Learn how to connect with marketing professionals across campus to create a powerful, unified brand. This session will dive into practical strategies for gathering input from internal teams and external communities, developing an authentic brand personality, and launching data-driven campaigns that resonate with your target audience. Attendees will walk away with actionable insights on fostering collaboration, leveraging research, and delivering campaigns that elevate their institution's visibility and impact.

Discover how personalization can elevate your outreach and engagement—and why it matters now more than ever. We’ll share findings from a nationally representative survey of high school students and introduce four key behavior-informed personas based on what drives their college decisions. Then, see how Lewis & Clark College’s marketing team puts similar insights into practice by centering students on their website and other recruitment marketing materials, as well as in crafting key strategic messages. This session blends fresh data with practical application, giving you research-backed and ready-to-use ideas and inspiration to better connect with prospective students—and beyond.

There is an art and a science to making and using checklists. Psychologically, checklists serve as external memory aids that reduce cognitive burden, and when we check items off a list, our brain releases dopamine as a “reward.” The art of the checklist is how we design and implement them.

Melissa Richards, CASE Educational Partner and author of, “The 30-60-90-Day Handbook: Checklists for Communications and Marketing Leaders in Higher Education” (available from CASE in spring 2025), and Keith McCluskey, Director of Public Relations Strategy at William & Mary, will share essential checklists and best practices for presidential communications planning, collaborative processes, and workflow. The presentation will include a demo of William & Mary’s new Presidential Communications Dashboard for tracking communications and measuring effectiveness.

For generations, American colleges and universities have been the silent engines behind the nation’s progress, driving our economic prosperity, building a skilled workforce, and nurturing a vibrant democracy. Yet today, a crisis of confidence is emerging. Just ten years ago, 74% of young Americans believed that a college degree was vital for success. Now, that number has plummeted to 41%. This isn’t just a statistic—it’s a wake-up call. There are many reasons this is happening, but a core part of the problem is the narratives used to describe the value of a college degree, which focus too narrowly on student recruitment and the immediate transactional return on the cost of tuition. Left out are the countless ways higher education benefits everyone, whether or not they have a degree. College is a public good that uplifts every facet of our society, and it deserves a national movement to highlight its collective impact. This session will describe the Proud Sponsor campaign, a grassroots initiative to tell the full story about the impact of higher education, including opportunities for colleges and universities to help spread the word. Together, we need to redefine college—not as a narrow, self-focused pursuit—but as a powerful, shared investment in our country’s future.