She would know. Before joining iFactory in January as a Digital Strategist and Account Services Manager, Brittany spent more than a decade inside higher ed enrollment. She was a recruiting counselor at Pfeiffer, did strategic planning at Winthrop, and eventually became Director of Recruitment at Colorado State, where she ran a team of twenty. After that, she spent three years at Ithaka S+R, the higher ed research nonprofit, working on student success and access at scale.
In other words: she has actually been the person on the other end of the website. The one trying to enroll a class. The one watching the inquiry-to-application step quietly fail.
A great website is a tour guide, not a filing cabinet.
Which is why the tour guide line cuts so cleanly. A filing cabinet is organized for the institution. Every office gets a drawer, every program gets a folder. A tour guide is organized for the visitor: here’s what matters about this place, here’s what you should see next, here’s what you can skip. A good tour guide has a route. A great one reads the person they’re walking with.
The Domino's Pizza Tracker idea
Brittany’s favorite project from her practitioner days was an admitted students dashboard. The problem: admitted students were getting lost between deposit and orientation, the gap where summer melt happens.
The solution came from television. “I saw one-too-many Domino’s Pizza Tracker commercials and thought, why can’t we make it that simple?”
If you can follow a pizza from prep to delivery, you can follow yourself from admit to enrolled. The dashboard mirrored the same plain, step-by-step logic, and worked for the same reason: it borrowed a mental model the user already understood.
I saw one-too-many Domino's Pizza Tracker commercials and thought, why can't we make it that simple?
“It was a simple solution to a complex problem that was developed with the end-user in mind. If you understood the pizza tracker, you could understand the admitted students dashboard.”
That instinct, to take an experience students already know and use it as scaffolding for one they don’t, is something every higher ed marketer talks about and very few execute on.
What she's chewing on right now
The thing keeping Brittany up at night is the shift toward stealth applications: students who never raise their hand as a prospect, never fill out an RFI form, and apply cold. The traditional enrollment funnel assumed students would identify themselves on the way in. Increasingly, they don’t.
“The role of a website, student search, SEO/GEO strategy, and communications all need to shift with those changes,” she says. The website is no longer there to capture an inquiry. It’s there to convince someone who has already done their research and is comparing you against three competitors in three browser tabs.
On AI
She’s not in the camp that thinks the machines will take over. “Even the smartest consumer-grade AI still lacks the nuance and understanding of a human that is necessary to do great work, especially in this field.”
But she’s also not dismissive. The underhyped part of the AI conversation, she says, is what it’s doing to us: “AI is changing how we think. That can either add value to our processes or make us less apt to think critically.”
The hill she'll die on
The website should point students toward an open door and connection with the institution. It's not a replacement for that human connection.
Ask Brittany what she’ll fight for, and the answer is fast: the website’s job is to point a student toward a person.
This is the thread that runs through everything else. The tour guide, the pizza tracker, the worry about stealth applications. Brittany isn’t building websites; she’s building the on-ramp to a human encounter. Which, if you’ve ever worked in enrollment, is the only thing that ever actually closes a class.
When she's not working
She’s watching her four-year-old play sports. “He usually has no idea what’s actually going on, but he has so much fun doing it.” If she could write her own dream job, she’d be an ‘official’ FOX One’s Chief World Cup Watcher this summer.
We’re glad she picked us instead.
