There is a difference between covering an institution and understanding how to tell its story. At The EDU Ledger’s 2026 HBCU Media Training Symposium, held Friday at Virginia State University’s Alfred W. Harris Academic Commons, communications professionals from HBCUs across the country spent the day examining that distinction — and sharing the practical tools, strategies and institutional knowledge that can make the difference.
The symposium brought together communicators working across photography, branding, data, grants, history and athletics, but a common theme connected the sessions: HBCUs have stories worth telling, and the people closest to those institutions are often best positioned to tell them.
Ahmad Barber, managing partner of Streamlined Media & Communications, opened the day by focusing on one of the first ways prospective students encounter an institution: its images. Authentic campus photography, he argued, is more than a visual asset. It is part of how students determine whether they can see themselves belonging at an institution.
Barber encouraged institutions to refresh their photo libraries every three years, incorporate interactive elements and avoid allowing their visual identities to become frozen in time. His own career offered an example of the point. A self-taught photographer, Barber began taking photographs for his alma mater while working in student journalism — illustrating how much storytelling talent may already exist on an HBCU campus.
That idea of drawing on the institution itself continued in Dr. Gwen Williams Dandridge’s session on making communication a campus-wide responsibility. Dandridge walked participants through a recent rebranding effort that involved current students, alumni, faculty and other stakeholders in developing the institution’s messaging.
When the communications budget could not support every element of the rebrand, Dandridge looked beyond her department. Facilities painted the new “Greater Happens Here” slogan onto campus streets, while athletics incorporated the new imagery into its team buses. Other elements required little or no additional funding: a campus-wide speaking tour introduced the new messaging, department-level logos reinforced the slogan, and virtual meeting backgrounds extended the visual identity into digital spaces.
The result was a practical lesson in institutional communications: A communications office does not have to own every resource to own its institution’s narrative.
From there, the symposium turned to two resources that are often overlooked as storytelling tools: data and federal grant language.
Dr. Rhonda Sharpe, who maintains The EDU Ledger’s Top 100 lists, led participants through the process of finding institutional data and using it to develop a story. Rather than treating data as an endpoint, the session positioned it as a starting point for identifying questions, context and narratives that can help institutions better explain their work.
Dr. Erin Lynch, president of QEM, took a similar approach to federal grant applications, demonstrating how communications professionals can use the language already embedded in grant opportunities to better understand what funders are seeking. The session offered a practical reminder that effective institutional storytelling extends beyond press releases and media pitches; it can also help institutions articulate their value when competing for resources.
At lunch, Dr. Cheryl Mango, executive director of the National HBCU Studies Data Collection and Resource Center at Virginia State University, placed that contemporary work within a much longer history.
Mango examined the role of the Black Press in advocating for HBCUs following court rulings during the Carter administration that challenged segregation in higher education. She highlighted the work of figures including former PBS host Tony Brown and connected that history to the eventual creation of the White House Initiative on HBCUs.
The history lesson added another dimension to the day’s conversations. For HBCUs, communicating the institution’s story has never been simply a matter of marketing. The press, public narrative and institutional advocacy have long played a role in protecting these colleges and universities and ensuring that their contributions are recognized.
Steven J. Gaither, founder and editor of HBCU Gameday, brought the day back to one of the most visible entry points to an HBCU: athletics.
Gaither described sports as the “front porch of the institution,” offering media outlets a reason to come through the door. But the opportunity for communicators, he argued, is to use that initial interest to introduce journalists to the people, scholarship, research and community work that exist beyond the scoreboard.
Taken together, the sessions offered more than a collection of communications tips. They demonstrated the range of ways HBCUs can take greater ownership of how their institutions are understood — through the images they use, the people they involve, the data they surface, the language they adopt, the history they preserve and the doors they open to the media.
For those who attended, the symposium provided a day of ideas and strategies that could be taken directly back to campus. For those who did not, they missed something harder to replicate: a room full of people doing this work, comparing notes and sharing what they have learned about telling the stories of institutions that have never lacked stories to tell.
