Do you want to improve digital engagement with your customers or with your employees? Who doesn’t? In 2018, when the University of Arizona wanted to drive more personalized digital engagement with its students, I forged a strategic alliance with our central marketing and communications leaders to move this initiative forward. Why? Well, as Bill Gates once said – “content is king.” Gary Vaynerchuk expanded on this to add that while “content is King, marketing is Queen and the Queen runs the household.”  They’re both right. I knew that any institutional effort to improve digital engagement that did not include close collaboration with marketing and communications (MarCom) would surely fail.

Forge the alliance, find common goals

As with all alliances, we started with identifying common goals and areas of alignment that both groups could rally around and support. As IT and MarCom leaders, we shared two key goals: 1) improve our communication practices to ensure essential information is not lost in a sea of irrelevant content; and 2) increase the level of personalization in our messaging. But first, we had to gain visibility into the current state of our engagement practices, including mass email communications and social media usage across the university.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste”

Early in the formation of our IT and Marcom alliance, a crisis struck. In March 2020, the University of Arizona was rapidly responding to the Covid-19 outbreak, just like everyone else. University leaders were scrambling to get the right information distributed to our faculty, staff, and students. We were early in our Marketing Cloud implementation, so our leadership did not have the right tools at their fingertips yet. Instead, they were sending critical institutional messages using 40,000+ recipient listservs, with no analytics on delivery, open, or click-through rates. On Friday the 13th (yep, the 13th), after hearing our provost lament the ancient email technology, I considered the critical question: Should I pivot my marketing cloud implementation team to serve as an internal agency for university leadership in sending institutional messaging? The answer was a resounding yes, as I was reminded of Winston Churchill’s famous quote during World War II, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” So, I along with the rest of my team, leaned into this opportunity to see where it would take us.

Over the next six months, my team did nothing but send emails for university leaders while other parts of our implementation came to a standstill. Although it slowed down our rollout of Salesforce Marketing Cloud across the university, it was immeasurably valuable to the institution. By the time we pivoted back to expanding to campus, we had an exceptionally long line of organizations wanting to use this new technology.

Be patient, understand alternative plans, and make compromises

For our Salesforce Marketing Cloud rollout, I wanted the fewest barriers to adoption possible. I didn’t want the university to get too heavy-handed with centralized oversight since we were operating in a decentralized environment with zero visibility into mass email communications. I wanted to get the technology out there and improve incrementally over time.

The central marketing team, on the other hand, had other ideas. They were concerned that offering a new, free service without any limits would lead to mass disruption. I realized for the collaboration to be successful, my team and I would need to be patient and make some compromises. We agreed on the use of centrally managed, branded templates, but this slowed down our timeline, which caused me great concern. Required templates were not initially well received by communicators used to working in the wild, wild west. It took a few iterations with building the templates to find a happy medium – consistent, on brand, but with enough flexibility to allow unit level marketers to adjust to their own needs.

Today, over 47M fully branded emails have been sent from Marketing Cloud and all our 22 academic colleges have adopted it – a huge win for the institution, enabled by quality collaboration across MarCom and IT. Looking back, I’m not sure how we could have put the genie back in the bottle if we had not required the templates upfront.

Be ready to propose non-IT solutions to manage perceived risks

Another area where MarCom and IT needed to reach a compromise was accessibility and availability of contact records. In an open constituent relationship management (CRM) platform, anyone can run a contact report that could result in tens of thousands of records. MarCom was convinced this would lead to communicators being asked to spam large audiences to attract event participants, donors, and friends. They wanted a more regulated contact records process that would require central approval for larger mass email sends. Supporting that process through technology would have required a lot of customization. As an alternative, my team proposed “good usage” guidelines and audit reports. We partnered to develop the guidelines, which are part of the required training to get access to Marketing Cloud and the CRM platform, and to date our shared audit reports have not uncovered any bad actors. More evidence of the synergistic relationship between MarCom and IT.

Invest in enabling your institution’s MarCom community

Marketing technology doesn’t always get the IT support that traditional ERP systems do. I think that’s a shame given MarCom’s role in advancing the institution’s mission and enriching digital engagement. If content is king and marketing and communications is queen, their highnesses deserve integrated technology that makes their job easier!

At the University of Arizona, we are building toward an integrated stack of marketing technologies that will allow communicators to syndicate their content more easily across channels including email, websites, and social media. This integrated ecosystem of technologies will help reduce some of the manual work by creating a more seamless approach to publishing and disseminating content. For example, news articles that originate on a website will be syndicated to newsletters. Events that originate in our event management system will be syndicated on websites. Communicators can draw approved content from our digital asset management system. The beginning of this vision is already available, with more to come!

If you lead an IT team or organization and are not already deeply collaborating with your marketing and communication professionals, now is the time. In a post-pandemic environment, we must realize that improved digital engagement with customers and employees is critical to our organization’s mission and overall success.