Meet Your Fellow Higher Ed Social Pros – Let’s Connect!

Hi my name is Hayley Bowring and I am the Communications Strategist for Career Services at the University of Idaho! Go Vandals!💛🖤

❤One thing that I love about social in higher ed is sometimes the freedom you get when creating fun content for students that they find funny or enjoy. I love that I create content that helps educate but also entertain students.

🤔What’s uniquely challenging is that there are so many different social media accounts associated with your institution and there is so much going on that it’s hard to fight the noise.

Our mascot is Joe Vandal!

Greetings all. I am interested in connecting with professionals who are assigned to individual units (e.g., colleges or schools), especially business schools. See below to discover why.

• My name is Shaun Bailey, and I am a new employee at the University of Michigan-Flint. That is where I am a communications specialist assigned to its School of Management.
• One thing I find challenging about higher-ed social media is that I have to juggle it with many other responsibilities. Consequently, it ranks lower on my list of priorities than I would like.
• The thing I love about higher-ed social media is the insight and levity it can bring to daily life.
• Despite being a satellite campus, our mascot is also the wolverine.

Hello everyone! Excited to join the group and appreciate Sprout providing a platform for us all to utilize as higher ed marketing opportunities are every changing. 

• I’m Bill Gaither, assistant manager of marketing at Carl Sandburg College, a community college located in west-central Illinois. My primary functions are photography, videography/multimedia, and social media management. When not executing roles for those I help with copy/proofreading, website,...we’re a small team at a small school so you get it when I wrap this up saying I can wear a lot of hats. ☺️
• My biggest question at the moment is the “correct” way to use Reels and Tiktoks when music choices are limited on the business accounts. As higher ed institutions, we should lead the charge on the correct way to use the platforms, meaning are we licensing the correct music, simply using workarounds like CapCut and checking the “yes it’s ours” box on TikTok, etc. This may be a bit on the nose but when I try to ask colleagues and point these things out, it’s crickets...so if anyone can comment or help on this specific topic on the correct workflow and using music correct, please let me know. 🙌
• Our mascot is the Chargers, based off the notion of the old war horses charging into battle. While this tended to be sports-specific for a few years, a recent brand refresh has now included it to help marry the academic and athletic sides of the house. Initial buy-in has been good but it’s early days so we’re continuing to build this out, and at the moment investigating bringing the print Chargers image to life as a mascot for athletics, academic, and community engagement opportunities.

  

   

Hello all! 

I’m Jenny Li Fowler, director of social media strategy at MIT. One thing I love about higher is the people. I’ve met some amazing people in the higher ed social space and I’m looking forward to engaging with you all here! Our mascot is Tim the Beaver! (Tim is MIT backwards and the beaver is nature’s engineer 😄 )

Hi all, 
I’m Bryan Navarro, Executive Director of Advancement Communications at Saint Mary’s College of California, my alma mater. I’m a team of one (plus some student workers) overseeing strategy and execution on all our comms channels, including social.

I love the ability to play and experiment on social. Testing out messages, executions, call-and-response. It feels like my fingers are on the pulse of our community and I can feel a change coming early. I appreciate the opportunity to be more casual and have autonomy since I run the alumni account, not the institutional account. I’m also forutnate that we’re a smaller, private college where there are fewer critical eyeballs on our pages. There’s lots of room for higher ed to catch up to brands and creators across the rest of the internet. Let’s have some fun!

Saint Mary’s is the home of the Gaels. And if you know what a Gael is, you’re ahead of the game! 

Looking forward to meeting and and chatting with you here!

Hi everyone!

I am Courtney Witmer, Assistant Director of Social Media at Penn State, where I manage 7 interns, analytics, paid social efforts (including our new Influencer program), teach a Digital PR class for our school of communications, and am the primary manager of the brand TikTok account.

Coming from a background in industry, one of the things I find uniquely challenging about Higher Ed is the conservatism in terms of social. It’s been hard to get buy in for a lot of thing that seem pretty mundane to me from a social perspective, but we’re getting there and the fight has been so worth it!

As an alum as well as an employee, I’m proud to say our mascot is the ‘stately Nittany Lion’

Hey everyone! 👋

I’m the manager of the Social Media Team at the University of Newcastle in Australia.

What I love about my job is the opportunity to take really complex, and sometimes life changing research and turn it into understandable, engaging and educational content for our audience - without taking ourselves too seriously!!

Our mascot is Hunter the Hippocampus (who recently went viral for crashing the library during study time: https://www.tiktok.com/@uni_newcastle/video/7503806855597149456). 

Hey there 👋 My name is Al Campion, Assistant Director of Social Media for Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. I think higher ed is unique in that those around you (both coworkers and ‘customers’) are continually willing to learn new things. I don’t think that’s true of very many other professions, so in a field like social where continued learning and adaptability are required, the buy-in become a lot easier to get than other industries--at least in my experience.

Contrary to popular belief (Google included, sometimes), UofI does not have a mascot! We haven’t been the Chiefs in nearly 20 years, and no, we have not adopted the Kingfisher as a mascot 🫠

I used to work at UWGB with Cindy Bailey! Love everything y’all are doing up there!

I had no idea this hub existed! I’m Matt, Head of Digital Media at Newcastle University in the UK (are there any non-North Americans here?)
I’ve been working in social at the university for nearly 12 years now. Helped create the internal team then wiggled my way up a bit and now look after the social team and paid media team.

One thing that I find hilarious about working in social higher ed is pretty much social “best practice” isn’t “higher ed social” best practice. We got to make our own tips for success due our weird and wonderful world as public institutions that also have a hefty sized audience between 16-21

We don’t really do mascots like you do in North America but we have Percy the Lion. The suit is the same suit they had when I joined here though 🤢 (it has been cleaned since then)