Elizabeth Scarborough. Aisling Kelliher. Lauren Candito

In today’s economic environment, designers must work smarter than ever in order to thrive. This might mean using research and data to your best advantage, or finding new ways to connect with your audience. The trio of speakers showcased here can give you that smarter edge...


Working smarter with research data

Elizabeth Scarborough will present a general session, “Bridging the Gap: Building Design Strategy on Marketing Research Data.” An engaging speaker who is an industry leader, Elizabeth promises to prove, once and for all, that data geeks and graphic designers can live together in harmony!

More and more, colleges and universities are conducting comprehensive, multi-audience marketing research in order to establish a brand positioning strategy. And once the positioning strategy is established, a creative concept needs to be developed to bring that brand to life. But, how do you really bridge the gap between research and creative? How can data lead to design?

Elizabeth will present powerful case studies to illustrate how colleges and universities on the cutting-edge of higher education marketing have drawn creative concepts directly from market intelligence. She’ ll highlight the research findings and then walk through the creative concepts that spawned from lively discussions!

In addition to clocking more cell-phone hours in airports and rental cars than George Clooney in Up in the Air, Elizabeth Scarborough is CEO and Partner of SimpsonScarborough, and is a nationally recognized expert in the use of research to drive marketing and branding efforts, with 18 years of experience in providing strategic solutions to colleges and universities.



Working smarter with an emotional connection

Telling stories is a fundamental element of what makes us human. It is also a highly intuitive way in which we make sense of our everyday lives. From the earliest cave drawings to Polaroids, blogs and tweets, we have always used a rich variety of media and technologies to represent and understand our lived experiences. Join Aisling Kelliher, media systems designer from Arizona State University, for her session, “Mediated Storytelling: Telling Something to Someone about Something.” An expert in her field, Aisling will explain how today’s social media platforms, mobile applications and hybrid physical/digital environments present rich opportunities for creating new forms of storytelling experiences. Join her as she demonstrates how to design, build and evaluate engaging mediated storytelling platforms.


Working smarter with social media

Lauren Candito from Social Media Solutions offers two sessions that will help you reach your audience using today’s tools and practices. Her first session, “Game Changers: How Educational Institutions are Using Social Media,” explores the advent of new technologies, such as the internet and mobile, which have given rise to an inter-coupling of relationships across vast numbers of digital social networks. The speed at which these communications take place, their lack of geographic or social boundaries, and their ability to convey complex information and synthesize millions of viewpoints into easily digestible formats is unprecedented in the history of man. Higher education has not been immune to these changes, and our traditional educational systems find themselves buffeted by social media and the various technologies that it rides upon. Learn how higher education institutions can leverage social media to your advantage.

Lauren will also present “How Today’s Students Use Social Media.” Today’s college students use social media (i.e., Facebook, Myspace, Twitter), cell phones, blogs, and instant messaging at higher rates than people from other generations.Yet faculty members generally lag behind students in their use of technology. While some embrace it, most faculty have negative views of newer technologies, believing that technology use hurts students academically and socially. Nevertheless, research shows that students utilize newer technologies that are beneficial to them. Recent research has shown that students who use Facebook at high rates have more positive educational outcomes. And the use of blogs, cell phones, and instant messaging have all been shown to promote student academic and psychosocial development. Learn the trends so that you can “talk the language” of your key audience and communicate effectively!


Check back soon to learn how your online presence can be the best it can be. Sandra Kowalski and Trey McCallie from Northern Arizona University recently revamped their entire online system and will share insights and lessons learned from their experiences. Susan Kirtland, of Propeller Communications, with present two sessions about what your visual messaging says about you, and how to to a self-audit of your website’s usability.