Excelsior
Our company was really just getting going when I reached out to David Schejbal, President of Excelsior University. I’ve known David for a real long time. He was a young associate dean in continuing education at Northwestern. I was an even younger PhD student. I honestly still remember meeting him in Annenberg Hall and talking about a Prague program he oversaw at the time.
David went off to the University of Illinois, followed by a spin running the University of Wisconsin extension system. Our paths crossed again when I worked at 2U and he was Dean of Digital Education at Marquette. At that point we thought about working together but various circumstances intervened to make that work unworkable.
When I decided in late 2023 to focus Story as a Service’s work on higher education, I reached out to David to see if he needed any support for his strategic communications at Excelsior. He was generous and put me in touch with his VP for Communications Erin Coufal and we were off and running.
Let me stop for a beat and say that I’ve known about Excelsior for a long time. You probably don’t and that’s cool. They are a fully online University with about 12,000 active students and like 200,000 living alumni. I know about them less because of my work in higher education and more because they are headquartered in Albany, NY, my hometown, and, for anyone who knows upstate NY, the center of the universe.
When I met Erin and we started to get to know each other, I learned pretty quickly that she’s a fellow Albany High School Falcon and grew up in the same Pine Hills neighborhood as me. Name game played. Trust began to be established from the outset. Erin and I decided to start our work on how to communicate first to internal leaders and then externally about the university’s emerging conceptual strategy termed the “Constellation.”
David’s idea for the Constellation is original. How can you play successfully in the M&A marketplace of higher education in a way that advantages students first and foremost? How can Excelsior use its strong operational foundation to create a new kind of university system? One that, unlike, say the SUNY system or California, allows for students to take advantage of all the partners in the system? And also one that need not only consist of colleges and universities – what if the Constellation could include employers, nonprofits, government agencies – any kind of organization where students could learn and work concurrently?
When I first started working with Excelsior, these ideas were only beginning to be explored. Staff and board members, let alone students and alumni or other stakeholders had not yet been brought into the conversation. And then I was.
Erin and I agreed that the best place to start with our campaign to socialize the Constellation strategy was with the staff. Erin assembled colleagues from multiple units – admissions, marketing, student services, development, and communications – and we embarked upon what I call our Origin Engagement. I can say with some pride after being in business now for over three years and having conducted our Origin Engagement facilitations – Listen, Clarify, Map, and Make – over a fifteen times, we’ve got it down pretty well. We often call it a “proven process,” which I guess it kind of is. Excelsior may not have known it, but they were our second try.
It went amazingly well. It was via zoom. It was fun. We had about a dozen people in the session. And we worked together to clarify the core story of Excelsior. What it is, what it does, how it is important, how it is unique. We explored the vocabulary they use (their words only) to describe the university. And we worked to decide together what three concepts (folks remember threes) really represented the essence, the true DNA of Excelsior. I felt like it was important for staff to start thinking about the future state of the university by first thinking about the past and present state. What was wonderful about the process was the three things they determined by consensus – innovation, opportunity, and student-centricity – as the core story of Excelsior then became the jumping off point for talking about the Constellation.
The staff, many of whom had been part of the Excelsior family for a long time (I even graduated from Albany High with one of their marketing people), felt tangibly more comfortable, even via video, because they had been brought into this process. And those three elements have become the bedrock for all the work I have done with Excelsior since that time. To communicate the Constellation strategy to the board, to staff, and now, to the partners they are bringing on as they actualize the conceptual plans.
David, Erin, and all the staff and leaders with whom I have had the pleasure to work since 2023 all contribute to make Excelsior a phenomenal partner. I feel like an extension of their leadership team. I feel incredibly fortunate. And the lessons I have learned about the value of internal communications as a prerequisite for strong strategic planning and execution, and how our Origin Engagement facilitates these things, would not have been possible without them and has made Story as a Service the little startup that could into one that actually might.