Higher Ed Storytelling University

In this solo episode, John pulls back the curtain on Unveild's new "Directed UGC" offering — and the surprising gap in the market he hit while trying to promote it. When he went looking for colleges using UGC video well, he found plenty of day-in-the-life content and campus vibes clips, but almost nothing using UGC to tell a real story or market a specific program. That gap became the episode.

John walks through how he landed on a working definition of "real" UGC, why day-in-the-life became the default format schools reach for, and what it looks like when a student or alum is given real direction instead of just a phone and a prompt — using a story from a University of Montana journalism alum as the throughline.

Key takeaways:

• Most schools treat UGC and "real" video content as two separate lanes — polished storytelling goes to the video team, and UGC defaults to day-in-the-life. That split is leaving a lot of good content on the table.
• John's working definition: real UGC is a student or alum bringing you into their world — how they think, what matters to them, what they've lived through — not just a clip of something happening.
• Day-in-the-life dominates because it's easy to operationalize — hand someone a phone, no storytelling skill required. Anything beyond that needs direction and coaching, which is harder to systematize.
• Program tours, project walkthroughs, and "a day in my job" videos from alumni are underused UGC formats that could carry the same weight as scripted student-story videos — with more authenticity.
• The best moments are often unscripted — John's example: a Montana alum's unplanned detour into how the journalism program's "learn by doing" philosophy played out, including students landing the first photo of Ted Kaczynski during the Unabomber arrest.
• Unveild's "Directed UGC" offering pairs a professional storyteller-led interview and shot list with in-house editing, aiming to solve the two biggest UGC pain points: finding willing students and getting usable footage back.

Schools/programs mentioned as reference points for UGC-style content:

• The Fletcher School at Tufts University
• Kogod School of Business (American University)
• University of Michigan
• Westminster University
• Sewanee: The University of the South
• University of Birmingham
• University of Leeds

Connect with John:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://unveild.tv
• Newsletter: https://unveild.tv/newsletter

My guest today is Betsy Chapman, Senior Executive Director of Family Communications and Engagement at Wake Forest. Betsy is the voice behind the Daily Deac, a blog for parents and families that's been running nearly every weekday for over a decade and has grown to roughly 8,200 subscribers.

Betsy walks through how the Daily Deac started as an alumni blog called Quad View, how it evolved into the go-to source of information and comfort for Wake Forest parents, and the philosophy behind "Stop, Drop, and Roll" — her framework for helping families support their students without taking over for them. She also shares findings from her own dissertation research linking how deeply families read parent communications to student satisfaction, self-advocacy, and giving behavior.

Key Takeaways:

• A named, first-person author builds more trust with readers than an institutional or departmental voice — Betsy's dissertation research on corporate and institutional blogs backed this up directly.
• The Daily Deac isn't written from scratch every day — a mix of predictable, cyclical campus content (move-in, midterms, finals) and campus partner requests keeps the workload manageable, often just 15 minutes to an hour a day.
• Schools don't need a new hire to start something like this — existing staff in communications, alumni, or student life offices can contribute, or the role can rotate across departments.
• "Stop, Drop, and Roll" reframes how families should respond when a student calls with a problem: stop and assess whether the student can handle it, drop your urge to fix it, and roll with whatever solution the student lands on.
• Betsy's dissertation found a correlation between how frequently and deeply parents read university communications and three outcomes: higher satisfaction, less direct intervention with university offices, and increased giving to the annual fund.
• Some of the most-loved posts weren't polished or strategic — a "five senses" post written during a bout of writer's block, just describing what Betsy observed walking across campus, became one of the most emotionally resonant posts she's written.
• Feedback and even pushback from readers (including families who felt a post was condescending) has directly shaped how Betsy frames advice — she treats critical feedback as information, not an attack.

Connect With Betsy:

• Email: [email protected]
• Find the blog: search "Daily Deac Wake Forest"

Connect With John:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
• Website: https://unveild.tv
• Newsletter: https://unveild.tv/newsletter

My guest today is Bobby Silk, communication and content strategist in the marketing and communications office at Sewanee: The University of the South. Bobby joined the show to walk through Inquiring Minds, a faculty spotlight video series that went on to earn a regional Emmy nomination — produced on a shoestring, unbudgeted line item of roughly $1,250–$1,500 per video.

Bobby and his small, wear-a-lot-of-hats team (one videographer running two cameras and sound, one editor doing double duty as that same videographer, and an outside animator) pulled off ten faculty videos in three shoot days over winter break, all in a single repurposed campus ballroom basement — accidental purple curtains and all. The conversation covers how they picked faculty, how they framed the ask so it didn't feel like homework, why one location saved the whole budget, and the surprisingly long tail of places these videos have ended up living — from admissions campaigns to a required first-year course.

In this episode:

• Why the series went straight-to-camera and personality-forward instead of traditional documentary style, and how that decision got made
• How to pitch faculty participation so it doesn't sound like "give us your conference presentation"
• The case for one location, one setup, and why that's what actually makes budget video work
• How an animator can solve the "we don't have footage of this" problem for historical or abstract topics
• Why "views" is the wrong first metric, and what Bobby looks at instead
• The unplanned afterlife of this series: newsletters, bio pages, anti-melt campaigns, and a required first-year seminar
• Why chasing a $50,000 budget isn't the same as chasing quality — and what Sewanee proved by doing the opposite

Resources mentioned:

• Inquiring Minds video series: https://new.sewanee.edu/inquiring-minds/
• "How a Diva Made History" (Cecilia Cerja on Josephine Baker): https://new.sewanee.edu/inquiring-minds/how-a-diva-made-history/
• "The Mathematics of Aviation" (Catherine Cavagnaro): https://new.sewanee.edu/inquiring-minds/mathematics-aviation/
• Rafa documentary (Netflix) — mentioned as Bobby's off-topic "nerding out" pick, no direct link available; searchable on Netflix
• Wistia's "One, Ten, One Hundred" Soapbox launch documentary 
• Leigh Burmesch (Animator): https://leighburmesch.com/
• Stephen Garrett (Videographer): https://slgarrett.com/about
  
  

Connect with Bobby:

• Email: [email protected]
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robert-silk-0a730235/ 
  
  

Connect with John:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://unveild.tv
• Newsletter: https://unveild.tv/newsletter

In this solo episode, John tackles a problem he thinks is way more foundational than filming or editing: casting. Before you can tell a great story, you need someone willing to raise their hand and tell it — and John argues that's the part most higher ed teams are actually failing at.

Drawing on conversations with clients and his own experience running Unveild's story-sourcing process, John breaks down why the standard approach — a mass email asking people to "tell your story" — usually falls flat, and walks through what he's currently experimenting with instead: smaller asks, better timing, and specific prompts that help people recognize they actually have something to say.

Key Takeaways:

• The hardest part of great storytelling usually isn't the production — it's finding people with real stories who are willing to participate in the first place.
• Mass emails asking people to "tell your story" tend to underperform because the ask is too vague, too impersonal, and easy to ignore.
• Many students and alumni self-disqualify because they assume their experience isn't dramatic enough — but the most compelling stories often live in small, specific, unpolished moments rather than big "hero" outcomes.
• Faculty and staff referrals are valuable, but without training on what makes a story compelling, they tend to surface the same safe, polished profiles over and over.
• Lowering the barrier for a first ask — a 30-second voice memo, a one-sentence response — works better than pitching someone straight into a full production, and lets you screen for communication skill and enthusiasm along the way.
• Specific prompts ("tell us about a time a professor changed how you think") help people self-identify far more effectively than open-ended asks like "share your story."
• Timing matters: asking during emotionally heightened moments — graduation, capstones, final critiques, the end of a clinical rotation — captures better material than following up weeks later.
• Story sourcing needs to become an ongoing campus habit rather than a scramble that starts only when a campaign kicks off.

Resources Mentioned:

• NPR's The Moth – referenced for its low-friction voicemail-style story submission format
• Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard and Monica Padman – specifically the "Armchair Anonymous" segment, cited as an example of how specific prompts generate better story submissions
• Glengarry Glen Ross – referenced in passing for the "always be closing" line, which John riffs on as "always be casting"

Connect With John:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://unveild.tv
• Newsletter: https://unveild.tv/newsletter

My guests today are Brenn Borror, who leads content strategy at the University of Maine, and Patrick Wine, founder of Story Stroll, the filmmaker behind UMaine's "Life in the Pines" series. We get into how an unscripted, vlog-style student story series came together — and why it's stuck around for three seasons.

Brenn and Patrick walk through how "Life in the Pines" started as a cold-call pitch for a generic campus tour video that they reshaped into something more specific to UMaine, why they insisted on one person, one camera, and no crew for every shoot, and how a rigged-up "snorri cam" — basically a tripod strapped under a student's arms — lets students walk and narrate their own story without feeling guided by the marketing team. We also dig into the unglamorous side of the metrics: why a nearly 40,000-subscriber YouTube channel mostly built on a viral lobster-cooking video and an old extension-office library isn't the same audience watching these student stories, and why that's actually fine.

In this episode:

• Why UMaine passed on a polished, teleprompter-style tour video pitch and built something rougher and more specific instead
• How the "snorri cam" walk-and-talk format gets genuine, unguided footage out of students
• The one-person, one-camera rule and why it matters for getting students to relax on camera
• Why calling it "seasons" and "episodes" instead of a playlist changed how people watched it
• How a pre-interview process surfaces the small, specific details (like a chocolate bar traded for a bicycle) that make a story worth following
• Why low YouTube view counts don't mean the series isn't working, and what they're actually using it for in the funnel
• How casting evolved from proactive outreach to an open call, and why they now ask for a 60-second video submission
• Why retention, not just recruitment, is a real benefit of this kind of content

Resources mentioned:

• Life in the Pines (full series hub): https://umaine.edu/pines/
• Life in the Pines, full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue-xo4MsoTs
• Life in the Pines, teaser trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1hKbuFXtw8
• Life in the Pines, Season 2 full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2axURGS18I
• The University of Maine's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheUniversityofMaine
• Story Stroll Studios (Patrick's production company): storystrollstudios.com

Connect with Brenn:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brennborror/

Connect with Patrick:

• Story Stroll Studios: storystrollstudios.com
• Email: [email protected]
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrickmwine/

Connect with John:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
• Website: https://unveild.tv
• Newsletter: https://unveild.tv/newsletter

Grad school enrollment is hard right now. International pipelines are drying up, domestic demand is soft in a lot of markets, and prospective students have more options — and more skepticism — than ever. So how do you cut through?

This compilation episode features three marketers from three very different graduate programs who are each doing something smart with storytelling and content creation to ultimately impact enrollment. Katya Popova at American University's Kogod School of Business went all-in on a bold AI identity and turned it into a PR machine. Chris Lewis at University of Michigan Flint built a podcast from scratch — solo — and is using it to meet prospective grad students exactly where they are. And Laura Beth O'Brien at Gatton College of Business and Economics at University of Kentucky figured out that "this degree opens doors" isn't enough — you have to show people how it actually fits into their real, busy, complicated lives.

In this episode:

• Why Kogod claiming to be "the first AI-first business school" wasn't just a positioning move — it became their entire enrollment engine
• How AI search engines have become their own audience segment, and why earned media is the way to feed them
• The podcast strategy that's building a grad enrollment pipeline at UM Flint — and why even a small audience is worth the effort
• Why Gatton stopped leading with aspirational alumni outcomes and started leading with "this will actually fit in your life"
• How to track storytelling content through the enrollment funnel (including a QR code attribution trick)
• The content ecosystem argument: why no single piece of content closes the deal — and what "the whirlpool" actually looks like

Key Takeaways:

• Staking a bold, specific institutional claim ("AI-first") gives your PR, content, and enrollment teams something to rally around — and gives media something worth covering.
• AI search engines are an audience. Treat them like one. Run monthly reports on what ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity say about your school and adjust accordingly.
• Earned media feeds AI findability. Third-party validation (not your own website copy) is what LLMs trust. Put money behind your earned media hits, not just original content.
• Podcast transcripts are an underrated SEO and GEO asset — they're long, keyword-rich, and naturally repetitive in a way written content can't be.
• A LinkedIn newsletter for your podcast is a low-lift distribution channel that self-selects a genuinely interested audience. A thousand subscribers who opted in beats ten thousand passive email recipients.
• Grad school decision cycles are long (18+ months). Your storytelling has to be present at multiple touchpoints — not optimized for the last click.
• "This degree will open doors" is table stakes. The story that actually converts is: "You can do this without blowing up your life."
• Every story you collect about student or alumni success is also a coaching resource for your own admissions team — Chris Lewis uses podcast episodes to help staff better articulate program value.

Connect with the Guests:

• Katya Popova, CMO, Kogod School of Business at American University — LinkedIn
• Chris Lewis, Director of Graduate Programs, University of Michigan Flint — LinkedIn | [email protected] | Victors in Grad School podcast
• Laura Beth O'Brien, Director of Marketing Communications, Gatton College of Business and Economics, University of Kentucky — Linkedin
  
  

Resources Mentioned:

• Kogod School of Business at American University: https://www.american.edu/kogod/
• Victors in Grad School podcast (University of Michigan Flint): (search on your podcast platform)
• Gatton College of Business and Economics alumni video series: https://www.youtube.com/@UKGattonCollege
• HubSpot Inbound Conference: https://www.hubspot.com/inbound
• Poets & Quants (named Kogod "most consequential AI transformation in business education"): https://poetsandquants.com
• Axios (featured Kogod student AI research): https://www.axios.com
  
  

Connect With John:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
• Website: https://unveild.tv
• Newsletter: https://unveild.tv/newsletter

Most college parent pages were built by someone who ran out of time and dumped every link they didn't know what to do with into a pile. Laura Rudolph has spent a decade trying to fix that.

Laura is the founder of Square One Consulting, where she helps colleges communicate more clearly and — as she puts it — speak more human. She started her career as a journalist with a crime beat, fell into enrollment marketing, and eventually realized that the audience nobody was talking to — parents — was the one she was most drawn to write for. Turns out, skeptical Gen X parents who want honesty and hate marketing fluff are basically the ideal audience for a former investigative journalist.

In this episode, Laura breaks down why most parent pages fail, what good actually looks like, and the three pieces of content she'd build first if she were starting from scratch. We also walk through real examples from University of Washington, UT Austin, Hamilton, and Wake Forest — and Laura shares a free AI-powered tool she just launched that lets you drop in a URL or paste a parent email and get an honest assessment of whether it's actually working.

In this episode:

• Why most parent pages are "informationally present but emotionally absent" — and what that costs you
• The filing cabinet problem: why organizing your site around your org chart is failing families who don't know what a bursar does
• The three content pieces Laura would build first: a "Start Here" guide, a "What Families Worry About" hub, and a "How to Support Without Taking Over" section
• Why telling parents why you want their contact info resulted in a dramatic increase in opt-ins at Laura's former institution
• What University of Washington, UT Austin, Hamilton, and Wake Forest are doing right — and what makes each of them a model worth studying
• The parent-to-parent trust play most schools are completely ignoring
• Why there's a middle ground between helicopter parenting and institutional silence — and how your content can actually help create it

The free tool: Laura's AI-powered Parent & Family Communication Analyst is live at squareoneky.com. Drop in a URL or paste an email and get a scored, tiered review of how well your communication is actually working for a parent audience. It's free.

Good parent page examples mentioned:

• University of Washington: https://www.washington.edu/parents/
• University of Texas at Austin: https://parents.utexas.edu/
• Hamilton College: https://www.hamilton.edu/parents
• Wake Forest University: https://parents.wfu.edu/
• Providence College (honorable mention for parent blog): https://parents.providence.edu/
  
  

Connect with Laura:

• Website: squareoneky.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/laurakrudolph
  
  

Connect with John:

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
• Website: unveild.tv
• Newsletter: unveild.tv/newsletter

If your school just came off a yield season that didn't go the way you hoped — or if you're staring down summer melt and wondering what to actually do about it — this episode is for you.

Rita Winthrop is a marketing consultant with 15 years in higher ed and edtech who helps institutions and brands build content that actually moves people. She runs Rita Winthrop Consulting out of Newport, Rhode Island, specializing in enrollment email campaigns, LinkedIn ghostwriting for higher ed executives, and content strategy that doesn't just fill a calendar. She also has a lot of feelings about yield season — which is exactly why I wanted to get her on the show.

Rita has a rare background: she was both an admissions counselor and the person writing the MarCom for her team at the same time. That dual perspective shapes everything she talks about in this episode — why the disconnect between admissions and MarCom is so damaging, what actually moves students from accepted to enrolled, and why May 1st is halftime, not the finish line.

In this episode:

• Why the personalized experience students get with their admissions counselor so often evaporates the moment they deposit — and what a good handoff actually looks like
• What bad yield communication strategy looks like in practice: too much volume, too many CTAs, and content that forgets it's talking to a 17-year-old making the biggest financial decision of their life
• Why parent communications deserve their own dedicated strategy with its own tone, cadence, and content — and why most schools treat parents as an afterthought
• What you can still do right now if you didn't make your class — including how to re-engage fence sitters without looking desperate
• Why silence is the biggest driver of summer melt, and what a smart anti-melt campaign looks like from May through August
• Transfer students as an underutilized population — why they should be a year-round conversation, not a backup plan
• What EdTech vendors consistently get wrong about the people they're selling to (and why cold emailing admissions counselors in April will get you yelled at)

Resources mentioned:

• Mailed It! by Day Kibilds and Ashley Budd:https://emailbook.co/ 

Connect with Rita:

• LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/rita-winthrop/
• Website: https://ritawinthrop.com
  
  

Connect with John:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
• Website: https://unveild.tv
• Newsletter: https://unveild.tv/newsletter

If you've been feeling the pressure to overhaul your entire web presence for AI search, this episode is your permission slip to take a breath.

Georgy Cohen is a content strategist who has spent her career in and around higher ed — in-house at universities, at agencies, and as an independent consultant. She joined the show to talk about one of the most practical and overlooked problems in higher ed marketing: how to actually structure your website so it answers the questions prospective students are asking — without relying on the sprawling, ungovernable FAQ page that becomes a dumping ground the moment you create it.

Georgy brings a content strategy and information architecture lens to a conversation that usually stays at the surface level of SEO and branding. The result is a genuinely useful framework for thinking about your web content on two levels at once — what the human sees and what the bots are crawling — and why attending to both doesn't have to mean starting from scratch.

In this episode:

• Why FAQ pages are well-intentioned but create more problems than they solve — and what to do instead
• The difference between the "viewable web" and the "semantic web," and why higher ed is mostly only thinking about one of them
• Why clear communication fundamentals will get you most of the way to AI findability — and why panicking won't
• How to bridge the gap between subject matter experts (faculty, financial aid staff) and the content strategists who know how to structure information
• Why higher ed's reluctance to have a point of view is hurting both their brand and their findability
• The role user research should be playing — and why it's underused
• Two short books Georgy recommends for anyone who wants to build a foundational understanding of content strategy and information architecture

Resources mentioned:

• Everyday Information Architecture by Lisa Maria Marquis: 
• The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
• About Schema Markup: 
  • https://schema.org/docs/schemas.html
  • https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/
  • https://search.google.com/test/rich-results
  • https://www.seerinteractive.com/insights/higher-education-schema-how-your-school-can-win-google
    
    

Connect with Georgy:

• LinkedIn: Georgy Cohen: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georgy/
• georgycohen.com

In this solo episode, John breaks down the fundamental camera settings and workflow decisions that can immediately elevate your video quality—whether you're brand new to video or looking to refine your technical foundation as an in-house higher ed videographer.

Key takeaways:

• The four critical camera settings: frame rate (shoot 24fps for cinematic look), aperture (lowest f-stop for background blur), shutter speed (set to 2x your frame rate), and ISO (keep as low as possible to avoid grain)
• Why shooting in 4K but editing in 1080p gives you flexibility without unnecessary file sizes
• The case for auto white balance in run-and-gun scenarios to avoid color correction nightmares
• Why shooting in LOG color profiles often creates more problems than it solves for in-house teams
• How to avoid the two biggest stabilization mistakes: micro-jitter from handheld shooting and overusing gimbal shots
• Audio quality matters more than video quality—record directly into your camera and hide those lav mics
• Think about workflow and asset management, not just the single video you're making right now

Connect with John:

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnazoni
• Website: https://unveild.tv
• Newsletter: https://unveild.tv/newsletter