Leadership transition is a time when your campus needs to balance continuity and change management. If you’re supporting a leader or are an incoming leader, social intelligence allows you to quickly communicate historical perceptions and stakeholder engagement, as well as gather and share real-time internal and external feedback during the transition. Leaders at every level of an organization make strategic decisions and social intelligence supports your understanding and informs priorities.
Social intelligence equips leaders with what they need to build and execute their vision.
When Doug Palmer became president of Siena Heights University in July 2023, he was very interested in brand development—both understanding existing perceptions of Siena Heights and understanding where they had room to grow awareness and affinity. We started working with him right after he took office to quickly move the institution toward a messaging strategy that was authentic and effective. The goal was to identify opportunities to elevate their brand by focusing on messaging, not creative.
We started with a brand assessment to understand who Siena Heights is and how their audience perceives them. As a Catholic university, one thing they were interested in was understanding awareness and value from audiences about the role of Catholicism within their institution.
During the assessment, we identified messages that resonated with target audiences and produced a brand messaging guide. Now we’re working with the president, cabinet, and executive director of marketing and public relations to grow brand awareness. The roadmap we developed used specific strengths and focused on different parts of the institution, prompting us to regularly collaborate with multiple areas of campus, such as athletics, advancement, or SHU Global. This work continues to grow and expand to align all of these groups.
Next we looked at Siena Heights competitors to understand some of their student experience differentiators to inform their strategic and marketing plans from an environmental scanning perspective. An important note about our work with Siena Heights is not only did we start our partnership during a presidential transition, but throughout our two years together they’ve had multiple transitions at the cabinet level. Now President Palmer is an established, excited president, with new cabinet level team members, and we’re the conduit throughout to support effective collaboration and strategic decision making with regular audience, market, and competitive insights.
In 2022, we started providing insights in support of a dean transition at a highly ranked professional school. On the cusp of transformational change in the field, the dean identified six topic areas of research and public scholarship to elevate the contribution and status of the campus and its programs within the industry.
The dean wanted to understand how the new research pillars were contributing to the school’s reputation before her vision was publicly announced. We provided historical social intelligence to understand how past online conversations and media coverage related to the six topics. Our analysis revealed unidentified opportunities, such as highlighting faculty voices that were influential in niche industry communities (adding to the group of faculty who can be considered “well-known”) and elevating the role of well-positioned research and policy centers.
We found unique opportunities to support each research pillar based on the communities, publications, and influencers already affiliated with each topic. For example:
This high-profile dean arrived with a vision of what the school should be known for. We were able to show them that they already had a lot of brand presence and industry influence for two of the topics, so they had an opportunity to build on strengths. In other, emerging areas of research, they didn’t have a strong presence so they needed to formulate a launch strategy. Our analysis enabled them to contrast data with a vision to see a realistic path forward—focusing limited resources where they’re most needed.
From there, we continued with real-time social intelligence to identify the share of brand voice of their research pillars and support the dean's strategy during the public launch, and the following two years. As potentially reputation-damaging narratives arose (e.g., during the Middle East unrest in fall 2023), they could share data with leadership to determine if the dean’s priority areas were suffering as a result of circumstances. In fall 2023, they maintained the research pillar brand share of voice and increased the public reach of four of the six topics.