Blog & News Management

Yes. The publishing workflow is configurable by author role, department, content category, or individual author. Common configurations include: senior communications staff publish immediately without review, department heads publish to their department section with automated notification to the central communications team, faculty submit drafts that require communications approval before publication, and external contributors require both department head and communications approval. You can also configure category-level restrictions, so a faculty member who publishes to their own department blog without approval still requires editorial review for content tagged as admissions-facing or alumni-targeted. Workflow steps are logged with timestamps, showing who reviewed, who approved, and when each action occurred.

Attribution tracking works through session-level tracking combined with the admissions CRM data that already lives in the same system. When a prospective student visits an article, the session is recorded against any existing inquiry or CRM record for that visitor. If the visitor submits an inquiry form during the same session or within a configurable attribution window, the form completion is linked to the article. For returning visitors, the system recognizes their CRM record and attributes the content they engaged with before submitting. The enrollment team sees a report by article showing inquiry completions attributed to each post, segmented by prospect program interest, enrollment stage, and geographic region. Because the blog module and the admissions CRM share the same database, this attribution requires no third-party tracking pixels, no cross-domain cookies, and no external analytics integration.

Each post has dedicated fields for the SEO title tag, meta description, canonical URL, and Open Graph data (title, description, image) that populate social preview cards when articles are shared. URL slugs are generated from the post title and editable before publication. Image upload fields prompt authors for alt text before they can complete the submission. Category and tag taxonomy structure creates topically organized archive pages that help search engines understand the depth of your institutional coverage on specific subjects. Scheduled publish dates let the communications team time releases without having to be online at publication time. Posts can be saved as draft, submitted for review, approved, scheduled, published, unpublished, and archived, with each state change logged.

Alumni blog sections are associated with alumni management records through the shared database. When a logged-in alumnus reads articles in the alumni section, that engagement is recorded against their alumni profile. Development officers who use the alumni management module can see content engagement data alongside giving history, capacity indicators, and contact activity. An alumnus who reads four articles about first-generation scholarship recipients before the annual fund campaign is flagged with that engagement context in the development officer's view. For gift officers managing major gift relationships, the system shows which specific articles a prospect engaged with before a solicitation meeting, context that allows for a more informed and relevant conversation about impact areas that align with the donor's demonstrated interests.

Yes. The blog module supports a multi-section architecture where each institutional unit has its own section with its own editorial workflow, category taxonomy, author roster, and publication permissions. The school of business can have its own editorial team that approves content for the business blog without involvement from the central communications office. The alumni relations team manages the alumni story section independently. At the same time, the central communications office retains visibility into all sections and can cross-post content from a department section to the main institutional blog with a single action. A university-wide editorial dashboard shows the communications director the publication queue, pending approvals, recently published articles, and performance metrics across all sections in one view.