At Berea College, ensuring brand consistency across campus is critical to our communications strategy. To address this need, we developed and led Brand Camp, a now-annual internal conference providing comprehensive training for staff and faculty on the College’s brand standards, including effective social media practices, media relations protocols, and digital media templates. In this session, I will share how Brand Camp became integral to fostering collaboration, ensuring consistency, and empowering our community to effectively tell Berea’s story across all platforms to an audience that includes prospective students, alumni, friends, and prospective supporters. This session is designed for advancement professionals seeking to enhance brand education on their campus.

In just 12 months, the Acceleration Consortium’s LinkedIn audience grew by nearly 150%, expanding from 1,700 followers in September 2023 to over 4,280 in September 2024. This session will explore the key strategies that fueled this growth, focusing on diverse content creation, event-based storytelling, and the development of internal brand ambassadors. Through practical examples and case studies, participants will gain actionable insights on how to amplify their institution's social media presence and audience engagement.

How do you answer the question, “is that good?” when explaining social achievements? Analytics can be a crucial tool in developing buy-in from stakeholders, supporting strategic creative decisions, and influencing long-term platform strategy. External benchmarks can be misleading, incomplete, hard to come by, or feel irrelevant (whether too high or too low). In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to create and utilize internal benchmarks instead to help generate continuous improvement across your social media channels. Social media is undeniably critical to the digital marketing and PR landscape, but still often treated as an afterthought or secondary consideration by many traditional organizations. Contextualization – being able to answer the question, “is that good?” when explaining social achievements – can significantly shift the conversation about social with key stakeholders, and analytics can be a crucial tool in developing buy-in, supporting strategic creative decisions, and influencing long-term strategy. Finding relevant external benchmarks, however, can be a challenge, as many are either misleading, incomplete, hard to come by, or feel irrelevant (whether too high or too low). In this hands-on session, you’ll learn how to create and utilize your own internal benchmarks to help generate continuous improvement across your social media channels, so you can better paint a picture of the value social media provides within your organization. Demonstrating how to access data in both Meta and Hootsuite to download and create an Excel benchmark sheet, Courtney will discuss how to calculate the most important KPIs, the most valuable formula you’ll ever use (percent change), why these metrics are important, and how to frame them with stakeholders so they can see the value of the work you’re doing on social. She will also discuss how to use these metrics to approach platform and content strategy so you can continuously improve your position against your benchmarks, find red flags, and make changes before they become an issue.