Sometimes the greatest superpower isn't strength or speed... it's hope. In this powerful and entertaining keynote, Jesse Wilson, co-founder and president of The For The Win Project, will share how they’ve harnessed the magic of Hollywood storytelling to empower children facing life-threatening illnesses, disabilities, and adversity by turning them into the heroes of their own stories. Through customized movie posters, trailers, and immersive experiences, their work brings light, courage, and visibility to kids who deserve to be seen and celebrated. Jesse will showcase how the language of creativity and storytelling, something that inspires us from the earliest age, can be used to bring joy, purpose, and empowerment.

In pretty much any brand refresh, brand launch is the milestone everyone’s working toward and the moment that gets all the air time. But in this session, we’re focusing due attention on the less-talked-about-but-mission-critical rollout before the rollout: the process of gaining internal brand acceptance, approval, and adoption. In late 2024, on the heels of a months-long brand development process, Cal Poly Pomona staged a full-day communications retreat—cleverly called “Comm-Chella”—designed to ensure the broad embrace of the new “Become By Doing” brand platform by cross-campus communicators, pre-launch. Learn how University Communications and marketing leadership, in tandem with brand partner 160over90, creatively educated attendees on the core brand positioning and its strategic underpinnings; created literacy in key visual elements; empowered communicators to take ownership of the soon-to-debut brand through interactive storytelling sessions, workshops, and resource giveaways; and reinforced that internal constituents/communicators are an institution’s top brand ambassadors.

Bring creative ideas to life with Ashley and Sarina's brainstorm framework. Known for their creative and innovative marketing campaigns, the Cornell advancement marketing team has fine tuned their approach to creating content themes that alumni love. Ashley and Sarina will teach how they craft creative marketing campaigns from online or in-person brainstorming sessions that remain timely and relevant. During the session, Ashley will share the science behind creativity. We'll leverage online tools, explore audience mindsets, and lean on team member strengths in a brainstorming session that is inclusive and fun. Sarina will showcase how these ideas are brought to life in alumni engagement and fundraising pieces. With a track record of pioneering marketing campaigns that have left a mark, these creative brainstorms will help your organization unlock its full creative potential.

In higher education, many of us are new to our roles, run on limited resources or have small teams, if not a team of one. Luckily, we can maximize resources by hitting multiple touchpoints in one communications campaign. Rather than focus solely on one campaign initiative or event, think of how to stretch that one idea across multiple platforms and efforts. Find ways to create evergreen content that will continue to increase your brand awareness and strengthen key themes past the time of the campaign or event. We all know about passive income, think of this as passive communications. When it comes to curating campaigns and developing innovative storytelling, the key is to tackle the sum of the whole through its multi-faceted parts. For instance, if you have an upcoming event, find ways to leverage promotional content by making it evergreen and removing the timestamp. Or if you have an article, how can that article then turn into a video, social media post, or newsletter entry without feeling stale? In creating the omnichannel approach, it's best to look at each piece of information and answer two questions: who does this best serve, and how can I best tell them this information? Often, great content can become a story, a video, and a social media campaign.

Building diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging into storytelling requires intentionally balancing broad-scale cultural and political ideas, institutional strategies and values, student, faculty, staff and alumni ambitions for telling their stories, and audience needs and expectations. How can storytellers balance all these factors to produce stories that serve society, the institution, audiences, and the people who share their stories with us? In this case study, we explore how race, socioeconomic status, and other identity categories intersect with institutional diversity, equity and inclusion priorities and brand storytelling goals through the production of a story by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Office of Advancement.

Communicators know that verbal speech cannot be undone, yet written corrections or amendments can go a long way to rectifying an error in print. But when it comes to imagery that "can't be unseen" there is nothing so toxic as a visual misstep. When the "art" you've used in your campaign, be it photography or illustration, offends sensibilities, the consequences extend beyond a single communicator and have a tendency to implicate organizational leadership. In this session, we will examine case studies of ad campaigns in the corporate and higher-education realms whose tone-deafness ended not in engagement but outcry. We will look especially at the implications of visual choices when communicating across cultures and nationalities, examining best practices for photography and illustration alike.

How do you focus your marketing efforts, gain leadership input and buy-in, and share your story? This session will provide processes,  examples and templates to help you collaborate with your institution’s stakeholders, build credibility, and get to the work that matters. Find out how to put the marketing mantra “more is not better, better is better” into practice.