Give your videographer a real gear budget, get them into classrooms and labs, build a shared b-roll library, and set priorities for the next six months. Their biggest advantage is being on campus when real academic life is happening. Make sure the job uses that.

Storytelling isn't always the right move. It depends on how much attention you've earned. If you're interrupting someone, like with a flyer or a paid social ad, get to the point fast. If your audience chose to be there or has nowhere else to go, like a podcast, a clicked-on student story, or a video at an event, you have room to tell the whole story. Before you create your next piece of content, ask yourself how much attention you've actually earned.

UMaine's "Life in the Pines" series works because they let students go off script (unfiltered beats polished), they've stopped chasing view counts (three-minute forestry videos were never gonna go viral, and that's fine), and they package it as a series instead of a playlist (a "season" makes people want to stick around). Do those three things and students start coming to you instead of the other way around.

4 schools with parent pages worth stealing from, plus why the old "we don't communicate with parents" instinct is costing you the narrative.

Rita Winthrop, enrollment marketing consultant and former admissions counselor, says the biggest yield and melt mistake schools make is going silent after May 1st. The fix: a pre-built email cadence through move-in, a dedicated parent comms strategy, one clear CTA per email, and treating transfer students as a year-round pipeline — not a backup plan.

A vendor lost my business by making me hunt for basic info instead of just telling me what I needed. Your deposited students are about to do the same thing when they reach out with questions. Answer them fully, right there, in the channel they used. Friction kills yield.

Your content team's motivation problem is almost always a distribution problem. Research from Duke shows people do 60% more work when they can see their efforts accumulating — and quit faster when they can't. Every piece of content that gets made and never properly distributed is a slow leak in your team's creative drive. The fix is simpler than you'd think: make distribution an explicit KPI, assign ownership, and block 30 minutes every morning just to get existing content in front of more people.

If your footage looks like a news broadcast and your audio sounds like you recorded in an echoey bathroom, this episode's for you. John walks in-house higher ed videographers through the camera settings that actually matter — frame rate, aperture, shutter speed, ISO — plus why he shoots in auto white balance (and doesn't care who knows it), why log footage is probably creating more problems than it's solving for your team, and why bad audio will tank a video faster than any camera setting ever could. The throughline: you're not just making videos, you're building an asset library other departments have to use. Make decisions accordingly.

Your admissions counselors are having high-stakes conversations with students every day and probably have no idea what videos you've made. A simple Google Doc — organized by student question, with shareable links and suggested copy — can fix that in an afternoon. Get the free template at unveild.tv/strategy-toolbox.

Your university website is probably organized around your org chart — president statements, department-named navigation, internal jargon — instead of the questions prospective students actually show up with. That mismatch costs you. Students today arrive already informed; they're validating, not discovering. If they can't find answers fast, they move on. The fix isn't a full redesign — it's auditing your jargon, surfacing information where students are already looking, and building around what they need to know rather than what leadership wants to say.

Discover a simple way to understand student needs by adding one required question to your webinar registration—and turn insights into better content.

Many higher ed videos underperform because their titles create unnecessary friction.
This guide shows how to make titles clearer, more clickable, and more relevant to prospective students.
Use these simple steps to increase engagement and support enrollment goals.

Discover the easiest higher ed content strategy for small or overstretched teams—one format, one system, and a repeatable approach that actually lasts.

Learn how colleges can use Zoom waiting room videos to improve engagement, enhance virtual touchpoints, and showcase student stories.