Insights

A few weeks ago, a user posted to the r/ApplyingToCollege subreddit asking fellow Redditors which schools’ application portals stood out, and the responses were exactly what you’d expect from Reddit: a blend of useful insights and brutal honesty, all seasoned with a heavy dose of attitude. (By the way, if you aren’t monitoring r/ApplyingToCollege, you’re…Read more

During presentations about brand architecture, I often pose a couple of questions to attendees. How many aspire for their institution to be a branded house (leveraging a single master brand or parent brand across an entire organization and the organization’s multiple offerings)? Nearly every hand goes up. Next, how many of their institutions actually operate…Read more

For much of my early career, I was engaged by clients to research and consult on the best way to communicate with millennials. Typically, this meant identifying a set of characteristics and preferences that afforded our clients the opportunity to better communicate with this target audience. It started with Neil Howe’s Millennials Rising, and then…Read more

The summer is flying by. Besides hoping those deposited students show up at registration or orientation, what are you doing to ensure they all show up this fall? Realizing the overdone-ness of this analogy, I intend to use it to make a point. Don’t rule me out yet. The process of recruitment has load of similarity…Read more

Change is good, right? Then why is it that new ideas and fresh approaches are met with disapproval? We’ve had opportunity to observe hundreds of campus communities in our work. Our site visits allow us deep familiarity with many campuses enabling us to note with confidence that no campus is without its share of dissidents,…Read more

While listening to Holly Morris, Director of School Incubation of the Washington State Charter School Association, speak about design thinking at the recent UCDA Design Summit in Savannah, my mind zeroed in on her comments about giving priority to empathy. She was reminding the roomful of designers that before offering solutions, we need to understand…Read more