Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Guest: This long tail tends to suck up an inordinate amount of time and digital governance attention. And I say that because I do think a new model of website design and redesign has to emerge where we focus on that critical section of select pages that are so vital to the constituencies and think of that long tail in a different way. That's number one.
[00:00:29] Host: Welcome to the EdTechConnect podcast, your source for exploring the cutting edge world of educational technology. I'm your host, Jeff Dillon, and I'm excited to bring you insights and inspiration from the brightest minds and innovators shaping the future of education. We'll dive into conversations with leading experts, educators and solution providers who are transforming the learning landscape. Be sure to subscribe and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform so you don't miss an episode. So sit back, relax, and let's dive in.
Welcome to today's episode where we are going to dive deep into the dynamic world of strategic communications with Pete Mackey, Ph.D. the founder and CEO of Mackey Strategies. With over 30 years of leadership experience in both private and public institutions across the US and and Europe, Pete has been instrumental in shaping institutional planning, communication strategies and campaign communications. He's a co author of the book how to Change the Future. His firm, Mackie Strategies, collaborates with some of the America's most esteemed educational nonprofit institutions, offering expertise in rebranding, interim leadership, operational audits, fundraising campaigns, and more. In this episode, we're going to explore Pete's journey in establishing Mackie Strategies, discussing the pivotal role of technology in modern communications and examining real world applications in higher education, including advancement divisions, crisis communication initiatives. And we're going to talk about AI. Really, a conversation that bridges traditional communication strategies with today's technological innovations.
[00:02:16] Guest: We're going.
[00:02:16] Host: Welcome Pete.
[00:02:17] Guest: Thank you, Jeff.
[00:02:18] Host: You know, I've known you for a while here and I want to hear your story. Tell me the inspiration and your vision behind when you started and established Mackie Strategies just nine years ago or so.
[00:02:29] Guest: Well, thanks Jeff. Great to be here. By the time I made that decision, I had been working in this field for more than 25 years.
I basically have dedicated my entire career to communications and marketing for education and educational nonprofits. I really believe in the power of education to change lives. I had been the head of communications at five different institutions by 2016, but not only that, just because of the way my career had evolved with this profession in higher ed. I actually was the first head of communications at every one of those institutions. A very large public eight campus university, an international science Foundation, America's leading scholarship organization for high achieving students from challenged backgrounds, namely the Jack Cook Foundation, Bucknell University, and then Amherst College. So I'd had this diverse career at these great places, and I sort of reached the point of thinking, what else could I do in this field? And I sort of got excited about the notion of working with multiple institutions at a time and seeing whether the experience I had built over all those years might be valuable to them. So that's really the genesis of it.
[00:03:45] Host: Well, I have some similarities there, you know, like in higher ed, but want to do more, so I can relate to this story. The reason I'm so interested in talking to you is there's a lot of communications firms out there, like a lot that serve higher ed, but you've recently added technology services to your portfolio and somewhat unique. What drove that decision.
[00:04:04] Guest: So the reality is that at least since the advent of the Internet and certainly since the advent of social media, and certainly accentuated by all the extraordinary explosion of software that is used in this field and the fields we partner with, like fundraising, admissions, president's offices, student life team, there is so much technology that I would say you really can't be a communicator or a marketer on behalf of, of these institutions anymore without effectively deploying the power of technology, including software, to support that work. And so the reality is, I just had to own the fact that the way we do our jobs in service to our clients anymore requires very deep knowledge of technology. We get asked all the time by clients about the predicaments they're facing with software within their units that doesn't talk to each other with software they've purchased and they're not maximizing its potential and many comparable problems. And I simply decided if we're going to serve our clients right, we need a technology team of experts as our partners. Because the truth is, as I said, when we do communications and marketing anymore, it is deeply intertwined with technology.
[00:05:22] Host: I've seen it. I'm right in the middle of it. You know, you and I are collaborating on this, and it's really exciting. Do you have any examples of how Mackie is using technology to bolster, let's say, fundraising? Donor engagement in that advancement space is one. I know you specialize in that.
[00:05:40] Guest: Yeah. I'll just mention two quick stories. One is, again, technology goes everywhere from the basic hardware we all use, which means our phones and our laptops and our desktops, which. Right. They're practically attached to our bodies anymore. That's number one. Number two, of course we engage with the institutions that we graduate from or affiliated with through not only that hardware, but through the software that they use to connect with us. This includes everything from the CMS of a website, to the databases used to manage alumni information, to the tracking mechanisms of donor engagement, prospect engagement and the like. So one quick example would be we worked with a top 10 liberal arts institution when they were facing some real predicaments about their giving day work. So we built out a whole set of outreach embedded in text messaging software that they had. It turned out to be their most successful giving day ever. And it partly is because of the messaging, but partly is because how we deployed that experience of their donor community of being so attached to their phones and being so comfortable in that medium. And then the second quick one I would add is a lot of times when we engage with a client, as I alluded, they're wrestling with the predicament of technology, particularly in places like the Advancement Office that they've purchased or invested in, not talking to each other, not maximizing its impact. So we will do a lot of work, often with clients to straighten that out, to let go of software that is simply not being maximized, and to make commitments to other types of emerging software that really help make that team work much more efficiently and effectively with their donor communities.
[00:07:21] Host: Those are great examples. Another thing I'm learning with AI moving so fast, we're going to talk about that a little later I think is that we can hyper personalize now and so we're going to be probably having some schools like I know, you know, we work on using data driven insights about donation patterns, engagement history. It's going to be, I think a real fun year for, for advanced.
[00:07:44] Guest: Jeff, let me jump in actually, if you don't mind and ask you a related question because you and I do work closely together on this and you're sort of a walking encyclopedia of today's higher ed software opportunities. In your experience, what tools or platforms do you now think are indispensable in conducting the work of communications in higher ed or related fields?
[00:08:06] Host: Yeah, it's moving so fast. I just wrote this. It's a predictions post on LinkedIn that's really some of the only the top five. There's so many ways that I think we need to be using this. Even less aspirational, but more just to keep up. The one I keep coming back to is we are kind of the victims of our own success in higher ed with the amount of content we have, you know, 10 to 20 years ago we implemented these content management systems. We didn't want to go to our webmaster to bother them to put all the content up. And finally we had these great systems. Now every school is dealing with a proliferation of thousands of pages. Sometimes it's in the hundreds of thousands of pages, as you might know, and people can't find anything because we have silos everywhere. Right when you go up to, even up to the R1s and IVs are the most complex and siloed. Even all the state institutions, the course catalogs over here, the CRM's over here, the event calendars over here, you know, the, your sis. And so we can get those to talk to each other. But how do you find anything? So what it goes back to is number one, digital governance. So there's digital governance tools that are now, they're keeping up better than ever. They're AI driven, they can predict patterns. And then there's site search. So be able to find something like we've used a free tool for so long, it's now's the time to start really bumping up our site search. So you kind of have to tackle your content discovery in both ways. From the bottom, with digital governance from the top. I would also say what's indispensable is we have to do more with less right now because we have the enrollment cliff. We have less students coming in. You know, we know it's going to hit us in the next year and on. So how do we make sure the people who find us, these prospective students, get what they need? So we need personalization software. And it used to be an infrastructure change, so it was expensive. It was. We can't have a two year project anymore. We're moving too fast. It was a two to three year project to install a dxp. So that still sometimes happens. But we can do things faster now with what's available. Like what about AI? Little snippet of code. I can pretty much know with AI now what type of person you are, what your interests are. And one I want to talk to you a little bit about is crisis communication. And so let me throw it back at you before I get into that and ask you, how do you approach crisis communication? Now I know you've done a lot of this for higher ed, like what role does technology play? What are some, any stories you can tell about.
[00:10:39] Guest: Yeah. And if you don't mind, I do want to come back to your point about websites and personalization and AI, because I have some thoughts on that. But on the Crisis communication. So, you know, I've now been doing this for almost 35 years. Right. And working with great institutions of all kinds across that time. And we are in an era of higher ed that seems to be nonstop crises. I tend to look at our campuses as sort of laboratories of society. This is where an old generation is passing knowledge to a new generation. And all the cultural, political, socioeconomic issues that are troubling society tend to come to a head on campuses very often now. So I will tell you my biggest concern, based upon my experience working with institutions, is not the caliber of thinking that is brought to bear on crises. It's two things. One is the lack of a plan or a strategy on how they will manage communications in a crisis, which is different than an operational plan to manage a crisis, number one. Number two, the need for speed. And usually the need for speed means not only do you need a very sound, efficient strategy for who does what when in a crisis, you also need to practice it and build those muscles so when the moment comes, and it will, you can activate that strategy efficiently and, and fast. Because we all know in a vacuum is where the paranoia and fear rise. And part of the job of institutions is to make clear to their constituencies things are being addressed as they should, they're being addressed promptly. People are being taken care of well, and the community will stay informed. And that is much harder to do. Well if you don't have a crisis communication strategy and you don't practice it. So we do. We build strategies for our clients in that space. And we also, if we do that, we ask them to commit also to training and practice so they're ready.
[00:12:44] Host: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense and it kind of aligns with what I've learned about hiring in my last couple decades. I'm curious as to your comments on my CMS evolution spiel I was just talking about.
[00:12:58] Guest: Yeah. So I want to touch on two things and intersect in the second one. Personalization AI in this way. But first, let me touch upon the website mentioned. Like, some of these websites can be hundreds of thousands of pages and all that. I think we all know that. The truth is any website has a very long and low level tail. T A I L Most of the central information and desires of an audience are met through a very select set of pages. But this long tail tends to suck up an inordinate amount of of time and digital governance attention. And I say that because I do think a new model of website design and redesign has to emerge where we focus on that critical section of select pages that are so vital to the constituencies and think of that long tail in a different way. That's number one. The second thing is with regard to personalization and AI, I do think some of the software that is now available and the powers of AI make two things possible in the personalization space that used to be much more complicated. One is AB testing of messaging used to be an onerous process, complicated to build, manage, learn from. Not anymore. And secondly, the power of AI to shape personalization in a very efficient way, both as part of your A B testing, but also how you activate the results.
[00:14:26] Host: No, I love it. And I'm going to say something now that's going to really kind of be an announcement to the audience here is that I'm working with Pete as we've defined how to offer these technology services. What we're seeing is that when you're looking at like I talk about site search or digital governance, often the starting point is a content audit. So we have a really efficient, effective way now. And it's not all AI driven. This is a lot of manual work to audit a university's content to really. It goes to what you're saying, which pages are not even being used. So that's really the starting point to this because even with the power of AI now AI is going to consume all that bad, redundant, stale content as well. So we gotta is now's the time to really look at our content and make sure it is tight. It's exactly what we want because we have all these other bots out there that are crawling it, basically.
[00:15:20] Guest: Yeah, Jeff, if you don't mind me, I'd like to follow that up with a question. Since you invoke AI, where do you think AI fits in with regard to communication strategies in higher ed or other related educational nonprofit sectors?
[00:15:35] Host: Yeah, and I'll bring that an example of agentic. So this is something that I'm writing an article right now about and in that we are going to know, have a personal view of all the people that are visiting our site. Our prospective students, our current students, our visitors. So it really needs, I think AI really needs to be at the core of this and agentic AI is really going to be these autonomous agents and this is the year it's already happening. So jobs are. There's going to be some roles that can be taken by AI. People are afraid of this, but basically the people who know how to use these tools are going to be running this. But the understanding the context of having some humor and oversight will still be very important. But universities can leverage AI to identify students that are at risk to send timely nudges. We need to communicate with their students. You know, we have to teach them from the ones who are really struggling to the very accelerated students. But that's a pedagogy that faculty really struggles with. So in the classroom, we're going to be able to identify, and we can now with agentic AI, because your agent, a student might have an agent when they come to school, and it knows it has access to their learning management system, to their calendar. It knows they like to play basketball and knows two of their other friends like to play basketball. And it'll get them tickets to the basketball game saying, hey, I got you tickets. I mean, we're there, we're so close to that. To say your agent isn't just one system you go to to use AI. It knows you and will act on your behalf for the easy stuff for now. So basically what I'm getting at is we're going to know so much that we need to use. Use this in a hyper personalized way. And I brought up the example of crisis communication. Here's another one. I think you were pretty kind of blown away with this because this was a ways away. Translation. Translation's out there. So a lot of schools are focusing on international students, but they don't quite know how to reach them with AI. Now in a matter of, you know, a fraction of the time it takes to hire a translator and translate your president's address or some key messaging to a different language, AI can do that automatically in the voice of the messenger. I do demos for this, and those are just kind of some examples. And it's really hard to keep up with what's available out there. And so that's. That's what we're.
[00:18:02] Guest: You're alluding to something that, you know, you showed me, which is that quick video you had done in which you appear to be a fluent speaker of Japanese. Right. And you wouldn't know better unless you had told me that it was not, in fact, one of your skills. But that is part of the reason, Jeff, that I'm so excited about the way we partner together for our clients, because that brings something directly to bear on things that higher ed is worried about and is trying to accomplish. I think, yes, it comes into play in the marketing, in the communication with alumni around the world or prospective students. I think it also begs the question when institutions think about their curricular futures and how they build out their faculty, the same type of software you showed me capable of doing that, can also translate faculty lectures into whatever language they.
[00:18:58] Host: Want, whatever format, whatever language, whatever length they prefer, it's going to know. Oh, you like little snippets of videos in this way and you often consume them at this time. I mean, the possibilities are somewhat endless right now.
[00:19:13] Guest: Yeah. In your article that you mentioned about your predictions, which I love for 2025, you used a phrase that is stuck in my brain, that AI has reached the level of near human level reasoning. Wow. Obviously, there's all sorts of worries that come with that, but if you just want to be an optimist, what it can do for education connection, bringing people together could be profound.
[00:19:36] Host: Well, let me reiterate, because what I really liked in that article, the important part is how I set the stage. And basically, this is news. This just happened a couple weeks ago. And the news is that there's a test out there that tests AI. It's called the ARC AGI benchmark. And it tests the capabilities designed on problems that are not in its training set, which is hard to do because there's billions and maybe trillions of data points in an AI training set. So how do you really test it? So the tests are based on, like, solving something outside of the set. In 2020, it was zero percent. It couldn't do it. And by the end of last year, at the end of 2024, it achieved almost a 76% accuracy on this test, on $10,000 worth of computing power. So that's what prompted me to say, okay, if we're there and if you do more, it's like almost 87% if you have unlimited computing power. So we're getting there, and for development, we're there. It's the best coder out there, AI. So one thing at the core of what you offer and what we're going to be working on with bringing technology to higher ed is, is CRMs too. So even 10 years ago, people didn't know what a CRM was. Right. We had our SLAs, we had our LMS. We have another acronym now, and this is across verticals, not just in higher ed. You know, LMS is very, very academic and you got to watch out for is a lot of CRMs are not higher ed specific, but the ones, there's some out there, and I'm not going to drop names of companies in this here, but there's a lot of companies out there that are building their CRMs really effectively now with AI. So I think that's another thing we need to really embrace is how do we. And that kind of goes to the bridge of personalizing our experience for our students.
[00:21:19] Guest: Well, to your point, we tend not exclusively, but typically we think of the use of a CRM really in the advancement space to manage your alumni relations and donor engagement. Right. It's valuable, critical there. It's increasingly becoming something applicable in the admission space. Right. That is also now a CRM based engagement. I think to your point earlier about AI and personalization, it's going to become a student based tool as well, you know.
[00:21:50] Host: And you asked earlier about like, what are the indispensable tools? And I went into some very specific examples. What's happening out there now is the general use of ChatGPT.
I remember showing you ChatGPT a couple years ago, right. When it first came out. And I would show my wife, I would show, because I'm an early adopter, I play with this stuff. I find it early. And I was just, it was blowing people's minds what you could do. And now you look at what I think showed you is like, look, I wrote a, I wrote an essay in two seconds here or something like that. But it's moving so fast that I'm excited that you're the only firm I found that's really going this direction. And so, you know, what we're seeing out there is schools coming to us saying like, they don't know where to start, they don't know how to ask, you know, what's the next question to ask? I guess I would ask you, what do you think schools can do best institutions can do to really prepare and adapt to these advancements and integrating them into their communications framework?
[00:22:51] Guest: And I'm going to leave the educational side of it over here. Right. Because that's not my specialty. Obviously we work in the operational side of things and primarily, as I alluded before, with presidents or boards, advancement teams, admissions teams, communications and marketing teams, and sometimes student life teams, that's basically who we partner with within institutions. I think first of all, you are right that as much as AI is moving staggeringly fast for those people who work in these professions on a day to day basis, it's not their primary concern. They're all aware it's happening. But we're in a moment of revolution in that field of AI, right? And so this is why, frankly, Mackie Strategies is leaning into what we can offer and technology knowledge and technology expertise. Because our clients in those fields where we do feel they could benefit from these kind of advances, frankly, simply don't have time to stay on top of it. And it can help them in many ways. So there's both an educational role we have to play with them to show them its potential, and also a support role that we can play, including through your expertise, Jeff, as you know, in helping them make all sorts of decisions about not only how to integrate AI effectively and ethically into their work, but also all the other software that is evolving so rapidly, both through AI and outside it, that it is so fundamental to those professions.
[00:24:18] Host: Yeah, that's where we're going and we're jumping on, on the train here because it's what's happening. You conduct or have conducted leadership development boot camps, and I think you just finished one. I really like this model of these little workshops you do. Kind of getting off the technology maybe a little bit here, but really learning more about, about you and how you operate your business. What advice would you offer to emerging leaders in communication regarding the adoption of technology? And could we work that into some workshops?
[00:24:48] Guest: Yeah, I'll just tell you very quickly. I do these workshops multiple times a year. Sometimes they're multi day, sometimes they're much shorter. I'm going to go back to your original question and just share with you that, you know, when I was earning my PhD and in the first phase of my career I taught because of my PhD is in British literature. I would teach in English in the English department, usually a course or two a semester, depending on my administrative workload. And I ultimately just became too busy to keep that up. But I really loved teaching. So the reality is, when I became a consultant, I thought, well, maybe I can create some constructs where I can continue to teach. But obviously it's not about British literature. It's about the kinds of things I've spent my career in, communications and marketing, learning. And so where I'm going with that is as myki Strategies grows out, its continued commitment to technology services. I absolutely intend for us to offer training programs of various levels of depth and substance to our clients. As I alluded to, it's really part of our obligation to the fields we serve because the technologies that are critical to their professions are so fundamental every day to what they're trying to accomplish, whether they're trying to recruit students, keep students, retain them, raise money, build engagement, all the rest. So we really owe our clients knowledge and expertise in the technologies and software they can put to use. And so we, we do intend to build out training programs in, in the same spirit as the other programs we offer.
[00:26:19] Host: I want to touch on one more thing. And it's pretty controversial out there. And, and I want to get your take on, on the ethics of AI. And my wife and I had this conversation last night about like, how much, you know, we know how well it can write. Do you have any overall arching thoughts about that? Do you have fear about that? Do you think our clients will ask us these hard questions? I have a thought here, but I'm going to hold it back for a little bit.
[00:26:42] Guest: Yeah. So I am interested in what you. Your thoughts on this, but I'll just share a couple reactions to that really tough but important question. One is I do have all sorts of deep ethical concerns and it mostly comes down to the reality of how because to your point, it is reaching near human level reasoning abilities. It can fool people into thinking someone did the work. That is unethical. If you present the work in that fashion, it is getting harder and harder to tell. And so I do think there are ethics of transparency that we really had better catch up with very quickly in creating guidelines and standards so that people cannot be fooled, or at least there is a way to hold them accountable if they violate anything that suggests people are claiming credit for work they did not do. That is critical. The second thing in my field, I will tell you, right, you alluded to that writes very well. A lot of what we do at Mackie Strategies is writing for our clients, whether it's fundraising work, admissions work websites, presidential communications about crises or any other major institutional decision. It's very possible, Jeff, that this is the last generation of people who make a living doing the kind of. I want to put novels and poetry and creative writing. For the moment aside, the kind of writing that we do, this sort of non, I'll call it non fiction or operational writing or institutional writing. It may very well be that in the very near future, AI is generating most of that and a human eye is merely being used after the fact. And I think again, this is where the ethical guidelines have to be established, that there is transparency among other requirements.
[00:28:37] Host: Well, I got to tell you a little story that Pete and I have from a couple months ago for everyone that kind of prompted this a little bit in that Google's Notebook LM came out with a new feature. It's still experimental. I don't think you can even pay for it. But I would say everyone go play with Google NotebookLM and they added this feature just a few months ago to. You can put up a PDF or point to a website and have it provide a summary or ask you questions, interact with it. Just like another AI, like ChatGPT. But it added this feature called Create a Conversation. So I just clicked the button, said Create a conversation. I uploaded my. My resume just to have something there. And it came back with a couple realistic people, a female and a male voice, talking about how great I was based on my resume. I'm like, oh, I gotta send this to Pete. So I sent it to Pete and we were. And he's like, oh, wow. Like, but what do we do with this? And so it just brings me up this ethical. Like, it's. And I've never been a voice person. I'm. Maybe it's an age thing, but I've never. I don't use voice and I probably should. It's there, but it sounds real, like it's the closest I've heard. So you're right, we're getting there. It'd be harder to tell. My view on the ethics part of it is that it's almost like we have these assistants now. So if you had your assistant write your entire paper and turned it in to someone else or turned into your boss, that's not right. We need to give credit where credit is due. But there's a spectrum of ways to use AI, right? And you need to go back and forth. You can really tune it. And I'm going to start offering some workshops on how to do that. So I don't have a yes or no answer on how to is it ethical or not to use AI? I know some faculty, what they do is they'll assign two versions because they know students are going to do it. You got to do one with or without AI. And I think they just grade one of them, but yeah.
[00:30:23] Guest: And the smarter institutions are creating very clear policies. Usually they come out of the faculty center like as it should. Faculty, I should say, are creating clear policies and guidelines, both for faculty as well as for their students, about the use of AI. And this is where I think the obligation is to be transparent, clear, specific, the institutions that are going to be in trouble. And there are these institutions, I'm sorry to say, because it is moving so fast. Either they haven't caught up or they're kind of in a wait and see approach, or they've almost said, we're going to stay out of it for now. Those are the ones I really worry about.
[00:31:00] Host: Here's what I recommend to schools out there that are not knowing kind of what to do. There's a level of tolerance out there. I feel like university presidents have. Like, we're more into it some Presidents are like, no, we're not. You know, whether it's your cabinet level or your president or your cio, whoever is holding that needs to have some framework. They need to be like, okay, where do we start? So I love, like, on your new website, we're offering digital governance planning. This is what we need. Whether you're the. The leader who's like, nah, we're going to be conservative here. Here's the digital governance framework to start there. Because we can't just trickle everything down to the faculty member. That's what happens now without any governance. That's what happens is every faculty, every director has their own way. They're using it. So we need a starting point. So that's going to be really valuable as well as the other places you're starting.
[00:31:53] Guest: Yeah. And I'm glad you mentioned digital governance, because it is the root of a lot of predicaments institutions have with management of technology, software, and their websites. I would almost say that the less sound digital governance is, the greater the predicament their websites and other tools face. And so they've got to fix part one if they're going to fix part two.
[00:32:17] Host: I agree. And so get your content ready. I'm going to go ahead and close it out, but if you want to get ahold of Pete, we're going to have links in the show notes and it was great having you on the show, Pete. Thank you.
[00:32:29] Guest: Thank you, Jeff. Great talking with you. All right, take care.
[00:32:35] Host: As we wrap up this episode, remember, EdTech Connect is your trusted companion on your journey to enhance education through technology. Whether you're looking to spark student engagement, refine edtech implementation strategies, or stay ahead of the curve in emerging technologies, EdTech Connect brings you the insights you need. Be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an inspiring and important informative episode. And while you're there, please leave us a review. Your feedback fuels us to keep bringing you valuable content. For even more resources and connections, head over to edtechconnect.com, your hub for edtech reviews, trends and solutions. Until next time, thanks for tuning in.
