About This Year's Conference Program

This year's conference program reflects a significant change for SUNYCUAD. The conference is no longer structured and programmed along seven discrete tracks (alumni, development, government relations, marketing, publications, public relations, and Web).
The board believes these tracks, traditionally planned by individual track chairs, are becoming less and less relevant as our work becomes increasingly integrated. For example, how can a public relations professional do an effective job without knowing a lot about the Web, or integrating messages with development and admissions, or working closely with publications or partnering with government relations? The lines separating these functions are increasingly blurred.

We sought to develop a program that reflects these new realities, a strong, integrated program created by a team that represents the range of expertise and institutions found in SUNYCUAD. The programming team, composed of both SUNYCUAD members and SUNYCUAD board members, started work at last year's conference by developing programming themes for this year's conference. The umbrella theme is, of course, integration. The main themes under that umbrella are branding, social networking and assessment/return on investment. The bulk of this year's conference program ties to one or more of those themes and individual sessions are, more often than not, targeted to professionals in more than one of SUNYCUAD's traditional seven tracks. The conference program identifies the tracks that may benefit from each session.

Additionally, we're very excited about our five core faculty. This is also a new approach and we believe that our core faculty will add strength and vitality to our conference program. They will come together to share their thoughts in our opening plenary session, and each will present at least two concurrent sessions. We encourage you to engage with them at every opportunity. We've also tried to offer a number of case studies from a variety of institutions, both inside SUNY and out.

We hope all of these changes strengthen SUNYCUAD and position us well for the future. As always, we welcome your feedback and hope that you have an enjoyable and fruitful conference.

The 2010 Conference Programming Team
Eric Bryant, Hudson Valley
Brenda Dow, SUNY IT
Eileen Hasson, Farmingdale
John Heiser, Hudson Valley
Cory Jacobs, Binghamton
Ken Lam, Buffalo
Tim Nekritz, Oswego
Bruce Ryan, Tompkins Cortland