Higher Education Communication Strategy Under Political Pressure and Crisis Risk:

Changing Higher Ed podcast 289 with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest David Maffei

Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast  289 – with host Dr. Drumm McNaughton and guest David Maffei

Introduction to Changing Higher Ed^®

Welcome to Changing Higher Ed^®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.

[00:00:31] Introduction and Guest Welcome

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.

My guest today is David Maffei, Senior Vice President, General Manager of Americas at Staffbase. David has over 20 years of experience driving strategic and operational growth for public and private companies, and he specializes in communications. What really attracted me to having David on the program is you don’t lead large divisions like he is without being an expert communicator, and he and Staffbase have that proven record of scaling teams and executing direct and indirect communications.

David’s experience goes across multiple industries, including higher ed, and he joins me today to talk about how the education sector, and specifically university and college presidents, can evolve their communication strategies in today’s highly politicized environment.

David, welcome to the program.

David Maffei: Thanks, Drumm. Happy to be here.

Drumm McNaughton: My pleasure. I’m looking forward to a great conversation.

[00:01:30] David’s Journey in Communications

Drumm McNaughton: You’ve got a tremendous background in communications. You’ve been a senior executive at multiple institutions. You don’t get there without having been a good communicator, and frankly, communication has changed in the last 20 years. Of course, you were still in junior high at that point, but that, no, I’m just kidding. Anyway, tell us about yourself, if you would please.

David Maffei: Yes, sure, Drumm. So, like you said, I’ve been in the sort of communication and sort of digital experiential software world for the last 25 years. I’m a washed up former NCAA baseball player and just operating in a world of trying to help medium and large enterprises and small to extra small institutions and organizations better operate inside of the world of what communications means and how that takes their business or their institution forward.

So I’ve been doing this for longer than I care to count. But you already made fun of me for saying I was a lot younger than you. So I think the audience won’t know the big difference between our ages.

Drumm McNaughton: Well, I hope not. That’s one of the reasons we don’t do video for the podcast.

David Maffei: Perfect.

[00:02:50] David’s Baseball Days

Drumm McNaughton: Off the wall question, what position in baseball did you play?

David Maffei: I pitched, I was a pitcher.

Drumm McNaughton: You pitched, okay. What did you top out at? Fastball.

David Maffei: I actually never saw a 90, but I did see 89. So I tried my hardest to push into the nineties, but unfortunately, God had different plans for what my arm was supposed to do, and that wasn’t on the list.

Drumm McNaughton: I understand. That’s about where I topped out as well, was about 88. I had a curveball that would drop off the table, but two pitches just weren’t enough.

David Maffei: Yes, there you go. I know the feeling.

[00:03:22] Introduction to Staffbase

Drumm McNaughton: So you’re with Staffbase right now. Tell us about Staffbase.

David Maffei: Sure. Yes. Staffbase is a thousand-person global organization, co-headquartered between New York City, here in the great state of New York, and in Chemnitz, Germany, which is in East Germany, a couple of hours from Prague, just to place where Chemnitz is. The company was founded in 2014. We call ourselves an employee experience software platform.

We work exclusively with organizations that are trying to figure out how to better communicate and better drive productivity inside their business. We’ve got almost 3000 customers using the platform and just about 20 million daily active users. So we’re a fairly well-deployed and widely used software platform. I don’t know the official number, but I think we have customers using the software in something like 180 countries or something like that.

Drumm McNaughton: Wow, that’s big.

[00:04:18] David’s Path to Communication Expertise

Drumm McNaughton: How did you become an expert in communications?

David Maffei: Yes, it’s a really good question, Drumm. Early on in my career, I had aspirations of being an attorney.

Drumm McNaughton: Glad those aspirations didn’t work out. No, I’m sorry.

David Maffei: Yes, I would tell you that people thought I was good at arguing. Which, maybe, is connected to being a good communicator? Maybe? But I came out of school, and I ended up working for SBC, which was a telecommunications company. And then I ended up in the web content management world working for an organization that was focused on creating public-facing digital web experiences. Thinking about how you communicate to an unintended or to an anonymous audience. And then in 2015, I actually founded a company based in New Hampshire. Which was focused on flipping that perspective, I call it flipping it inside the firewall. We went from working with organizations to communicate externally to anonymous audiences, to working with organizations to communicate internally to very well-known audiences. Which is where my passion’s been for now the last 12 years.

Drumm McNaughton: So, external, internal, but it can be summed up as digital communications and digital strategies.

David Maffei: That’s correct. A hundred percent correct.

[00:05:33] Internal vs External Communications

David Maffei: There’s a significant amount of overlap, as you might imagine, between the way that organizations think about communicating who they are to customers or to investors or to alumni or to, these audiences that operate outside of their world to what it means to operate and communicate to those inside of your world. And I think that there’s a lot of, I don’t know, I guess overlap, I would say between thinking about communications through the lens of internal and external. And there’s a lot that can be gained from those strategies that make one more successful than the other in certain scenarios. But then how that plays out in terms of thinking about flipping it over the wall.

Drumm McNaughton: Of course. It makes perfect sense.

[00:06:16] Communication in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: So let’s swap it over a little bit to talk about higher ed. Highly politicized, overwhelmed by the amount of communications going on. When you and I spoke the other day, you said something that was very interesting to me, you said, “now is not all that different from the past”.

Help me out. Okay. The only thing I can think about “past” is the McCarthy era. And yes, I was not born during that— well, maybe toward the end of it.

David Maffei: Yes, it’s funny that the methods and the means of communication have obviously evolved, and the way that communication is created has obviously evolved. You mentioned the thought of higher ed being a sort of hyper-politicized environment. And I would say politicized is a word that you can use in the environment. I would say that higher ed’s a highly competitive environment. Both for those operating inside of the world, what does it mean to be an educator at a higher education institution, or a president, or a dean, versus what does it mean to be a student? And what does communication mean, again, thinking through my internal/ external or what we sometimes refer to as “mix-ternal” comms, thinking through the lens of the way that a higher education institution paints who it is externally and how that can contrast sometimes maybe incorrectly from how they paint themselves internally.

And I think if you go back to 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, while the method and the access to communication is greatly advanced and more mature, maybe you would say, now, The actual communication itself is actually quite similar to the way that it used to be in terms of the problems that are being tackled and the sort of vying for eyeballs and ears in terms of letting the message land and putting organizations like higher education institutions in a position where they can toe the line between doing what we think they’re all designed to do, which is to educate, but also to represent a perspective of what that education means in the world.

Drumm McNaughton: I think that’s a critical point for folks to remember, it’s the internal and the external communications. When we work with institutions and we talk about branding and you know, from communications, you don’t get your brand from what your faculty think you do. You get your brand, what your customers say that you’re known for.

What I’m hearing you say is those internal and external communications are different. And am I right in assuming that they need to be brought together more?

David Maffei: Yes, we see this all the time with customers. I’ve seen this throughout my career. Probably the biggest change when I switched from the world of external communication from a software perspective to internal communication. I think one of the more interesting things that you see is that there tends to be more of a focus placed on external comps. So what does it mean to tell our story publicly? What does it mean to take our stances politically? What does it mean for how the outside world and someone that we don’t know perceives us? That anonymous audience I was making reference to earlier.

[00:09:32] Importance of Internal Communications

David Maffei: When I would actually argue that that’s not nearly as important as how we communicate internally. Because whether you’re a higher education institution or you’re a diversified manufacturer, you’re a pharmaceutical company, the way that you communicate internally is actually how your brand truly gets represented externally.

It’s how your customers embrace you. It’s how you set the tone of who you are as a business. It’s how you enrich and excite the people that are delivering your brand to the world. And I think sometimes that gets lost and we see it. Throughout my career if you had an organization whether a higher ed or non-higher ed and they had two different project priorities, they wanted to replace their website and they wanted to replace their intranet. I would tell you that a hundred times out of a hundred, if you said you can only do one.

People were saying we’ll do our website, and we’ll save the intranet for later. Because they thought this is how we represent ourselves publicly. It’s so much more important that we worry about the way that the external people perceive us and we can just kick the can down the road, and we’ll use SharePoint or whatever. We’ll keep doing what we’re doing internally. But my perspective on that is that it’s completely backwards. Because I truly believe and have a passion for, obviously I built a career around it, that internal communications is actually what drives who you are in the market.

It’s what drives the way that your customers perceive you. It’s what drives the way that a prospect or a prospective student or a prospective professor is going to look at your institution in terms of what will this be like for me if I become a part of this. And I would argue that’s even more important than the message that you put out in terms of what it means for an external person that may or may not interact with your brand more than on a cursory level.

Drumm McNaughton: Which makes perfect sense. What it reminded me of is a Southwest pyramid. Southwest, at least the management under Herb Kelleher and whatnot, the baseline is you take care of your employees.

David Maffei: That’s right.

Drumm McNaughton: Your employees take care of your customers. Your customers take care of your stock price.

David Maffei: In many ways what you’re saying, this is not rocket science. It’s actually quite logical and sometimes surprising how that simple concept of what you just laid out can get lost in the noise.

Drumm McNaughton: That’s— I’m going to relate it back to academics— that’s org behavior 101. Sorry folks. You should know that.

[00:12:01] Challenges in Communication Strategies

Drumm McNaughton: So what are the elements of good communications? Be it external or internal.

David Maffei: Yes, I think if you asked five people like me, you might give five different answers. But I’ll give you mine since you were nice enough to have me on the show and ask my opinion.

[00:12:17] Overcommunication and Preparation

David Maffei: You know, what I’ll tell you, Drumm, is I’m a huge proponent of over communication. I’m also a huge proponent of preparation. And I think these are two things that are often lost. When you think about internal comms, when you think about the culture that communications can create inside of an institution or an organization.

Being a proponent of overcommunication is this firm belief that if you’re not communicating who you are and what that means for you and what it means for everyone else and you’re not painting a vision of how that’s going to mature and evolve over time, you actually allow that vision to be painted by lots of different people and in many ways incorrectly. And I’m a huge proponent of ensuring that you’re over communicating. Now, you have to be smart about it because there’s a lot of organizations who have taken the perspective of over communicating and they over communicate to a level where their communication is ignored. Right? And it’s viewed as noise. And so this is where I think the concept of over communication combined with sort of personalization is critical, right?

I talk a lot about the fact that there’s this sort of intersection of context and relevancy. And the intersection of context and relevancy for you is going to be different than it is for me. It’s going to be different than it is for Bob and Mary who are listening to us in the audience today. That intersection of context and relevancy is the most important communicative point for an individual at an individual time.

And it is never the same for any two people. And so when you think about that, it’s so critical that you find that critical sort of inflection point for each individual where they feel like the communication, and in my, I’m a proponent of over communication, that over communication is landing because it’s relevant and contextual for who I am and what I’m doing in that particular moment.

The other thing that I talked about is preparation. You see lots of examples of organizations who are actually not prepared to communicate. Whether there’s a natural disaster or, there’s a situation such as an active shooter situation on a campus, God forbid. Or, you get into a situation where something’s happened that you do and or don’t want to take a political stance on, especially in the climate that we live in today in 2025. Not being prepared for when you’re going to go right and when you’re going to go left and when you’re going to take a big step forward and when you’re going to take a big step back is like the kiss of death for communications and for an organization who didn’t prepare. And while it might sound simplistic where I’m saying over communicate and be prepared to communicate, these are two principles that are often not, taken for the level that they should. They’re taken for granted, they’re overlooked, they’re assumed that they’ll be able to be solved in the moment. And what we see across, our 3000 customers and the probably 10,000 organizations I’ve worked with in my career, is actually the majority of them don’t do either well.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, that’s true. You take a look at what’s going on politically right now. Institutions are having to take a stand with the good deal that the Education Department, the Trump administration, we’ll give you preference in research, et cetera like that. And MIT was the first institution to come out and say, no, we’re not going to do this.

The other presidents very smartly have not given indications until they have come to their decision, and I would bet work with their boards to say, this is what we want to do, this is how we need to communicate it. And make sure that communication is not only consistent, transparent, and reaches all the various demographic groups that it needs to.

David Maffei: Yes, I agree with you Drumm. I think, you look at the, I don’t know what the count is, you’ll know better than me, but the 4,000 some odd higher education institutions in this country. I would argue that when you have a sample size that’s that big, you are going to have organizations or institutions that fall evenly across the spectrum. Right? So those who believe some things are right, those that believe some things are wrong, those that believe they’re somewhere in the middle. From my perspective, going back to the over communication and the preparedness, I don’t care where you stand on an issue.

What I care about is that you have a stance on that issue and you know how to communicate it and you know what it means to be prepared for that. And I think this is where you see authenticity come through. Because organizations will take a stance that may be popular one day and not popular another.

And I think that authenticity, especially in higher education, is critical. Because I think that if you are viewed as a higher education institution that flops in the wind based on where dollars are flowing or not flowing or what’s good for today but wasn’t good for yesterday. And again, like I don’t have a political perspective on any of this.

I just come at it through the lens of be prepared, know who you are and own that, right? We have a saying at Staffbase, which is “own it”, right? So, own your message, own that communication, prepare for it. And then, if you’re really prepared, you don’t have to worry about, you know, “well geez, what if this goes bad?” Well, you don’t have to worry about that because you’re prepared for it. If the stance you’re taking sends you one way or another, you’re prepared for it. And I think that’s so critical. Especially in a time when communications may be more important than ever.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, a hundred percent, a hundred percent agree. The message has got to be delivered in a way that the various constituencies can hear it. You’ve got your internal, you’ve got alumni, political prospective students, traditional, non-traditional students. There’s multiple demographics, constituencies, you’ve got to be able to speak to as a president or whatever.

So how do you prepare people for those various constituencies.

David Maffei: Yes, there’s no magic wand here, and I think that, as you’ve probably seen through your career, those perspectives and the positioning that a particular university president may have, can change president to president. And while some organizations can go decades and decades with the same president, as you know, there’s some institutions that have, in recent years, made more changes, more rapidly looking for the right person to be the face and lead their institution. And I think that there is a very real sort of thing that exists where who that president, who that top person is the preeminent voice of that institution, can change over time. And so thinking about the way that a higher education institution is able to have its values and have its morals and present who they are as a business and why that matters to prospective professors and prospective students, knowing that those positions can change based on who leadership is very similar to what we see in the, public and private business world, right?

So the perspectives of these organizations can change. And I think that’s okay. As long as it comes back to enabling a voice that makes sense for the times and for the audience that you’re going after. It’s the simplest thing I’ll say, but if you have a perspective and you’re going to communicate that perspective, and that perspective is misaligned from the audience that you’re targeting, well guess what? You have a problem.

So it really comes down to understanding what does the audience mean to us? Is the audience evolving? Does our position affect the audience’s evolution? And are we okay with that? And this is all under that umbrella of preparation and preparedness to ensure that you are able to sit back and say, this is a hill that we’re going to die on or not. And regardless of which way the wind blows on this we know we’re sticking to what makes the most sense for our institution today, and in many ways, based on the history that institution has had, to lead up to this particular point.

Drumm McNaughton: Very, very true. One of the things that I always advise Presidents on when they come into the new role, and we do a lot of onboarding of new presidents, is you need to sit down with your board and figure out who is going to be the spokesperson for this university, for this college. Is it going to be you? Is it going to be the board chair? Is it going to be the two of you combined? Most of the time it works out that it is a president and he or she knows when they need to consult the board about a particular message. But when it gets to be really gnarly, for lack of a better word, you’ll see the board chair and the college president, university president, together on the dais to bring out the message.

That message has to cascade throughout the organization to all the various constituencies that the president and the board have to deal with. Does that make sense?

David Maffei: It makes perfect sense. And I’ve seen this throughout my career as well. And I think one of the mistakes that gets made is these situations, whether they’re situations of crisis or massive change, or responding to things that are happening in the world or in the markets, oftentimes the public is finding out about that position and they’re finding out about that communication at the same time as everyone internally.

And I would argue that’s a great way to erode trust. For me, there’s nothing more important, in a college or a university, then the trust that they have of the people that work there and the people that come there to be educated.

And we coach a lot of college presidents. We coach a lot of tenured professors on the fact that communication, even in times of crisis where you have to move fast, has to be communicated internally before it gets communicated externally. Because while you might be saving a few seconds to get it out to the public, in a particular moment. The amount of trust that you can erode there is sometimes an amount that you can’t actually recover from. And I think there’s been times throughout history where we’ve seen that.

Drumm McNaughton: Oh, most definitely. What’s that old saying? 10 attaboys are great, but one ah crap really wipes the slate clean. It can take years to build trust and moments to break it.

David Maffei: A hundred percent.

[00:22:57] Technology’s Impact on Communication

Drumm McNaughton: How has technology impacted communications other than, first off, I tell people, everybody’s a reporter. They can record video. They can record audio on their cell phone. You’ve got to treat it like that. But besides that, how has technology impacted communications, especially for presidents?

[00:23:18] AI and the Future of Communication

David Maffei: Yes, we see, almost like a tale of two sides of the coin. Everyone that’ll be listening to this in the audience will know that artificial intelligence is just such an incredibly hot topic today. And when you think about the rate of change and the evolution that AI is bringing to us. When you think about technology, I still see these clips from when Bill Gates and now I’m forgetting that gentleman that replaced him, was the president of the LA Clippers. When they released Windows 95, there’s this very old video of these guys out on stage and they’re literally like dancing and chanting about developers. And what were they doing? They were communicating, right? And in that moment, that was the communication message that was landing in the market. We see, we see a lot of organizations who are prepared to leverage technology. And in this case specifically, AI, to be able to advance the capabilities of the institution, to be able to advance communication, to be able to communicate faster, to be able to communicate with more agility. And then we see, like another half. Which is like not embracing technology and AI at all. And there is a really stark contrast between the two. It speaks, I think, Drumm, to the level of comfort that particular institution has with change. And we live in a world where the only constant thing is that stuff’s changing incredibly fast.

And so we’ve been really impressed, at Staffbase, with our higher education customers, for those who have embraced artificial intelligence. Not to say, hey, we use Microsoft Copilot, or we use Gemini. And so we’ll check the box and say we’re, we’re on the AI trend. But they’re actually using it to get work done faster.

They’re actually using it to communicate more quickly. They’re actually using it to better connect with the younger generation. And we see the sort of complete opposite with organizations who haven’t leaned into that or still trying to figure out what AI even means for them; they’re still catching up with the cloud.

I mean, literally, we’re still talking to organizations who have stuff on servers and closets in 2025, you can believe that. So I just think that, this isn’t tale as old as time. And fast forward 10 years and we’ll be talking about something else. Now we’ll be talking about those that are still just doing AI the old way and the new thing that’s existing out there. It is fascinating. I did an interview, I don’t know, maybe a month ago. And the premise behind the interview was, how much different life is today with technology and AI and is AI going to take people’s jobs? And I said I’ll take the opposite position. I’ll say it’s actually not different at all.

This is just another evolution of what’s happening. Because remember 10 years ago it was everything’s going to the cloud, and so you don’t need, engineers that are working on mainframes and you don’t need all these data centers, minus the public cloud ones. And you don’t need, you don’t need, you don’t need, and guess what that meant? It meant people losing their jobs. Or that their jobs had to be adjusted. So it’s the same thing. Sure is AI coming in and potentially putting jobs at risk? I would argue it’s not putting jobs at risk. I would argue it’s opening doors for new jobs and more growth and more autonomy in inside of the workforce at higher education institutions and not. So Yes, tech is ever changing. It’s changing faster than we’ve ever seen before. Whether that’s, how my daughter as a junior in high school is using technology to, to better herself and work towards college. How a college president is using technology to better connect with the student body. To how the, the board chair of a university is using technology to figure out how to increase the bottom line, an increase enrollment and cut down on attrition. And, we just live in a different world where that technology is so much more readily available at your fingertips, on your phone, in your pocket, and in a way that can actually create meaningful impact.

Drumm McNaughton: Yes, it’s so critical that people be embracing the technology in a smart way.

[00:27:18] Advice for University Presidents

Drumm McNaughton: So advice for presidents, in these crazy times, what would you tell presidents, all presidents, about how to better communicate?

[00:27:33] Holistic Communication Strategies

David Maffei: Some of the most successful customers, higher education institutions that I’ve worked with at Staffbase and prior, thought about communication through the lens as an avenue of connectivity through their institution. How do we better communicate collectively to students and through students, to professors and through professors, to our administrative staff and through them, and all of them together?

I think this is something that’s lost, right? We run into organizations all the time and say, well, I need an intranet platform, or I need a digital workplace at the institution because I can’t communicate to my faculty correctly. And then we’ll talk to someone else and we’ll say, we have Microsoft teams, but we can’t really communicate with the students in a way that lands.

And I sit back and say, okay, but how are you setting it up so that you, as the administration and the students and the professors and the support staff are communicating together as one holistic body that makes your institution run. And those presidents that get that and that understand the power of a tool such as a Staffbase or one of our competitors and the connectivity that can exist inside the four walls of the institution with everyone, every member of that body, is such a different world from those who are trying to solve this sort of singular linear problem of I have to figure out how to communicate with alumni, or I have to figure out how to communicate with my professors, or I have to figure out how to better communicate with students.

Those siloed individual, sort of, swim lanes don’t work to create a cohesive, communicative group. And we see it like if I talk to five higher education institutions in the next week, four of them will tell me that’s not a problem. And I will tell you that it’s a major problem for all four of them.

And the one that says I know it’s a problem is the one who’s willing to lean in and head towards that intersection of context and relevancy for everybody inside the walls of that university, not just certain segments.

Drumm McNaughton: It makes perfect sense. Well, we were speaking last week.

[00:29:41] Leadership and Ego in Higher Education

Drumm McNaughton: We talked about Mun Choi, who’s President, University of Missouri, and he had a quote: “there are issues that I feel very passionate about. I can’t let that influence the decisions that I make on behalf of the university”. When I hear that, I go, bravo.

You’re here to educate. You’ve got a mission. You’ve got certain values. Your own personal, whether you believe or not in X, Y, Z, or A, B, C, it really doesn’t matter, you’re there for your students, your community, et cetera. Does that make sense?

David Maffei: That makes perfect sense. And I love that because not everyone thinks that way. And by the way, it’s easy to say that you’ll do those things. It’s harder to put it in action. And I think that, especially in today’s day and age, it’s sometimes hard to blur the line between the way that you might feel personally about an issue.

[00:30:36] The Role of University Presidents

David Maffei: But at the end of the day, a university president is a steward of the students, is a steward of the faculty, is a steward of everyone down to the janitorial staff that make the operation run. The athletics programs, the list goes on and on. And I think that especially in higher education, maybe more so than in any other vertical that you could mention, a university president is not there for themselves.

They don’t, I, I’m not saying any of them are starving, right? But maybe some of them are. But, they’re not making $50 billion a year like the CEO of Boeing or, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla or any of these, very high-profile successful business owners. They’ve chosen a path of education. They’ve chosen a path of giving back. They’ve chosen a path of connecting and doing something that’s bigger than themselves. And I think that’s so unique. And the wise thoughts by the president of University of Missouri to be able to recognize that and put that out there to the world is like, look, what I think doesn’t matter. I’m just a representative of this amazing student body and this amazing group of educators. And I think that’s so critically important to park your ego at the door. I read a book, a year ago, and I forget the author of course. But the title of the book is Ego is the Enemy.

And it’s a fascinating read for any of the presidents that are on the line today. It really hits home on the fact that the thing that’s holding you back from galvanizing the organization that you’re leading is your own internal beliefs of what that’s supposed to be. Because what it’s actually supposed to be is what you and your team turn it into. And I think that’s the beauty of what, being in a leadership position like we’re talking about, affords to the right person.

Drumm McNaughton: Well said. As it reminds me from the documentary from We Are The World. Put the sign outside the door, leave your egos out here.

David Maffei: Yes. Yes, that’s right. And it’s sometimes harder to do, easy to say, hard to do, but those who do it well… Boston College has just announced that they’re, for the first time in I don’t know, maybe 30 years, they’re making a change in leadership. The gentleman that’s been there forever is, I think, retiring either at the end of this school year or next school year.

And, when you think about their institution and the growth going forward of identifying the right person to step in and lead that institution forward in such a competitive market educationally as Boston is, finding that person who’s willing to leave their ego at the door and put the body of work of that university first is so critical.

Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely. This has been a fascinating conversation, David. Thank you so much for being on. I’ve learned a lot, and I really appreciate that. In fact, that’s one of the main reasons I enjoy doing podcasts is I get to be taught so many different things. So, thank you for that.

David Maffei: Yes. No, Drumm. Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to chat and the great work that you do inside of a, an industry and a vertical that, that hits home for me personally.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you.

[00:33:39] Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards

Drumm McNaughton: Three takeaways for presidents and boards. What do they need to remember about communications?

David Maffei: Ah. All right. Three takeaways. First one is as soon as you think you have hit the line of over communicating, keep going because you haven’t hit it yet. Number two is we live in a world where our youth are trying to find their way. Maybe more so than ever before. And the higher education institutions in this country owe the youth of this country and this upcoming generation and the generations beyond it, we owe them the ability to give them a platform to succeed. And being prepared, as we talked about earlier, on how to handle the growth of the individuals of every one of these people and finding that inflection point of context and relevancy for everyone, is so important. And the last thing I would say is that we still see a lot of educational institutions who deprioritize implementing a tool like Staffbase. And I’m not grandstanding for Staffbase here by any means, but there’s a lot of great tools in the market that can fundamentally change the way that an organization, like a college or a university, can create connectivity and collaboration between everybody that exists in the body under that umbrella.

And I think there’s a lot of missed opportunities there. And look, organizations like ours are dying to work with organizations like colleges and universities. And in a tough economic climate, we’re willing to do a lot to make that easier. And again, I’m not just speaking about us. There, there are a lot of tools out there that will solve a lot of problems. You got to find the right tool for you. But stop backdooring solving your internal communications problem. Find a way to connect internally. And find a way to put yourself in a position to fundamentally change the way that things happen inside. And imagine you are going to see some stuff happen on the outside that’s pretty incredible.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you. Great takeaways.

[00:35:35] What’s Next for David Maffei

Drumm McNaughton: What’s next for you?

David Maffei: Oh geez. A lot. We—

Drumm McNaughton: Are you retiring next week? No, I’m just kidding.

David Maffei: I’m not retiring next week. We’ve got some pretty lofty goals at Staffbase. From my perspective, we’re looking to take 20 million daily active users and make it 40 million daily active users. We’re looking to take 3,000 customers and make it 4,000 customers. We’ve talked publicly a lot about taking the business public through an IPO on the floor of the Nasdaq at some point. Hopefully maybe not in the not so distant future. So, continuing to work with great organizations and tell our story and help organizations change the way that they drive communication and productivity through technology is critical and we’re having a lot of fun doing it. So, it’s been a great run and anyone that’s listening in today, grab a demo, check us out, see what Staffbase does, and we’d be happy to chat with you about the way we’ve helped other institutions like yours change the game.

Drumm McNaughton: Sounds great.

[00:36:27] Conclusion and Farewell

Drumm McNaughton: Well, David, again, thank you so much for being on this show. I’ve enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to the next time our paths cross.

David Maffei: That sounds great, Drumm. Thank you as well. It was a pleasure.

Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, sir. Take care.

Thanks for listening today and a special thank you to my guest, David Maffei. David enjoyed having you on the program and I look forward to the next time our paths cross. To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in. I look forward to seeing you next week.