Plot twist: the content was there all along

Instagram is saturated, attention spans are short, and higher ed social teams are expected to produce more content than ever. Recruitment cycles, campus events, leadership initiatives, and student expectations all compete for space on the grid. The result is constant pressure to create something new.

This session challenges that model with a simple question: why are we exhausting ourselves creating content when students are already doing it for us? 

Every day, students are documenting campus tours, commitment decisions, game days, club meetings, move-in, and everyday life. The opportunity is not to create more, but to recognize what already exists and build a structured pipeline to capture and repurpose it.

In this session, I’ll show how to build a sustainable user-generated content workflow by capturing student content that’s already being created across the student journey.

Attendees will see a step-by-step approach to:

• Identifying natural user-generated content capture points across campus
• Designing simple prompts that encourage participation without feeling forced
• Spotting and sourcing organic student content strategically
• Setting up streamlined systems for collecting, organizing, and repurposing content
• Building a content bank that supports recruitment, engagement, and long-term brand storytelling
• Participants will leave with a repeatable structure they can implement immediately, even with small teams and limited budgets
• Integrating and balancing user-generated content with existing curated or internally produced content.