What our experts are thinking about when they aren't on a project.
With international recruitment less predictable, interprovincial and regional student recruitment deserves a closer look. It starts with understanding why students choose you, not just where they come from.
Dr. Lindsey Fair
November 6, 2026
Why bringing advancement and marketing together earlier can make all the difference during Giving Tuesday and year-end fundraising.
Tiffany Emery
November 5, 2026
Defence is having a moment in Canada. We're using SignalSense™ to track how universities, colleges and polytechnics are positioning themselves in this emerging landscape — and inviting institutions to participate and receive their own report.
Dr. Lindsey Fair
November 3, 2026
Engineering programs are competing in an increasingly crowded category, where innovation, hands-on learning, race cars, robots and research have become familiar signals rather than distinctive ones. Drawing on research across six Canadian engineering programs, we explored where the real opportunities for distinctiveness may lie—and what universities could be saying, showing and owning that others aren’t.
Dr. Lindsey Fair
October 6, 2026
After a thousand stakeholder interviews, the pattern is hard to miss: the institutions that struggle to recruit are rarely the ones with the weakest message. They're the ones that never checked whether anybody was listening.
JP Rains
September 18, 2026
Change management gets treated as the soft bit you do at the end, once the real thinking is finished. It's actually the mechanism that decides whether any of the real thinking survives contact with the organisation.
Deanna Davies
September 11, 2026
Institutional restructuring changes more than how an organization operates. It changes how people experience it, understand it and talk about it, which is why brand strategy should inform transformation from the beginning, not simply package the outcome at the end.
Dr. Lindsey Fair
August 1, 2026
A new VP's first 100 days are an opportunity to understand the institution before trying to change it. Here are 10 priorities for building the knowledge, relationships and plan that allow you to lead well.
Dr. Lindsey Fair
July 3, 2026
Universities and colleges have a value story to tell, but fewer people are willing to take that value for granted. For senior leaders, the challenge is moving from communicating institutional excellence to demonstrating public value.
Dr. Lindsey Fair
June 30, 2026
Who gets to decide what a city stands for? Increasingly, the answer is everyone. As people define places in real time on digital platforms, place identity is shaped by actions, not adjectives.
Dr. Lindsey Fair
April 3, 2025
In the race to build innovation ecosystems and attract talent, many cities are missing a critical competitive advantage: differentiation. Lasting innovation strategies start with truth, not trend.
Dr. Lindsey Fair
March 21, 2025
A city can't rebrand its way out of being a place nobody wants to live. A university can't either. The discipline of place branding is mostly the discipline of telling the truth attractively.
Dr. Lindsey Fair
February 15, 2025
Universities are increasingly becoming city-defining brands. Their campaigns sell an experience tied to a specific place, and their campuses are evolving into vital components of urban identity.
Dr. Lindsey Fair
January 30, 2025