When the federal government began slashing funding for scientific research in the spring of 2025, we at the School of Public Health had a daunting choice: weather the storm and hope for brighter days ahead, or do something. Our marketing and communications team opted for the latter and developed the “Public Health Research: Your Life Depends on It” strategic communications campaign in about a month. In the ensuing months, the campaign served as a rallying point for our community and beyond, garnering positive attention and philanthropic support. In this session, we will break down our lessons learned from mounting an ambitious campaign in a matter of weeks and how we activated our audience and donors.

Higher education marketing has become increasingly competitive, and most audiences are inundated with information. Many campaigns assume people already care about what a university offers — but frequently, they do not. This session bеgins with a fundamental question: Why should аnyone be interested?

As Health Lab by Michigan Medicine marks 10 years with over 67 million pageviews to date, learn how the Department of Communication built the trusted publication that reporters, researchers, and the public alike rely on for accurate health and medical research information. Find out how it’s evolved over the last decade, the “secret sauce” that’s garnered its success, and what might be next for the platform, with thousands of free articles, that has reached over 33,000 newsletter subscribers.

Master a structure that’s been proven in the lab to outperform the traditional news format. Grab readers’ attention, pull them through the piece, and leave a lasting impression. Specifically, you’ll learn how to:

• Grab attention with compelling leads. (And which ones your AI bot can help you write!)
• Avoid skipping the most important paragraph in your piece.
• End your message with a bang, not a whimper. (Usually we … just … stop … typing!)

This session explores ways to align organizational vision with day-to-day campaign execution. Discover how University Human Resources Communications uses focused communication to achieve its long-term plans. Also, learn how Asana helps the team stay organized and accountable, and how it improves their work over time.

With things going faster and faster in graphic design, downshift a bit and settle in with a thrilling ten-pack of the Draplin Design Co.’s best tips for maximum design efficiency. Aaron Draplin will walk you through each move in a live, in-the-moment setting. Go behind the scenes to learn how he ideates, iterates, and executes the moves in his work, which can easily be used in yours. From sketch to screen to solution — all in a loose, fast, fun, constructive environment. A quick-reference PDF will be supplied at the end of the workshop detailing each tip.

Unlock the power of U-M’s GenAI with the Make a Maizey workshop. This hands-on, 90-minute workshop, designed specifically for communicators at Maizey X Blue, will provide an overview of AI tools available at U-M, campus-specific use cases relevant to communication professionals, and assistance with creating your own Maizey: an AI tool trained on your custom dataset (for example, content from Google Drive, Dropbox, or website URLs). Learn how to streamline workflows, solve unique communication challenges, and extract deeper insights from your data. Whether you’re new to AI or looking to refine your approach, this session will provide practical skills you can use right away. Bring your own use case and leave with actionable solutions!

Make every piece you write easier to read and understand with techniques and targets based on 130 years of readability research. Leave with cool, free tools for measuring, monitoring, and managing readability. Specifically, you’ll learn how to:

• Hit the right targets for paragraph length, sentence length, and word length.
• Use free online tools — better than AI! — for making every message easier to read and understand.
• Stop writing emails that nobody wants to read.

Communications is arguably the most visible — and therefore most impactful — component of crisis response. It shapes perceptions around decision-making and effectiveness, and can have a profound and outsized influence on the credibility of an institution and its leadership team.

Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to help your department, division, school, or institution explain in a credible, compassionate, and consistent way your leadership’s response to a crisis. (No pressure!)

This hands-on, interactive session is designed to help you better understand the strategic role that communications should play in a crisis. During our time together, we’ll discuss:

• Crisis 101
  • Understanding the difference between issues and crises and why it matters.
  • Building an effective response team.
  • Differentiating between operational and strategic communications.
• The importance of a stakeholder-centric — as opposed to media-driven, “wag the dog” — approach to communications.
• Strategies — both formal and informal — that ensure you learn about a situation early enough to have a fighting chance.
• Establishing an expedited communications approval process.
• Your Turn: Roll up your sleeves! You’ll have an opportunity to respond to a “crisis.” Using a Blue Moon Consulting Group framework, participants will get to practice thinking strategically and communicating effectively.

Join the content teams from the Alumni Association and Ford School of Public Policy to explore how audience insights and publication strategies can increase the engagement and impact of alumni publications. We’ll dig into Michigan Alum survey data to see what content resonates and why, what doesn’t work, and how it all could inform and improve your own storytelling. Then, learn about the strategic planning process behind the reimagined State & Hill hybrid publication and see the results that balance engagement while conserving resources, with data-driven, actionable insights for editorial strategies and tools for rethinking publication content and models.

See motion graphics demystified through real University of Michigan examples, ranging from simple to complex animations. Learn the planning process behind efficient animation, then go behind the scenes to explore After Effects timelines and 3D workspaces, discovering that even sophisticated animations are built from simple, achievable elements layered together. Leave inspired and equipped with curated resources, tools, and the confidence to start creating your own animations.

Has leadership asked you, “What does the data say?”—leaving you wondering what they actually want to see? The growing calls for more data are inescapable, requiring marketers and communicators to weave data analysis into already overflowing workflows. This session will show how teams can apply their storytelling skills to move beyond numbers and vague data requests to tell persuasive stories that show their business impact, helping them earn trust and win authority with leaders.

As marketers, we are sometimes asked to market a new product that doesn’t — or shouldn’t — fit under your normal branding. This session explores the marketing and launch of the Michigan Ross Los Angeles Campus, focusing on two things: developing a unique voice that still resonates with your brand, and strategically expressing that voice across a myriad of channels and tactics — including through the campus itself. Attendees will walk away with a framework for developing a unique brand expression and actionable tips illustrated by real-world examples.

Your team's time is your most limited resource, and manual processes are wasting it. This session shares how two communicators use automation to reduce friction, eliminate redundant steps, and build more efficient workflows without hiring a developer or overhauling your tech stack. The first presenter shares how an AI tool generated working code for automated Google Sheets deadline reminders, start to finish, in under an hour. The second walks through how a no-code integration platform eliminated manual steps across lead capture, contact management, and program approvals. Whether you manage a team of two or ten, you will leave with specific tools, tested approaches, and a clearer picture of where automation fits in your own workflows.

Attention spans are shrinking, AI is accelerating, video dominates, and both algorithms and audiences keep shifting. In this session, we’ll share how we stepped back, reassessed our entire content ecosystem, and built a strategy designed for how people actually consume information in 2026. You’ll leave with practical, forward-looking concepts — from a “zero-click” mentality to optimizing for both humans and robots – that you can apply to your own work.

This presentation offers practical strategies from U-M’s Medical, Dental, and Pharmacy anniversary campaigns, showing how to turn milestones into opportunities for institutional identity and community engagement. Attendees will learn how to plan meaningful celebrations, balance stakeholder needs, and use storytelling and digital archiving to build lasting legacies in their units.

Follow the maize-brick road and come to the land of a worthy cause: The college or department newsletter. Sometimes those publications may feel a bit wicked because we put in so much work for readers — only to later hear that someone missed important news because they didn’t read. Two newsletter content managers from two different U-M areas will talk about ways to make internal newsletters a bit more popular.

Accessible marketing isn’t just good practice — it’s a high-impact strategy for building trust, expanding reach, and strengthening brand loyalty. In this session, attendees will learn practical tools to make their content, campaigns, and event communications more accessible while staying aligned with brand standards. Participants will leave with actionable techniques they can immediately apply to increase engagement, reduce barriers, and design communications that truly reflect belonging.

In this interactive panel discussion, attendees will learn how their peers are finding and developing stories for their distinct audiences. Panelists will also share how they know when a story has resonated with its target audience — or not — and insights they’ve gleaned from those experiences.

Michigan Medicine migrated over 30 department websites to a shared platform designed around prospective learners and faculty. We’ll walk through the strategy, stakeholder alignment, and user-centered decisions that made it work. Expect practical takeaways for managing large-scale web projects and keeping content quality high after the dust settles.