Higher Ed Icons

Everyone in higher ed agrees a website should treat people well. So why do many websites fall so short?
Joel Goodman has spent close to 20 years closing that gap. He ran Bravery Media for 13 years, named a framework — Hospitable Design — and evangelized his approach across the field through talks, podcasts, and client work. 
The idea is simpler than it sounds and harder than anyone admits: a website isn't for the dean who wants his photo up top. It's for the 17-year-old trying to find out if you have her major and whether she can afford it. Joel grew up around the hospitality industry  and built a career arguing higher ed should treat that person like a guest and create a space for them that’s welcoming, attentive, and anchored in care
He walks Mallory and Volt through where the instinct came from, why an idea everyone nods along to still doesn't get built, and what AI search does to a philosophy that rests on the person showing up. He's still the critic he's always been, still hoping for better despite the optimist that he isn’t, and still finding the next problem to name … and solve.
🔑 What You'll Take Away
Why "treat people well" is easy to agree with and hard to build
What the restaurant floor teaches about higher ed web design
Why the homepage's real job is to get people off of it as quickly as possible
The three questions every prospective student asks first
Why the obvious idea stalls inside most institutions
What  AI search does for the concept of hospitality, and why the fewer visitors who still reach your site matter more than ever
 

In 2010, Jennifer Lonchar pitched retargeting to higher ed with “janky PowerPoint decks” and a Zappos analogy, and schools called it Big Brother. The schools that said yes rode the digital wave for a decade. The schools that said no spent years catching up. Fifteen years later, she's having the same conversation again — same skepticism, same "does it even work," same budget hesitation — this time about streaming TV, with her own name on the company.
 
Jen walks Mallory and Volt through what category education costs when you're early: the 3 years before real adoption, the cartwheels down the hallway over the first $100K contract, and the University of Cincinnati campaign that had a recruiter in Vietnam calling to ask why students kept showing up saying they saw the school everywhere. Then she gets into the second bet — the business partner who spent a year and a half convincing her, the 2 years of self-doubt before she printed AmbioEdu business cards for NACAC, and what it means that founding something felt like jumping off a cliff with your eyes closed even after being right the first time.
 
The argument underneath: branding is lead generation. Students don't fill out forms for schools they've never heard of, and if you're waiting until they know your name to show up, someone else got there first. The living room, as Jen puts it, is the new quad.
 
🔑 What You'll Take Away
 
Why the schools that called retargeting "creepy" in 2010 are the same ones struggling now and what that predicts about streaming
How Jen sold digital before anyone was buying, and why being early means paying an education tax
What streaming TV targeting can do at the household level
Why the branding-versus-lead-generation debate is a false choice
What the perception cliff is, why a Got Milk moment for higher ed hasn't happened, and who would have to fund one
The doubt underneath a track record: what it took to bet on a second wave with her own name on the door

Lee Coffin made Tufts cool. Then he walked into Dartmouth and did it again.
Over 30 years, Coffin turned two very good universities into two of the most wanted schools in the country. He gave the field its language — "the qualified muddle," the creative essay, the case for putting voice next to data on every application. In 2024 he made Dartmouth the first Ivy to bring back the SAT, and the rest of the Ivy League followed inside a year. He's spent the last 32 years and 100-plus podcast episodes pulling the curtain back on the whole process. If higher ed admissions has icons, Lee Coffin is one of them.
We got him for the kind of conversation you only hear from someone in the top of the ninth, his words. He explains why volume is not the coin of the realm, even at a 6 percent admit rate. How he turned a test score into a story by reading it against the room it came from. Why he leaned Dartmouth all the way into rural when a consultant told him to sell urban. And what it costs to be the warmest gatekeeper in the Ivy League and still say no to 94 of every 100 students who knock.
We also get into where it started: a public-school guidance counselor who looked at a straight-A kid and said "I don't have time for the smart ones," and the first-gen instinct that became a 30-year practice of translating this process for the families nobody helps.
🔑 What You'll Take Away
Why a bigger pile of applications isn't a win and what selective colleges chase instead
How a test score means more once you know the school behind it
Why so many applicants look identical on paper and the idea ("the qualified muddle") that changed how schools tell them apart
What it costs to love saying yes in a job that means rejecting almost everyone
Why a student's grades and their story work as a team
 

Every institution claims students belong there. Dayana Kibilds says that claim falls apart the second you hold it up against the experience students find when they arrive.
She has worked every seat this industry offers. She led domestic recruitment at Western University, ran brand and messaging engagements at Ologie across dozens of institutions, and now serves as AVP of marketing and community at Simpson Scarborough. She co-wrote Mailed It, the book higher ed marketers reach for when their email program stops performing.
OnDeck Marketing CEO John Reid takes the host chair for this one. 
Day’s argument: the field avoids talking about the parts that are hard, and students pay for that. Academically rigorous institutions leave the rigor out of the marketing, so students show up unprepared for the reality. Every institution names community as its differentiator, which drains the word of meaning. Getting closer to right means showing instead of telling, then letting the audience decide whether the challenge described is the one they want.
🔑 What You'll Take Away
Why "everyone belongs here" flattened institutional differentiation across the field
What separates institutions closer to getting brand right from the ones repeating the same claim
How to pitch a pilot when there is no data and no support in the room
Why Day reversed her position on print and in-school presence
The audience question that sits underneath every channel decision
Thank you to our founding sponsor. OnDeck Marketing keeps colleges and universities visible where high school decisions actually start—inside the school day. Their North American in-school network puts branded screens in high schools and runs digital channels that maintain consistent presence in feeder markets, so institutions don't go dark on students before they ever start searching. Learn more at ondeckmktg.com.

Teresa Valerio Parrot is the person higher ed presidents call first. Principal of TVP Communications, CASE Laureate, Crystal Apple winner, PR News industry innovator, and to the leaders she counsels, the "president whisperer" — the one who can get a guarded administrator to say the true thing out loud.
In this conversation, Teresa walks Mallory and Volt through what that discipline looks like when it holds and when it slips. The president who wanted to make a public statement about undocumented students, and why 5 private conversations protected those students better than a headline ever would. The call she got wrong: a team that swore no one had talked, a leak she didn't see coming, 2 weeks of her life spent putting the pieces back, and the shadow plan she now builds every time in case the worst arrives early. 
It's a conversation about putting the institution ahead of your own reflection in the glass, about honesty that arrives wrapped in optimism, and about a career built by getting out of her own way.
🔑 What You'll Take Away
The one question Teresa runs every hard decision through, and the moment a leader's answer tells you it's going sideways
Why "go bold" almost never means grab a megaphone
How to build the plan that assumes the leak, then execute like it won't happen
What sitting this close to presidents for 20+ years teaches you about the job nobody wants anymore
Why honesty needs a delivery system, and what a wrecking ball needs seated beside her
How to carry other people's weight across a whole career without letting it harden into your identity

Jack Martin came to higher education from politics. Before he ran marketing at the University of Washington, before he built one of the most admired storytelling programs in the field, he worked for Governor Kathleen Sebelius. He ran comms for a congressman. He spent the first decade of his career learning how to move audiences who didn't already agree with him.
Then he walked into higher ed and noticed something.
Nobody was polling. Nobody was testing the words. Nobody was asking what the public actually thought of the institution — they were just telling the institution's story louder and hoping it would land. Universities, Jack realized, are political actors operating in a politicized country, and most of them are flying blind.
In this episode of Higher Ed Icons, Jack walks Mallory and Volt through what it looks like to bring a campaign operative's discipline into a major public research university and what the field still doesn't understand about its own audiences.
He talks about the immersive storytelling program at UW that set the standard the rest of the field is still chasing. He talks about the Big Ten We Are Here campaign — a $1,500 ad that landed 250 million impressions during football season — and why every conference should be doing the same thing. He talks about the moment President Robert Jones tested the phrase debt-free and watched public perception of a UW degree jump twenty points overnight.
And he says the thing nobody else in higher ed will say on tape: the academy is naive about politics, and naivete is costing the field.
🔑 What You'll Take Away
Why universities are political actors whether they want to be or not, and what that means for how comms gets built
How a $1,500 ad reached 250 million people, and what the Big Ten model means for every other conference
The polling discipline that turned one phrase, debt-free, into a 20-point gain in public perception
Why the job of a marketing leader is bidirectional, and why the inbound half is where the institution actually changes
How to make the case for survey research when the academic side thinks the data should speak for itself
What separates institutions still telling their story louder from the ones learning how to test it

Terry Flannery has been the first person to hold her job three different times. First marketing director at the University of Maryland. First VP of Communication at American University. First-ever EVP and COO at CASE. When the institution offered her the founding marketing role at Maryland with a $48,000 budget, no staff, and a job description that read "coordinate the deans' messages," she turned it down. Then waited for the institution to come back and ask what it would actually take.
In this episode of Higher Ed Icons, Terry sits down with Mallory and Volt to walk through the career that shaped how higher ed thinks about marketing. The original argument she made to skeptical faculty using a definition borrowed from a Northwestern academic. The four-step process behind WONK that most institutions skip. The dial-up, dial-down brand architecture that let WONK speak to faculty, alumni, and donors in three different registers without losing the through-line.
She also names something most senior marketers won't say out loud — that politics is the job, not a distraction from it. That the fights in higher ed are vicious because the stakes are so low. And that the people who do this work well are the ones who stop pretending the political work is separate from the strategic work.
It's a conversation about building the function before the function exists, the discipline that makes bold creative possible, and what thirty-five years of being the first person in the room taught her about saying no until the institution is ready to say yes.
🔑 What You'll Take Away
Why the founding move of any marketing leadership role is refusing the underbuilt version of the seat
The four-step process behind WONK 
How Terry made marketing acceptable to faculty by routing the argument through a source they already respected
Why "polarizing" is the wrong frame for distinctive creative and what to aim for instead
The dial-up, dial-down architecture that made WONK work across faculty, alumni, and donor audiences
What thirty-five years of retail politics inside universities taught Terry about moving institutions

Marketers have been sold the wrong order of operations.
Permission, then proof, then scale. That's the sequence most of us were trained on. Devin Purgason argues it's exactly why so many marketers are stuck — and the people actually moving on AI, on student experience, on work that matters, are running it the other way. Proof first. Permission after. Scale once the evidence is in the room.
From there, the conversation opens up into how that mindset plays out across an entire career. How to choose what to prioritize when the budget is fractional. Why community college marketers should be sitting in graduate enrollment sessions. What agentic AI is actually doing to the role, and why brand awareness gets more important in an agent-mediated world, not less.
We also get into the case for collapsing marketing and student care into one function and what happens when the team responsible for the promise is also responsible for whether the promise gets kept.
 
🔑 What You'll Take Away
Why "permission, then proof, then scale" is the wrong order — and what to run instead
How to use other people's sessions, budgets, and playbooks as your R&D
What agentic AI is actually doing to the higher ed marketing role
Why brand awareness becomes more important in a zero-click, agent-mediated world
How student care belongs inside the marketing function, not next to it
What seminary teaches you about taking complex ideas and making them land

Ashley Budd saw it before most of the field did. Sitting in admissions at RIT, watching tuition climb and the enrollment cliff inch closer, she made a bet: higher ed was going to have to learn how to fundraise, and the old playbook wasn't going to cut it. She moved to Cornell, joined a brand-new digital innovation team, and got to work. But she didn’t just rewrite the playbook. She changed the game. 
In this conversation, Ashley walks Mallory and Volt through the moments that shaped the modern advancement playbook: the Kickstarter-era realization that higher ed's business model was breaking, the first crowdfunding experiments at Cornell, the Black Thursday giving day that raised $7 million the same day the market crashed, and the stubborn, ongoing work of turning Cornell's giving day into a 12-year tradition that still grows while peer institutions plateau.
She also takes on the inbox. As co-author of Mailed It, Ashley has spent years arguing that email isn't dead — we just wish it were, because we've made it miserable. She talks about why 85% of higher ed communication is a call to action and why that's a problem. She unpacks the deceptively simple idea that's animated her whole career — alumni have lives, and our job is to insert ourselves into them through games, through kitchen art for new grads, through email people actually want to open. She closes on AI, returning to a trust framework as old as Aristotle to explain where the technology helps and where it will quietly erode the relationships we've spent decades building.
It's a conversation about reach versus relationship, the difference between running a playbook and reinventing one, and what it looks like to be the person who keeps moving the whole field forward.
🔑 What You'll Take Away
Why higher ed's business model demanded reinvention, and what crowdfunding got right that traditional fundraising missed
How Cornell built a giving day that keeps growing while peer institutions plateau
What separates institutions running the playbook from the ones still rewriting it
Why "email is dead" really means we've made it miserable, and how to make the inbox a place people want to be
How to stop confusing reach with relationship in alumni communication
Where AI helps, where it erodes trust, and the framework Ashley uses to tell the difference

This episode starts with a LinkedIn controversy and quickly turns into a much bigger conversation about what higher ed keeps getting wrong about brand.
Mallory and Volt sit down with Joe Master, one of the sharpest brand strategists in the industry, to unpack a line that hits harder the longer you sit with it: higher ed doesn’t have a storytelling problem. It has a personality problem.
Because the stories are there. The outcomes are there. The impact is real. But when every institution sounds “professional, supportive, and student-centered,” none of it sticks. 
Joe takes us inside what it actually looks like to build a brand that people remember from the inside-out work behind Drexel’s Ambition Can’t Wait campaign to the reality of operationalizing brand across enrollment, media, and institutional strategy.
🔑 What You’ll Take Away
Higher ed doesn’t need better stories. It needs a stronger point of view.
Brand is what makes performance marketing work harder.
AI is making “good enough” content easier and memorable brands more important.
You can’t defend brand spend with performance metrics alone.
The strongest brands are built through consistency, trust, and how you show up when it counts.