Fredric Mitchell
Principal at Bright Plum, Inc.
Fredric Mitchell is the principal at Bright Plum, Inc., a Drupal and WordPress web operations shop working with colleges, universities, and nonprofits.
Higher education marketing teams are responsible for websites their institutions can't afford to have fail. They manage them with small teams, on platforms inherited from agencies that have moved on, without the internal technical depth the work requires.
Bright Plum exists for those teams.
We provide proactive Drupal and WordPress support built specifically for colleges, universities, and higher-ed adjacent nonprofits. Our playbook-driven model runs in the background every month, keeping sites secure, accessible, and performing, without waiting for something to break. Our account management layer means every client has someone who prepares for meetings, surfaces issues early, and translates technical work into language that travels up the org chart. Most web support relationships make the client do the work of staying informed. We make staying informed part of what we deliver.
100% client renewal. 91% referral rate. 82% of clients rate our communication as excellent. If your marketing team is managing more website than it has capacity to support, we should talk.
Your site didn't go down. No one got breached. The accessibility audit didn't turn into a lawsuit. By every measure that matters, the year went well.
Now your board is asking why the web support line item costs what it costs.
This is the trap that every small higher-ed web team eventually walks into. When operational work is done properly, the evidence of it is an absence. No outage, no incident, no crisis. Absence is impossible to put in a budget request. The metric teams have reached for instead, website traffic, has stopped working. Organic search may have dropped and AI Overviews now appear on roughly 83% of education-sector searches. Traffic is going to look worse every quarter for reasons that have nothing to do with your team's work.
This session offers a different set of numbers. I'll walk through a six-dimension model for scoring website operational health. Those dimensions are:
Security
Accessibility
Performance
Platform health
Documentation
Communication
The exist on a 1-to-5 maturity scale, from ad hoc to managed. You'll see what evidence sits behind each score, why documentation is the dimension that almost always comes back lowest, and what the shape of a site's scores tells you about where institutional risk is concentrated.
Then we'll cover the harder half: turning that into something leadership reads. This isn't just a list of tickets that were closed. This is what changed, what it means, and what to do next in language that allows you to forward it via email without translation.
You'll leave with the scoring rubric, a reporting template, and a way to answer the question leadership actually asks: is the website getting better, and how do we know?
What attendees will take away
- A 1-to-5 maturity rubric for six dimensions of site health, and the evidence behind each score
- A monthly reporting format built for a non-technical reader
- A way to frame maintenance spend as risk management rather than upkeep
- Language for the conversation where a stakeholder asks why you're spending money on a year in which nothing happened