’s educational mission? What are the common obstacles to this, and what are some proven ways to overcome them?

-- GA4. How do I keep this from ruining my life for the next year?

10:00 - 10:45 am

Beyond the Summit/Next Steps—Description

Here’s another way that we’re making something new happen. Beyond the Summit is a closing session at the 2022 eduWeb Summit AND a slate of virtual activities to keep the conversation going. On Thursday, the faculty will lead wrap-up sessions to review the conversations and revelations during each Challenge Tracks and facilitate a discussion to make specific plans for follow-up.

Everything is on the table—webinars, virtual meetups, discussion threads, live social media events, show and tell sessions—anything that will help attendees and faculty sustain connection until we meet again. We think this new approach goes beyond a few summer days. We know the problems we’re trying to solve won’t disappear because of one conference. But we believe in this community’s power and are determined to keep a good thing going.

10:00 - 10:45 am

Beyond the Summit/Next Steps—Challenge Track 1

Lead Generation

Lee Goldberg, President, Marketing & Strategy, Happy Cog

Fernando Bergas-Coria, Executive Director, Digital & Media, Ologie

10:00 - 10:45 am

Beyond the Summit/Next Steps—Challenge Track 2

Reputation vs. Recruitment?

Kin Sejpal, VP, Marketing and Communications/CMO University of Redlands

Zac Vineyard, Director of Enrollment Marketing Technology, Miami University

10:00 - 10:45 am

Beyond the Summit/Next Steps—Challenge Track 3