Imagination Precedes Speaking

Nestled in the foothills of the Appalachians, a little-known West Virginia Bible college draws students from across the U.S. and seven foreign countries with an admission staff of one. A small, private university in Texas extends its outreach well beyond the borders of the Lone Star state and into 151 foreign countries. A regional Catholic university in Pittsburgh garners worldwide acclaim and interest in a new MBA program. Schools with small staffs can deliver bigger enrollments, if they use the web for better recruiting. Join us and learn how! After this session, attendees will walk away with enrollment tips that will enable them to strategically focus ALL online efforts towards helping right-fit students go from being prospects to applicants.

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Imagine making a one-time commitment and having your publication work across innumerable platforms. The content is entered once in a single CMS and it works perfectly on the web, on a tablet or phone, indeed on any device you can imagine. Impossible? Not if you use Responsive Design. When talking about Responsive Design, it’s easy to feel that it could be applied to alumni magazines and other publications. But the enthusiasm frequently fades when existing teams encounter new and thorny challenges. How do you get approvals if Responsive methodologies demand a more iterative approach? How do roles and responsibilities need to shift to accommodate the new order of things? How do you reliably predict the cost? A case study will be used to show how to move beyond flip-books and apps to create a publication that displays and behaves elegantly across innumerable platforms, and what lessons we’ve learned about making the transition.

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When the time frame is tight and the budget is limited, it might seem like a simple, separate capital campaign microsite is the best way to announce a capital campaign. Well, it's not. Here's a case study of how -- and why -- a college collaborated with an outside vendor to redesign their website first, then included a link to the separate capital campaign microsite. Learn how they structured the website to tell their unique story and why that message can increase donations. Creative thinking is essential when deadlines dictate speed, yet the stakes are too high to settle for anything but excellence. Here's proof that if the message is created with sophistication and grace, a capital campaign can belong on the homepage of a college's website.

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SEMINAR IN MAY SOLD OUT! With a focus on building enrollment and revenues, colleges across the U.S. are looking beyond traditional enrollment populations to new international, graduate and online frontiers. But what are today’s best practices for winning more of these students in a market that is growing more competitive and more global? Join Elliance at The Crane Estate on the Atlantic coast in Ipswich to explore how colleges like yours are expanding their international recruiting pipelines, overcoming graduate enrollment declines and capitalizing on the growing demand for online programs.

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For the last few years, three questions have, in one way or another, driven a disproportionate number of the web-related presentations I've either attended or seen online: Should web designers know how to code? How do I convince my boss that we should be building our [thing] responsively? How do we get clients to pay for [new thing du jour]? On the surface, these are good and relevant questions. Ours is an industry in upheaval, and we're all trying to figure out how to cope with revolutionary change and its implications. But a deeper examination of questions like these reveals a dangerous and shared achilles heel: In the name of community, we have built around us a professional echo chamber so tight, it's weakened our ability to do the very synthesis required to advance the causes that drove such questions in the first place. For forty minutes, we'll focus on practical ways to wrestle ourselves and our profession from this straightjacket of regurgitative nonthinking, and stop creating needless Sisyphean drama where progress, play, and growth ought naturally to dwell instead.

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