Building for
boardrooms and
locker rooms.

Challenge

When I joined UK, Marketing Cloud was mostly limited to static, one-off email sends. There was no automation, no personalization, and no way for individual departments to run their own communications without going through a bottleneck. On top of that, the enrollment and advancement teams were working with unreliable data coming from the university's upstream data lakes, which made building anything automated risky until the data itself was cleaned up.

Approach

I rebuilt the environment around automated, cross-channel communication journeys that guided prospective students through the full admissions funnel, from initial interest all the way through acceptance. Rather than a single fixed path, students moved through different journeys based on their data points and how they engaged along the way, so the communication adjusted as their circumstances changed. Because the underlying data wasn't trustworthy on its own, I used Marketing Cloud's tools to clean and validate audiences before journeys could run against them reliably.

I worked through a mix of formal working groups and informal collaboration with departments across campus to design communication strategies tailored to different student segments. Just as important, I trained those departments to build and manage their own journeys going forward, turning what had been a single-person bottleneck into something teams could run themselves. Getting there took real work convincing skeptical stakeholders, one use case at a time, that the new approach was worth the change.

Challenge

The Virginia Community College System is made up of 18 distinct campuses, each running its own version of the recruitment and onboarding process. The system office wanted to unify those processes, give leadership visibility into how each campus was performing, and establish consistent metrics they could use to measure success and identify areas for improvement across the board.

Approach

As the lead technical resource on a team of three, I helped stand up a single Marketing Cloud instance that housed all 18 campuses plus the main system office. We built a uniform data structure and shared process for recruitment and onboarding, while still giving individual colleges room to adapt the process to fit their own student populations. That meant designing a data model that could actually work across 18 different institutions with different needs, which took a lot of iteration to get right.

Getting the data usable was its own challenge. We had to manipulate raw data across various business units so each institution could actually work with it inside the new system, and we built a custom preference management tool so campuses could manage their own communication preferences without stepping on each other inside a shared instance. On top of the technical build, there was a heavy training component to get users across 18 campuses comfortable with a brand new, unified tool, and some real friction to work through around adoption.

Challenge

The University of Iowa Center for Advancement was moving off a legacy marketing tool and onto the Salesforce stack, including Marketing Cloud, starting from a fragmented setup: donor and constituent data spread across spreadsheets, CSVs, and other disparate sources, with no unified system behind it. On top of the technical gap, the client was comfortable with how they'd always done things, and skeptical that a new platform was worth the disruption.

Approach

I worked with a complex data model the client didn't fully understand themselves, which meant a lot of the early work was as much about building shared understanding as it was about the technical build. Rather than just standing up new tools, I had to show the value of both the platform and the process changes that came with it, moving them from fully manual, hand-pulled data collection and distribution to automated journeys that did the work for them.

From there, we built out automated journeys that helped grow fundraising totals, along with a preference management center that adjusted dynamically based on which institution or organization was sending a given email, so recipients only saw options relevant to them. We also implemented MobileConnect to add texting as a channel. By the end, the client had gone from zero familiarity with the platform to running advanced, multi-channel use cases on their own.