Our expertise

It’s hard to make time to be strategic when you’re constantly met with challenges and shifting priorities. Real-time market and audience insights are essential to give you space to make decisions confidently and efficiently, and keep your campus focused on your strategic outcomes and mission.

Social intelligence insights offer the opportunity for building better brand alignment, strengthening data-informed communication strategies, and amplifying key audience voices. With over 15 years of combined social intelligence expertise and 35 years of campus experience, we offer comprehensive research insights and higher ed knowledge to support applying the findings within your unique campus context.

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The value of social intelligence

Surveys and focus groups make assumptions about audiences to facilitate data collection, and are often unintentionally exclusionary. Social intelligence leverages organic online conversation to learn about the experiences and beliefs of a community. As a form of market research, it’s faster, more fluid, and more authentic than traditional focus groups, interviews, surveys, or audience panels. 

Social intelligence collects large volumes of audience feedback, using historical analysis to capture relevant conversation from the past to provide unfiltered insights. Looking forward, it offers the opportunity to measure progress and effectiveness over time as you implement new strategies. The community also doesn’t need to participate in social intelligence research so the insights include voices from those with highest need in the design process, incorporating all segments of your audience. 

GRIT Future List Honoree

GreenBook's 2019 GRIT Future List Finalist

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Social Intelligence Insider Pioneer, 2022

Our process

We’re not just your partner, we’re your strategic expert. We collaborate to deeply understand your priorities and questions, ultimately defining our shared vision and action plan. Along the way we increase your capacity by identifying obstacles and opportunities. We build your capabilities, empowering your team and extending their expertise.

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Build trust and a shared vision.

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We get to know each other and learn the ins and outs of your organization with the intention of deeply understanding your goals and questions, and how to best support you. We’ll build a shared vision for our work together and what we work toward.

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Understand and apply insights.

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This is where we dig in! Your partnership team is focused on supporting and coaching you through new ways of using and incorporating social insights into your work. You’ll make progress on your goals and begin to connect data, ideas, and people on your team and across campus to our work.

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Make strategic progress.

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Our strong relationship continues and you’ll see consistent progress toward your organization and partnership goals. You’ll regularly apply what you’ve learned and use it to inform your strategic decisions, support cross-org collaboration, and grow closer to your audiences in ways that matter.

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Brand & reputation

Brand and reputation management is one of the earliest and most significant applications of social intelligence. Leveraging social insights empowers you to refine your brand positioning and enhance your strategy, giving you a clearer understanding of how your campus is perceived and the ability to align marketplace perception with your strategic priorities.

Employ social intelligence to effectively assess your strengths and weaknesses, capitalize on your differentiators, mitigate detractors, and cultivate the essential value of trust.

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Our team of experts will work with you to:

  • Inform and develop your brand
  • Position your brand in the market
  • Manage and measure your brand
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Strategic planning & organizational strategy

Strategic planning is an opportunity to evaluate and prioritize resources so your institution can optimize its strengths and achieve its goals. Using social intelligence to gather the data improves the value and relevance of the environmental and market scanning at the foundation of every successful plan.

It allows you to learn from organic community conversations and assess market trends so you continually refine your strategic planning efforts to inform and align your program development, student success initiatives, and alumni or donor engagement.

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Our team of experts will work with you to:

  • Support leadership transition
  • Develop strategic initiatives
  • Optimize program development, funding, and marketing
  • Refine key stakeholder personas
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Stakeholder engagement

Develop an engaging and positive stakeholder experience that enhances their journey from prospect to graduate. You'll learn how they talk about their time on campus, including your strengths and opportunities, and how to apply your social intelligence insights to enhance the prospective student, current student, graduate, and donor path.

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Our team of experts will work with you to:

  • Build an engaging prospective student experience 
  • Inform alumni outreach and fundraising
  • Develop a robust student experience 
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Explore how ready your campus is for social intelligence.

I'm ready to learn more

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