Hello and welcome to higher thinking on higher ed. I am Sharlyn Carrington, communication steward and strategist. Excited to continue diving into the biggest trends, common challenges, the most effective solutions encountered by communications and marketing leaders in higher ed today. I am super honored to be talking to Heather Johns today. Heather is the vice president of Marketing communications for Bucknell University. She leads an integrated team responsible for everything, brand and content strategy, creative services, digital platforms, media relations, print and mail services, internal and executive communications, all of the things. With more than 15 years of experience in higher ed, she is known for advancing marketing efforts that are mission driven, data informed and institutionally aligned. 02:08 Heather Johns Big, big. 02:08 Sharlyn, Content Strong Thank you again so much for bringing your expertise to this conversation. Heather, how you doing? 02:13 Heather Johns I'm doing great. Thanks so much for having me. 02:16 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yes, it's going to be such a wonderful conversation. I know I've just talked on and on about all the wonderful things that your team does, but can you walk us through a little bit? Your role at Bucknell and how your team helps bring the university's Mission to life. 02:31 Heather Johns Sure. Our team, as you shared, is an integrated team. We have a lot of different sort of units within our division. And one of the main things that we'd like to do is be completely aligned strategically within division so that we are able to work together to help support all of our colleagues across the institution. And so one of the things that we're most proud of, especially, is our relationship with our admissions colleagues. And we see ourselves as an extension of their team. And our only goal is to get them the largest pool of qualified applicants that we possibly can. And so we take all of their strategies and their goals to heart, and those are our goals, and we move forward in helping them get to where they need to be. So that's probably. That's probably one of our major focuses. 03:25 Heather Johns And then we also work really hard on our reputational strategies as well, for, you know, rankings and things like that. In addition to working with our advancement colleagues, with campaign and also our publications, print and mail team is fantastic, and they're a huge asset to the university. So we are. We do all the things as well as we possibly can, and we really have a great time doing it. 03:53 Sharlyn, Content Strong Well, I. I have three questions coming out of that were not planned, but I'm gonna. I think I. I think I'll park them. I'll park one of them, and I'll get into just a little bit, you know, about some of the things you're seeing across the sector. You know. You know, what are some of the major shifts you're seeing, whether it's political, whether it's social, whether it's institutional, that are really kind of influencing how you shape your overall strategy today? 04:17 Heather Johns Well, I think what I'm seeing at a lot of institutions, including Bucknell, is that we are all emerging from that Covid haze and recognizing that we are all needing to have a strategic focus that is different for a very different landscape than we had pre Covid, during COVID and even immediately post Covid. And so there's a lot of strategic planning happening. And so that is very important for a division like ours because we are in service of that strategic plan. It is our job not only to help implement it, but to help communicate it and to help all of our campus colleagues, our alumni, and all of our constituencies embrace it, get on board, and really, you know, all just get on the same bus going in the same direction. So we have an interesting role in that. 05:14 Heather Johns We not only have to live it, we have to help other people want to live it. And that's a Real, that's a daunting task. But I think that especially in this climate, you know, in just where we're at in general, this moment in history. So that's, I think, the biggest challenge facing marketing and communications units right now, from my perspective. 05:38 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. And you said just now that I want something. I really want to pick up on this idea that you have to help other people, want to live it. Who are those other people? You're really, you're. You're trying to get on board. 05:47 Heather Johns Students, faculty, staff, parents, alumni, every. All of the, all of the people. All of the people. And it's funny because they all have very different needs. Just like, I mean, our job in general is to understand our audiences and understand what they need to know and how they need. How they need to hear it in order to be able to. For it to be able to resonate with them. So like our students explaining what our strategic planning, you know, a plan will be to them is a careful endeavor because most of what we will achieve, they won't be here for. Right. So we need to get them excited about it, but recognizing that most, they will mostly be alumni when it actually happens. 06:33 Heather Johns So we don't want them to be bitter about some of these amazing things that we're going to be doing that they won't, you know, they might not get the benefit of. So you have to sort of figure out how to transition, help them transition their own thinking to recognizing that this is for the betterment of the institution in the long haul and for future generations of students. So, for example, that's one constituency that has a very specific need in terms of how we message to them and what we need to say and how we need to get them on board. Whereas faculty and staff, they are, you know, ideally here and they are, you're in it. And they have a better ability to see the long game perhaps than like students would or even like parents of students. 07:19 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. And I see that being, you know, even in some of the work I do, seeing that as a really difficult task to get students who are almost in the weeds. Right. They're, they're living this experience. They're. They're going to classes every day. They're trying to figure out what their futures are going to hold for them. But, you know, having a strategic plan is such kind of such a bigger picture idea and getting them to understand what that means for them and what that mean, what that will mean for them as still part of this community, ideally as alumni, I don't know if you have anything to add to that. That was more of a statement than it was a question. 07:52 Heather Johns Well, my. My own D. A student at Bucknell. And so that really helps me think about it in a very specific way. So if you say, okay, let's. And we're in the middle of our strategic planning, so we don't have any specific outcomes quite yet to be able to share, but let's pretend, and let's say that we are going to have a new residence hall or something like that, or a different take on the residential experience. Let's pretend that if we're going to say to current students, hey, aren't you excited about this thing? That's going to happen like three years after you go, they're gonna be like, well, no, I want it to happen now. So being able to get them on board with something like that and to support that, to see the long game, that's hard to do. I mean, there. 08:35 Heather Johns I mean, the beauty of college is that you are in the moment and that you are experiencing this wonderful time in your life that you will never, ever get back, right this. This time to live in this environment where you are learning and growing, and that's your whole job, is to learn and grow and in lots of different ways. And it's hard to. A lot of students really have a hard time transitioning to being alumni anyway. You know, I mean, it's tough. They have to say goodbye to this whole era of their life. And so that's a challenge. But we're up for it. 09:11 Sharlyn, Content Strong I mean, that's great. I want to pick up a little bit on what you said earlier. Just this idea that the landscape has almost dramatically changed from COVID 19 and the aftermath of that to now. What. How could you know? What do you look at when you make a claim like that? Like, what were the big landscape shifts that you've seen from, let's see, post pre2019 to now? 09:34 Heather Johns Well, there's definitely the hybrid work piece and the transition to almost fully remote for a lot of people, then to hybrid. And now you see a lot of industries going back to fully in person. And so, thankfully, at Bucknell, we've been able to maintain a hybrid work environment, flexible work environment for folks who are not student facing, because students are our first priority. For example, on my team, our print shop, our mail team, there's no room for hybrid work there. They have to be on site. That's just the nature of their job. But then there are other areas within communications that can be hybrid. And that's just not something that really existed before. So communication has fundamentally changed among our team through Covid, and it persists now in a good way. We use Slack very effectively. 10:29 Heather Johns We are able to move very enormous projects forward without all being in the same room. Even something as simple as magazine development. I mean, almost every institution has an alumni magazine or a university magazine. We don't have printouts anymore. We don't have blue lines in the traditional way. We've adopted lots of tools that allow us to work remotely and work our, make our teams as effective and as functional as possible when we're not all in the same room. So those types of things have changed. Obviously, the political landscape has changed. We have, there's a lot of uncertainty, there's a lot of instability in terms of what decisions are going to be made at the federal level, how they will affect us, if they will affect us. But there's also the people's fears really do drive their perception of what is happening. 11:23 Heather Johns And so even if your institution is moving forward in a very measured way and is doing as I believe many are, if you are in a marginalized group, for example, or if your work is under intense scrutiny from, say, the federal government, there is an element of fear inside of you that you feel and that fear will drive your perception of a lot of things. And so it's beholden on marketing and communications, I believe, to help assuage those fears, to help communicate, to be as transparent as possible, recognizing the human element of everyone on your campus, of everyone who is experiencing this in very different ways. So we ironically, in an age of more technology, more, you know, less, you know, maybe interpersonal interactions, the humanity of our work is, has never been more important. 12:23 Sharlyn, Content Strong More important. Yes. I, I, I mean, this is definitely a theme that I'm seeing in a lot of the conversations we're having. But I love the way that you've just framed that and want to build on that a little bit. This idea about really facing head on some of these political challenges, thinking about them and what they mean for the audience, you know, students and faculty, but also even your own team. And I'm wondering how that drives almost how that drives your messaging or, you know, your workflows. I want touch in a second about the digital disruption piece and using some of the technologies and stuff you talked about. 12:58 Sharlyn, Content Strong But I think in one of our earlier conversations we talked about just, you know, the diversity aspect of some of the things that you do and how you Continue to kind of uplift that or bring that to the forefront or the center of the work that you do. 13:11 Heather Johns So what we've done in this past year is implement something called ethical storytelling. Okay. And the reason that we, we did that in response to some student feedback from students of underrepresented groups who felt that they were being tokenized on campus and perhaps like if they saw a photographer taking their photograph, that they would feel like they were being singled out and because of how they looked. And that is not something that our team ever has done. And so it was very concerning to us to feel that anyone would ever have that experience on campus. 13:49 Sharlyn, Content Strong Right. 13:50 Heather Johns So we looked into figuring out how on earth were we going to better articulate what we actually do and to also assess what we're doing to make sure we're doing it in the best way possible to honor people's human dignity and make, not just do it, but make sure that they felt it and understood that was what were doing. And so we ended up adopting ethical storytelling, which is typically used in social justice organizations. And we worked with a consultant who helped us evaluate all of our materials, all of our processes, all of our workflows, all of our policies, all of the decision making matrix type things that we use. Like what is a story, what makes a story, things like that. That seems sometimes crystal clear to us, not crystal clear to anyone outside of our division. 14:43 Heather Johns So we worked for a year doing all of that work. And then finally this fall, beginning with orientation, were able to launch it. And it's been very successful. It's been wonderful. We culminated with a great celebration at the end of the year where we invited everyone who has trusted us with their stories this year to celebrate them and to help explain what ethical storytelling is. We have a whole section about it on our website that I would encourage anyone to go to and check out. It's been, it's been very effective and helpful and it has really helped us center the work of like human dignity in our work, which I think is really important, because it's hard when you. Marketing can sometimes be a dirty word in higher ed. 15:31 Heather Johns And so we want to make sure that everyone recognizes that we approach their story as their story. And if they, it is their story. And we are, we have the privilege of telling it in a very authentic way as part of our marketing materials. So that's how we're centering kind of the human piece of that is that. Did that answer your Question. 15:53 Sharlyn, Content Strong That totally answered my question. Of course it brought up more questions because that's how my brain works. And you know what I'm saying, thinking about that, we see a lot of people, at least before we're really trying to center this idea of inclusion and really naming some of the challenges that certain groups were facing and how they were facing it and what it actually meant for them and their experience, which we know is the big deal in higher ed. What is your experience like when you're here on campus and part of this community? And I wonder. It's always been a challenge to kind of. To measure, let's say, how impactful some of the work beyond outputs, but actually measure what the outcomes are of the work that you're doing. I don't know if you have anything to say to that. Like, what. 16:33 Sharlyn, Content Strong How are you actually measuring beyond maybe beyond. Maybe metrics, but also beyond metrics like how it. How it makes people feel and how you're actually seeing that it matters and it's making a difference. 16:43 Heather Johns So I think that's twofold, right? One. One part of our ethical storytelling work in terms of how we set the. Set the foundation of it and the framework up within our division, is how would we measure our success with the ethical storytelling specifically? And that was one of our most challenging pieces of how would we do this? And we talked about, like, surveys and things like this, and we didn't want to overwhel. We didn't want to do this. And what we actually came up with is a metric of if we heard, if we actually got feedback from people asking us to take something down or to say we want to. I'm not comfortable with this, or I was very happy with this a few years ago, but I don't want it online now. That's our measure of success. 17:27 Heather Johns Because what that shows us is we've communicated very clearly to our. To our campus community that welcome that we want to hear that, and that we will honor that request. So if we hear nothing, if we hear radio silence, then that actually suggests to us that we have not made it clear that people can opt out of something or that they can decide that perhaps the way that this was framed before, they don't want it framed. 17:55 Sharlyn, Content Strong That. 17:57 Heather Johns So ironically, getting at feedback, that's our sign of success because we've communicated clearly. 18:03 Sharlyn, Content Strong And that was the goal, to be able to see that you've communicated clearly, of course. 18:07 Heather Johns And then in terms of the other piece, in terms of just marketing in general and getting feedback and all right, it's really hard to be able to tell if something that we have said, you know, on Instagram influenced anybody to come to Bucknell. Right. It's really hard. But word of mouth is where we are really. We love those stories. We have a Slack channel that's completely just about shout outs and about just sort of gassing everybody up if we have done a good job. And one of my favorite stories is we have a podcast that's really designed for parents and families of college students. And so it's one of the examples of our really close partnerships with admissions in that we have co hosts. One is a, a communications writer and marketing strategist and the other is an admissions officer. 18:55 Heather Johns And so they're co hosts together and we have different themes and you know, for each episode. And at an admitted student day, one of our colleagues in our division was working and you know, helping to get everybody excited. And a parent came up to her who lived in Texas and she said that she had not gone to college, so her son was going to be a first generation college student and she had no idea what to do. She had no idea how to work. And she listened to every single one of our podcast episodes. Every single one. And because of that, she then fell in love with Bucknell, encouraged Tristan to look at Bucknell and lo and behold, now he is a Bucknell engineering student from Texas. Oh my God. So all the way to Pennsylvania. 19:36 Heather Johns And that those stories don't come along very often, but boy do we hold onto them with both hands in those. 19:44 Sharlyn, Content Strong Because they're more like, oh yeah, they're more profound than oh, you know, I, we sent out this one tweet and one person re shared it like that is an actual story to be able to say, well we've, this is one additional admission here. And they decided to go here and made this choice and now feel comfortable here. Not only them, their parent feels comfortable that they're coming here because of the environment that were able to support and create and all the communications were able to send out. 20:09 Heather Johns That's huge, right? Yeah, we have a student run Instagram account that's actually going to be celebrating its 10 year anniversary this summer. And another thing that really makes us feel good is we have students who come here and it is on their Bucknell bucket list to be Ray Bucknell, to be I am Ray Bucknell to run that Instagram account. And so we have waiting lists to run it because this is like part of, it's one of the things that they followed before they got here, then they're here, they want to do it. And that also is just a constant reminder of how the work that we're doing really is making a difference and an impact on our students. 20:45 Sharlyn, Content Strong Well, I want to pick up a little bit on what you said there, just about the Instagram account. And we talked a little bit about COVID 19, of course, changing you work internally, but I likely also changing some of the tools that you're using to. To do some of the things that. That. That you're doing. I wonder if you have. 21:00 Heather Johns Maybe. 21:00 Sharlyn, Content Strong Maybe I'll directly ask that, like, are there new different tools that you're using now that you weren't using then? Thinking about also this idea of digital disruption with new AI tools and what that means for, you know, your team and how you guys are using or not using that. 21:14 Heather Johns Yeah, well, during COVID we implemented a few things that have really, we've kept going because they've been very successful. One of them is an aud. And I know that other campuses did the same thing, and we've evolved it over time. So now it's multilingual. You can do this whether you are actually on campus, or you can do it whether you're just at home on your computer. You can follow along. And it's students who are offering the audio commentary. So there's that sort of personal connection there that's helpful. It's not somebody that we've hired to do a voice actor or something. It's actual students. 21:51 Sharlyn, Content Strong It's authentic that way. 21:52 Heather Johns Yeah, so that's been very helpful, and we've also recognized that. 21:55 Sharlyn, Content Strong But. 21:58 Heather Johns The traditional viewbook, there's just so much opportunity there. So we've launched a customizable viewbook. And so that has been very helpful, where students can go in there and they answer a quiz. They love quizzes, as long as they're not too long. And they, you know, so they fill out a little quiz. We understand what kind of content they want to see. So that customizable viewbook has been very helpful in moving forward. And we also launched. I think I tried to remember, I feel like we launched this before COVID but I'm not really sure. But we have our Instagram Q and A with our Dean of Admissions. And what we do is we solicit questions from really anyone, but mostly prospective students through Instagram. 22:39 Heather Johns They give us all their questions, and then we film our Dean of Admissions, Kevin Mathis, on all different spots on campus, spots that relate to whatever the question is. And he gives answer, we film, and it's fun. And then we have a blooper reel. And that blooper reel is, like, one of our best viewed pieces of content for the year always. But those are some of the things that we've done that. The digital disruption, it's a. I don't even think about it as a disruption. It doesn't feel like a disruption to us. We've. We've really embraced it. We've moved forward with it, and we've. We love it. 23:16 Sharlyn, Content Strong That's. I mean, I. I would agree with you. I think there's a lot of opportunity. It's more opportunity than not. Right. With some of the new tools that we have at our fingertips. Just shifting gears once again, a little bit, thinking about, you know, what you have in your mind on your strategy, on your plate for the next six to 12 months. You know, what do you hope your team will have moved the needle on, whether internally or whether, you know, how Bucknell is kind of viewed externally? Tough question. 23:46 Heather Johns That is a really tough question. And the next. Well, we. Like I said, we are in the midst of our strategic planning, so much depends on what that outcome is. So I would say in the next six to 12 months, I would love for our community to feel like they understand what our strategic plan is, that they believe in that plan, that they know that they are able to list the priorities in that plan if they were quizzed, like a pop quiz on campus, and that they can also all talk about how they are furthering that plan. And so that's my goal for my division, is to be able to do that so that everybody on campus could be able to do the same thing. 24:32 Sharlyn, Content Strong That's amazing. I would be interested to see. And this is a very difficult thing to do unless you act exactly as you said, unless you survey them. But it would be really interesting to see how that translates into what the person on the street at Bucknell, the person sitting in their class, actually feels or is absorbing of the strategic plan. I would love to see that. I'm sure you would, too. 24:52 Heather Johns Yeah, I would, too. I'll. I'll get back to you in six to 12 months. 24:56 Sharlyn, Content Strong Let me know. Let me know how it goes. And then, I mean, this is the final. This is the final question. It's a question I ask everybody. I'm sure you've heard this question before. It's the big magic wand question. If you had that magic wand and you could wave it in the air right now, and it could remove one persistent obstacle that's, you know, on your team's plate. Whether it's a perception gap, whether it's a capacity issue, whether it's a structural barrier, whatever it is, or what would you fix to help your team have the impact it deserves? Across campus. 25:26 Heather Johns My team punches up all the time. We are performing at a very high level, but they're tired. I mean, they're tired. I would say that those guys are working so hard. And my biggest obstacle truly is to find ways to allow them to get the rest that they need. I know that is not a sexy answer, but they have been, quite honestly killing themselves since COVID Truly. They have just been working and we are just operating at such a high level and they need a little bit of a break. And that's the hardest thing. And so the flexible work environment when we can do really tried hard to do that, try to make sure they're taking vacations. If they have any interest in professional development. 26:24 Heather Johns I work hard to get them coaching, professional coaching, whatever we can possibly do to help them feel fulfilled and rested. But they're, they're a really hard, hard working bunch. And I just wish that I will sell you. If I had more of them, they would all be working just as hard. So it's not necessarily a body's issue. 26:47 Sharlyn, Content Strong I was just going to say that. Is it a capacity issue? 26:51 Heather Johns It's making sure to find that balance of they're performing at a very high level, but also taking care of themselves. Right. So that's what I would say. That's probably the technological disruption of COVID is not what is persisting today for our team in terms of hurting us. It is the idea that you can work all the time, you're always available. We've had some really hard moments at Bucknell that we've had to communicate through some crisis management issues that have taken, you know, taken a toll. But it's also, it establishes an expectation that you are never, ever off the clock. And so we have to find a way to do better there. And that's on me. So you can check in with me 6 to 12 months to see if I've been able to do better. 27:39 Heather Johns I've really been working hard at it and I can always do better in that way. 27:44 Sharlyn, Content Strong I feel like we can all probably do better in that way. Just the idea that we unplug a little bit. But every, you know, we live in a society where we're all urgent, instant things need to happen, need to Always be progressing and moving at all times. And I was just going to say, I wonder if that's almost a priority issue, not in terms of knowing that your life is more of a priority than your work, but in terms of having so many work priorities and being able to structure them and identify which ones go first and just balancing them, I think is. 28:12 Heather Johns Yeah, well, we've had, we have themes for our division each year and two years ago our theme was efficiency. Right. And the reason for that was it's really easy to just keep doing this the things that you're doing the same way you've always done them because it takes so much time and effort to do it at the front end, to change it, even if there's long term benefits. And it's also really hard to be able to say to somebody, hey, you know what, I need a minute here to be able to assess this, to see if there's a better way I could be doing this to save me more time in the end. And so by having that as our theme for the year for the division, that was literally an expectation for everybody. It gave everybody the room to do that. 28:53 Heather Johns And in some cases, some of these really onerous tasks that take a long time, sometimes that's just the way it is, we have to do it that way. But for some of those tasks that gave our teams some room to realize, oh, I could do this, it's just going to take like a day and a half to set this up, or it's going to take a week and a half to set this up and I might need actually help from this other person in this other area of our division to help. And then the next year, our theme, this year actually our theme is AI. So we're building on that efficiency to say, okay, we've identified that these areas could probably be done quicker and faster. Can AI help with that? And it turns out that it absolutely can in a lot of ways. 29:36 Heather Johns And so we've taken this year to say, what can we do to make things a little bit easier for ourselves? Certainly not replacing the essential magical human creativity. It's not replacing people. It's just freeing those essential special things up to be able to do those things and apply those things to our work and not have to worry about the stuff that could have, that can be done a lot quicker by AI. So that's how, that's how we're doing it. I, I am trying. I am trying. I'm working on it. 30:10 Sharlyn, Content Strong Yeah. I mean, that's it. And that's. You know, I love that you touched again on. On AI, because I think we're. We're all. At least, we should all. I feel like we should all be leaning into a little bit some of the tools that we have there. There is. Is kind of a fear I find around, especially people in our industry, where we're going to be replaced by machines, but not necessarily right. We, We. They still. We still need the strategy to look at what it is that we're producing and how we produce it and what it means and shape it and so on. It is really just finding those kind of strategic ways to use the tools that are available to us. So I love that you brought that up. 30:42 Sharlyn, Content Strong Do you have anything else that I didn't ask that you were like, I really am dying to share this? 30:47 Heather Johns No, you hit it all. It was a very great conversation. Thanks for inviting me. 30:51 Sharlyn, Content Strong Good. Thank you so much again. So, you know, you shared your. Your time, your expertise, your perspective with us today. It was such a thoughtful and generous conversation. Big thank you to anybody who listens or watches this. I hope that this episode sparked some ideas, affirmed your own experiences, helped you see, I don't know, maybe a challenge in a new light. If you're a leader in higher ed and you want to contribute to this evolving conversation, I'd love to hear from you. The truth is, we know these conversations aren't just us talking. They really are a start of, I hope, a shared roadmap for the future of our field. So let's get to work. Thank you again, Heather. 31:27 Heather Johns Thank you.