Bob Dylan was not singing about higher education when he sang “the times they are a changin’,” but indeed many universities nationwide are experiencing an era of challenge and change. Our relatively small school at the flagship university in Colorado has experienced significant change over the past year-plus — from deanship transitions to sweeping budget and organizational change. These changes have led us to pivot and evaluate our communications strategies in real time while we attempt to remain true to our mission and center community-building among faculty, staff, students, and supporters. We don’t have all the answers, but we know we are not the only ones interested in exploring inclusive and transparent communications strategies during times of change and processing our emotions as staff leaders. In this interactive session, we will work through lessons learned around change management in our school as we explore case studies together about budget constraints, political scrutiny, leadership transitions, humanizing change management, and more.

Learn from the award winning “Only in Nebraska” campaign what to do and not to do to make your next campaign a success. With a university system that has four unique campus brands, we still wanted everyone to share a single, unified message. In this session we will share how we started with a systemwide visioning day with top campus influencers and then developed campaign priorities for each campus and individual unit. Next, we used that information to build a comprehensive communications plan to publicly launch the campaign while considering all possible audiences from students to faculty and campus leaders to trustees and major donors to alumni of all four campuses.

As we share our “Top Five Lessons Learned from a Campaign Launch,” we will explain how we partnered closely with our campus partners to ensure that everyone felt they could see themselves in this campaign. We will also discuss how adding an engagement goal to our normal fundraising goal has rallied everyone around the campaign. Publicly launching a campaign is so much more than a cool logo and a catchy tagline – let us share with you how we approached it, Only in Nebraska.