About

About Brad J Ward

Brad has been working in the Higher Education setting since college, starting as a student assistant in the Marketing Department at the University of Illinois at Springfield. As a student in 2003, he created a website with photos, forums, and videos for both current and prospective students, which was later used as a primary recruitment tool by the University. In 2005 he served as a student blogger for the University. After graduation, he acted as the Marketing and Recruitment Specialist at UIS for 1 ½ years, starting many web-based recruitment efforts.

Brad then went to Butler University, where he served as the Electronic Communication Coordinator in the Office of Admission for nearly 2 years. As one of the few higher education professionals whose work is focused in social media / social networking, web content, email, and data research, Brad has taken web-based recruitment and admissions to new levels. His work at Butler has been featured in several magazines and websites such as Campus Technology, University Business, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, Wired, CNET, New York Times and more.

During his time at Butler, the University had 2 record years of enrollment in the school’s 152 year history. The numbers of applications for Fall 2009 had already surpassed the totaly number of apps in 2008 at the time of his departure in January 2009. His efforts, in addition to the hard work of everyone in the Butler Admission Office, has helped them achieve these goals year after year.

Brad created and oversaw the popular Butler Bloggers and the BUForums community and is the co-creator of http://www.bloghighed.org, a site that aggregates many popular higher education blogs. Brad blogs at http://squaredpeg.com and is speaking at conferences around the world. To read what others say about Brad and his work, please visit http://tinyurl.com/aboutbrad.

You can find Brad on Twitter at @bradjward.  You can email him at brad(at)bluefuego.com.