How George Washington University unified social media across campus with Flockler

About George Washington University

George Washington University (GW) is a leading research institution in Washington, D.C., serving students across a distributed city campus, multiple locations throughout the area, and numerous online programs. With their Communications and Marketing team centralized to serve multiple schools and departments, GW needed a scalable solution to bring consistency and accessibility to their digital presence.

Their centralized model, implemented around 2020, brought together communications directors and web leads from across the university under one unified team, creating an opportunity to standardize tools, provide comprehensive support, and ensure every department could effectively engage their communities online.

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The challenge: fragmented social presence and accessibility concerns

Before adopting Flockler, GW's approach to social media integration was inconsistent across departments. Each school and administrative office handled social content differently. Some embedded individual feeds, others used makeshift RSS solutions, and many resorted to manually copying and pasting content onto their websites.

"We were finding a lot of inaccessible content," explains Terry Carter, who manages Flockler implementation at GW alongside
Ethan LeSage. "Colleges and administrative offices were taking a piecemeal approach to social media curation. People would come to our office hours asking questions about their implementations, and we didn't have any idea what they were using."

This fragmented approach created several critical challenges:

• No unified feeling of GW's social presence across different websites
• Time-consuming manual updates that pulled staff away from strategic work
• Accessibility compliance issues that put the university at legal risk
• Knowledge loss when staff members left their departments
• Inability to provide centralized support and training

For a university spread across multiple locations and serving students worldwide, creating connection and community was essential, but the tools weren't supporting that mission.

Discovering Flockler: accessibility as a game-changer

When GW's centralized communications team began searching for a social media aggregation solution, one requirement stood above all others: digital accessibility.

Beyond accessibility, Flockler's model aligned perfectly with GW's centralized approach. The university's division funds Flockler centrally, allowing them to offer it as a supported tool to all departments. Ethan and Terry serve as two central points of contact, eliminating the problems they faced when each department managed their own tools.

"Rather than people bringing us the tools they're using, our division pays for Flockler so it's a tool we can offer to all these different groups," explains Ethan. "Even though it's for individual teams, it's all supported and organized by our central team."

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The results: campus-wide adoption with remarkable ease

Since implementing Flockler, GW has seen transformation across multiple dimensions:

• Unified brand presence: The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences, GW's largest school, was an early success story. Their homepage now features a prominently placed Flockler feed styled with GW's branding, serving as a model for other departments to see what's possible.
• Accessibility compliance: Every Flockler feed across GW's websites now meets digital accessibility standards, protecting the university legally while ensuring all students can engage with the content.
• Remarkably fast implementation: Setup time has become a selling point in itself. "I helped someone set one up last week," Ethan recalls. "It was 'Oh, is this possible?' to 'Oh, we're done' in a few minutes."

Terry shares a similar story: "One of the institutes recently came to me wanting something like this. They were like, 'Look, if this is going to take a while. We don't need it right now.' But we got it set up in like 2 minutes on the call, customized with GW branding and everything. They were like, 'Is that it?' And we were like, 'Yeah, that's it.'"

• Real-time event engagement: During commencement celebrations, GW leverages Flockler's hashtag moderation to feature real-time student posts across school websites. This was especially valuable during COVID when making virtual ceremonies as interactive as possible was crucial.
• Simplified management: The My Sites dashboard has made managing multiple feeds across 35 departments straightforward. "It's good to see everything all in one screen," says Ethan. "Specifically the sites with issues, having that condensed so I can see just those at once has been helpful."
• Building community across a distributed campus: For a city campus where students, faculty, and staff are spread across locations and countries, Flockler helps create connections. "It's a way to have students and the university and faculty and staff all communicating," Ethan notes. "It allows for a little bit more connection."

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Beyond compliance: enabling strategic communication

For GW, Flockler has become more than a tool, it's an enabler of their centralized communications strategy. When staff members leave departments, nothing breaks. When new teams want to add social feeds, setup takes minutes, not hours. When regulators review accessibility compliance, every feed meets requirements.

The partnership has been strengthened by Flockler's commitment to accessibility and responsive support. "I think that's been a nice selling point and a point of reassurance," says Ethan. "The gratitude for your team and the previous team in terms of supporting training, supporting questions we have, helping us make changes specifically around accessibility that are important to us. They seem to be taken seriously by the Flockler team."

As more institutions face increasing accessibility regulations, GW's experience demonstrates that choosing the right tools from the start can turn compliance from a burden into a competitive advantage, all while making it easier to connect and engage your community.