Brain Waves Blog

I had the most wonderful campus visit in November. Two members of a university leadership team invited me to speak with a group of stakeholders about social intelligence and Campus Sonar. The visit stood out to me because they followed some best practices to vetting and building a relationship with an expert partner. Here’s how to adopt their approach.

As an industry, higher ed is often slow to change. But in the current landscape, change is critical to long-term sustainability. A strong strategic plan gives you flexibility to evolve as needed to meet current market and audience needs. 

Social intelligence is market research that uses online conversation data to answer key business questions. The internet is an always on focus group that allows you to better understand markets, audiences, brands, or organizations. In higher ed, social intelligence can inform organizational strategy, enrollment, alumni engagement, advancement, academic planning, and reputation and brand strategy. 

We’ve shared our strategies and recommendations for how leaders can rebuild trust on campus, but it’s not always as clear-cut to put it into practice. When we developed our social intelligence research, we had the opportunity to share it with Rebecca Ehretsman, president of Wartburg College. She shared some thoughts on the implications of our research.

I’m going to be vulnerable in this post. This is intentional; you haven’t stumbled across a mistakenly published diary entry. Our educational institutions serve humans with a myriad of feelings, challenges, and experiences. This is mine, and I hope it helps you understand others’.

We don’t need another study proclaiming that public trust in colleges and universities is at an all-time low in our country. The conclusions are predictable, and so is the response; a defense of higher education as it always has been, often putting the blame on the public who just doesn’t get why it’s so important. Defending, rather than listening to understand, is doing more harm than good.