Lightning talks

How to Prioritize Program-Specific Marketing: Turn Program Pages into Enrollment Growth Engines

Kayla Benda — digital marketing specialist, Ferris State University

College websites can’t be treated like digital catalogs anymore. Prospective students are researching like shoppers, comparing programs by outcomes, career paths, cost, and fit, often before ever completing a form. At Ferris State University, we leaned into that reality by prioritizing program-specific marketing that combines web improvements, rich media, inbound SEO, and paid campaigns that land on targeted program pages.

In this practical case study, Ferris State shares how we built a coordinated marketing push around identified programs that students could actually feel. We will cover how we updated key program pages to better match search intent and decision-making questions, paired those improvements with new photography and video, and created SEO-rich content that supports inbound discovery. Then we amplified the same program narratives through paid social and paid search, using those optimized program pages as the primary destinations.

You will see examples of:

• Program page upgrades that support recruitment journeys: clearer value props, outcomes proof, and stronger calls to action
• Working with subject matter experts, current students, and alumni to better understand actual program outcomes to guide content decisions.
• Rich media that builds trust quickly: new program photography and short-form video used on-page and in campaigns
• SEO-rich marketing that supports inbound: intent-driven page structure, FAQ content, internal linking, and content that aligns to the questions prospects ask
• Paid social and paid search campaigns tied to specific programs, with landing pages designed to convert rather than just “inform” How we kept this scalable using templates and a repeatable kit across multiple programs

We will end with the results we have seen and the measurement approach behind them, including what worked, what surprised us, and what we would do differently next time.

Accessibility in Practice: Why Compliance Alone Isn't Enough

Nick Croft — principal developer, ReaktivStudios

Higher ed teams work hard to meet accessibility requirements; yet students, staff, and faculty still get stuck. Why? Because passing a checklist (or even a formal audit) doesn’t always translate into an experience that’s actually usable with assistive tech, keyboard-only navigation, cognitive load differences, low bandwidth, or real-life time pressure.

This session explores the gap between compliance and accessibility-in-practice through familiar higher ed scenarios: course registration flows, LMS content, library resources, financial aid forms, authentication barriers, PDFs, video/caption workflows, and “accessible” components that technically meet criteria but remain frustrating or confusing. We’ll look at what goes wrong, why it goes wrong, and how shifting from compliance-first to usability-first leads to experiences that work better for everyone, especially disabled users.

Attendees will leave with practical ways to evaluate usability as an accessibility multiplier, spot “checkbox accessibility” pitfalls, and build lightweight habits that improve outcomes without requiring a full redesign.

Website Everything People: Surviving and Thriving As A Team of One

Joey Gill — web developer, University of South Carolina Aiken

Have you ever felt like you wear too many hats just to keep your university's web presence up to modern standards and practices while also juggling constantly changing needs and demands of an entire university? How can you shoulder an entire website relaunch project largely by yourself? How can you keep yourself personally and professionally moving forward, when the mountain of work is stacked against you?

When I stepped into my role as university web developer, I inherited a website redesign project that had already started but had stalled for over two years. The previous developer had left, and their only support role had been reassigned. For 18 months, the project sat and the website was being maintained minimally by the university's marketing director, who was not previously involved in website management.

What I walked into was an outdated, volatile CMS running on aging self-hosted infrastructure, a website carrying 20 years of content across three migrations, and a university community with urgent needs, strong opinions, and very little patience. Add in internal management challenges, a full university rebrand, and rapidly evolving web standards -- and you have the full picture.

Within one year, I relaunched the university website on a new CMS and eliminated more than 7,000 outdated pages. Within two, I redesigned the new website completely to address internal feedback and the aforementioned university rebrand. And somehow, I'm still here.

This talk will tackle the challenge of being a web team of one, lessons learned from a "website everything person" who is still living to tell the tale, and how, despite everything, you can climb the mountain too and see success from the other side.

Social Media Accounts: Which to Grow and Which to Delete

Joshua Kerby Jennings — communication manager, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ( UNC )
Chloe Bell — communication specialist, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ( UNC )

Through the years, UNC Global Affairs has gone from having (and neglecting) many social media accounts to going all in one three. Learn why they chose just three — LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube — and how they get the most out of them, as well as why they deleted others. The presenters will showcase how they improved engagement on Instagram (after stagnation), increased their following on LinkedIn (from zero to ~2,500), and enhanced their unit's and university's reputation on YouTube (after effectively no strategy). Additionally, presenters will discuss how they got support from their department's leadership, and how their colleagues have gone from not understanding social media to becoming collaborators.