Higher Ed Icons
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Podcast Overview
<p>Celebrating the pioneers, thought leaders, trend setters, and change makers in higher education marketing. With your hosts: Voltaire Santos Miran and Mallory Willsea.</p>
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
4/1/2026
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Recent Episodes
June 17, 2026
Episode 6 - Why Playing It Safe ... Isn't
Terry Flannery has been the first person to hold her job three different times. First marketing director at the University of Maryland. First VP of Communication at American University. First-ever EVP and COO at CASE. When the institution offered her the founding marketing role at Maryland with a $48,000 budget, no staff, and a job description that read "coordinate the deans' messages," she turned it down. Then waited for the institution to come back and ask what it would actually take. In this episode of Higher Ed Icons, Terry sits down with Mallory and Volt to walk through the career that shaped how higher ed thinks about marketing. The original argument she made to skeptical faculty using a definition borrowed from a Northwestern academic. The four-step process behind WONK that most institutions skip. The dial-up, dial-down brand architecture that let WONK speak to faculty, alumni, and donors in three different registers without losing the through-line. She also names something most senior marketers won't say out loud — that politics is the job, not a distraction from it. That the fights in higher ed are vicious because the stakes are so low. And that the people who do this work well are the ones who stop pretending the political work is separate from the strategic work. It's a conversation about building the function before the function exists, the discipline that makes bold creative possible, and what thirty-five years of being the first person in the room taught her about saying no until the institution is ready to say yes. 🔑 What You'll Take Away Why the founding move of any marketing leadership role is refusing the underbuilt version of the seat The four-step process behind WONK How Terry made marketing acceptable to faculty by routing the argument through a source they already respected Why "polarizing" is the wrong frame for distinctive creative and what to aim for instead The dial-up, dial-down architecture that made WONK work across faculty, alumni, and donor audiences What thirty-five years of retail politics inside universities taught Terry about moving institutions
June 2, 2026
Episode 5 - The High Cost of Certainty
Marketers have been sold the wrong order of operations. Permission, then proof, then scale. That's the sequence most of us were trained on. Devin Purgason argues it's exactly why so many marketers are stuck — and the people actually moving on AI, on student experience, on work that matters, are running it the other way. Proof first. Permission after. Scale once the evidence is in the room. From there, the conversation opens up into how that mindset plays out across an entire career. How to choose what to prioritize when the budget is fractional. Why community college marketers should be sitting in graduate enrollment sessions. What agentic AI is actually doing to the role, and why brand awareness gets more important in an agent-mediated world, not less. We also get into the case for collapsing marketing and student care into one function and what happens when the team responsible for the promise is also responsible for whether the promise gets kept. 🔑 What You'll Take Away Why "permission, then proof, then scale" is the wrong order — and what to run instead How to use other people's sessions, budgets, and playbooks as your R&D What agentic AI is actually doing to the higher ed marketing role Why brand awareness becomes more important in a zero-click, agent-mediated world How student care belongs inside the marketing function, not next to it What seminary teaches you about taking complex ideas and making them land
May 19, 2026
Episode 4 - Our Business Model Is F'd
Ashley Budd saw it before most of the field did. Sitting in admissions at RIT, watching tuition climb and the enrollment cliff inch closer, she made a bet: higher ed was going to have to learn how to fundraise, and the old playbook wasn't going to cut it. She moved to Cornell, joined a brand-new digital innovation team, and got to work. But she didn’t just rewrite the playbook. She changed the game. In this conversation, Ashley walks Mallory and Volt through the moments that shaped the modern advancement playbook: the Kickstarter-era realization that higher ed's business model was breaking, the first crowdfunding experiments at Cornell, the Black Thursday giving day that raised $7 million the same day the market crashed, and the stubborn, ongoing work of turning Cornell's giving day into a 12-year tradition that still grows while peer institutions plateau. She also takes on the inbox. As co-author of Mailed It, Ashley has spent years arguing that email isn't dead — we just wish it were, because we've made it miserable. She talks about why 85% of higher ed communication is a call to action and why that's a problem. She unpacks the deceptively simple idea that's animated her whole career — alumni have lives, and our job is to insert ourselves into them through games, through kitchen art for new grads, through email people actually want to open. She closes on AI, returning to a trust framework as old as Aristotle to explain where the technology helps and where it will quietly erode the relationships we've spent decades building. It's a conversation about reach versus relationship, the difference between running a playbook and reinventing one, and what it looks like to be the person who keeps moving the whole field forward. 🔑 What You'll Take Away Why higher ed's business model demanded reinvention, and what crowdfunding got right that traditional fundraising missed How Cornell built a giving day that keeps growing while peer institutions plateau What separates institutions running the playbook from the ones still rewriting it Why "email is dead" really means we've made it miserable, and how to make the inbox a place people want to be How to stop confusing reach with relationship in alumni communication Where AI helps, where it erodes trust, and the framework Ashley uses to tell the difference
7 total episodes available
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- What is Higher Ed Icons?
<p>Celebrating the pioneers, thought leaders, trend setters, and change makers in higher education marketing. With your hosts: Voltaire Santos Miran and Mallory Willsea.</p> - How often does this podcast release new episodes?
This podcast updates daily.
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