Vision is the easy part.
Your seat is far from the room where it lands. The plan has to hold through enrollment pressure, cost, and public doubt — and it gets lived somewhere else entirely, in the classroom and the advising appointment and the office where someone is doing three jobs.
I help leaders understand what moves their people, and bring those people into solving what comes next. Buy-in isn't won at a town hall. It's what's left when the plan sounds like something they said.
FOR HIGHER EDUCATION LEADERS
THE DISTANCE PROBLEM
For institutions and leaders, the messaging problem is often a distance problem. The vision is sound, the strategic plan is defensible — and somewhere between the cabinet meeting and the adjunct checking email at 9pm, it stops being true to anyone. That's not a failure of words. It's what distance does to belief.
Closing it is not a campaign. It's a practice, and it can be built.
WAYS WE MIGHT WORK TOGETHER
Message architecture for announcements that land
A first hundred days. A budget year or strategic plan with new priorities. A vision for the future. I listen across the institution, then craft the core message, the three things people actually need to hear, and the cascade that gets it to deans and managers before it reaches everyone else.
Listening infrastructure
Engagement surveys tell you the score. They don't tell you why. I build the stakeholder groups and standing bodies that do: a president's advisory council, a cross-departmental culture group, a faculty channel that reports something honest. Designed, recruited, chartered, and facilitated until your team can run it.
Meetings that matter
An academic symposium. An all-employee summit. A timely all-hands at a pivotal moment. Theme, agenda, speaker sourcing, engagement design, run of show, and the leader prep that decides whether the room leaves different. I've built these for a thousand people on a two hundred thousand dollar budget, and on almost none.
Channels between the big moments
A fireside format faculty, staff, and leaders don't dread. An internal podcast that your people actually finish. The recurring rhythm that means your next hard announcement doesn't arrive into silence.
Figure out what to build next
Before you fund the initiative, find out whether it's the right one. A structured sprint that puts faculty, staff, and students in the room with the people who hold the budget, surfaces the unmet need underneath the stated one, and ends with something your cabinet can decide on.
You end with two prototypes, not one.
The build-toward
What you'd build with real money and time. The version worth taking to a board, a donor, or next year's budget.
The do-now
What the same people can start Monday with what they already have. No new line item, no permission required.
HOW IT GOES
A CALL
LISTENING
BUILDING
Thirty minutes. You describe the need. I tell you whether I'm the right person.
I talk to you and a cross-section of people three levels down who will tell me the truth.
I build it with your input, then hand over something finished that can run without me.
This is for you if...
You're new in the seat, or about to ask for something hard
Your engagement numbers moved and nobody knows why
Faculty trust is the constraint on your strategy
You have a signature event to plan and limited budget to fund it
Probably not if...
You want enrollment marketing or brand advertising
The message is already decided and you want it polished
You need crisis PR or media relations
Nobody outside the cabinet can be talked to
The goal is for people to stop complaining
PROOF POINT
WHERE THIS COMES FROM
Nineteen years inside higher education, most of it at Rasmussen University. I started as an adjunct and ended up overseeing communication and transformation across the institution.
Dozens of events for up to a thousand employees. Multiple innovation sprints. Two internal podcasts. Three standing advisory bodies feeding the president and provost. I helped find the words to use when it counted, mostly by understanding the people who had to hear them.
A few examples:
Award-Winning Standards
An award-winning standards-based approach to hybrid learning, built when blended was still new to many in the sector. The point wasn't the format. It was making sure a course felt like one experience whether a student was in the room or not.
Shangri-Lab
An innovation incubator I co-created and led with Brooks Doherty, Rasmussen's Chief Student Experience Officer. Results included a competency-based model for a health sciences program, all-hands meetings rebuilt as something closer to a podcast, and a new approach to anticipating learner needs through mental health support.
Institutional Generative AI Response
A year-long institutional response to generative AI. My part was the faculty side — professional development, the symposium that carried it, and moving people from policing the technology to using it well. I wrote about the whole initiative for Grammarly.
A Theme that Matters
For Rasmussen's 125th anniversary, I brought stakeholders across the university together to name the theme — Legacy Matters — and built an interactive timeline documenting 125 years of the place.