You don't have an engagement problem. You have an execution problem.
If you work in digital at a UK university, the chances are, one or more of the following statements are giving you a headache right now:
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You are competing for audience attention in an increasingly competitive environment
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AI is disrupting typical search behaviour
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Trying to meet rising student digital expectations feels like being on a treadmill that’s moving slightly too fast
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Data is all over the place and none of it is joined up
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You have an ecosystem of technology that promises more than it delivers
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There is institutional wide (or at least pockets of) resistance to transformational change
… and then there’s the well documented financial squeeze on the sector.
Where do you turn?
It turns out, it’s not just you. Our research across the charity and cultural sectors reveals something striking - these problems aren’t exclusive to Higher Education. They're universal symptoms of the same underlying engagement crisis. But what do we mean by an engagement crisis and how can we resolve it?
Key findings at a glance:
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The Engagement Gap: 95% of leaders are ready to evolve engagement, but 33% are held back by cultural resistance.
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Execution > Tools: The crisis isn't a lack of technology, but a lack of "organisational muscle" and connected data.
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Cross-sector lessons: HE can learn from the charity sector’s "mission-first" approach to digital transformation.
The engagement paradox
Our 2026 research - which surveyed 400 leaders across the UK charity and cultural sectors, alongside 4,000 donors and visitors - reveals something striking. Over 95% of leaders across the charity and culture sectors say they're ready to evolve audience engagement in the next five years. And yet, in the same breath, one in four admit their data is incomplete, inaccurate, or not being used effectively. And one in three cite cultural resistance as their biggest internal barrier.
Ready on paper. Stuck in practice. We called this the “Engagement Gap”
Universities are living this paradox every day. You're investing in CRMs, personalisation tools, marketing automation, AI chatbots. But the returns aren't matching the spend. Not because the technology is wrong - but because the culture, capability, and connective tissue to use it properly hasn't kept pace.
To use a music metaphor - we're buying the instruments faster than we're training the orchestra.
Top 4 internal barriers to digital engagement in HE, charities and the cultural sector
What makes this research genuinely useful for higher education is that the anecdotal root causes of underperformance we’ve heard about are almost identical across charities and visitor attractions. The top internal barriers our research identified were:
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25% cultural resistance to change
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24% conflicting priorities
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21% siloed working
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25% risk aversion
None of those are technology problems.
The capability gaps are equally telling. Organisations across these sectors struggle mostly with:
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28% integrating new technology
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27% cross-team collaboration
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26% personalisation at scale
And this plays out in Higher Education, too.
Not a shortage of platforms. A shortage of the organisational muscle to use them.
In higher education, this plays out in ways you'll recognise immediately. A recruitment CRM that doesn't talk to your student information system. A website team often working in isolation from marketing. An AI strategy that's been kicked to a working group and hasn't surfaced since. Data sitting in silos between admissions, the VLE, and student services — making a genuine 360-degree student view feel more like a fantasy than a roadmap.
The tools exist. The integration, governance, and human behaviours to use them effectively? That's where the gap lives.
Process and culture over tools
Organisations keep adding platforms - believing the next purchase will solve the problem the last one didn't. But technology only amplifies what's already there. Without the right culture and capabilities underneath it, you don't get better engagement. You get faster dysfunction.
Our research put it well: tools should enable empathy, not replace it. The most effective engagement strategies across these sectors weren't the most technologically sophisticated - they were the ones that combined data-driven targeting with human-centred design and genuine cross-team collaboration.
In-person experiences ranked as highly as digital targeting. Personalised communications worked when they were backed by clean, connected data and a team empowered to act on it. The organisations winning at engagement weren't the ones with the most tools. They were the ones where culture and technology were moving at the same speed.
Where higher education has a genuine advantage
There's one important nuance worth calling out. Charities, by and large, are better at keeping mission at the centre of engagement decisions. Their research showed that long-term relationships (31%) and quality of experience (30%) ranked above pure resource constraints when making decisions - a more purpose-driven posture than we see in attractions and membership organisations, where budget and revenue consistently crowd out mission.
Universities, at their best, have this too. You have a genuine story to tell. You're transforming lives, producing research that matters, creating communities that last decades. The problem isn't the mission - it's converting that intent into repeatable, scalable execution that engages with your audience as their needs and relationship with you evolve.
That requires three things our research consistently points to: cultures that support experimentation, capabilities that close the gap between strategy and delivery, and connective tissue - shared goals, clear ownership, feedback loops - that stops good ideas dying in perpetual pilot mode.
Is your HE engagement strategy backed by data or just ambition?
Here's what I'd encourage every higher education digital leader to honestly reflect on: are you confident you understand your audiences? Almost certainly yes - 89% of leaders across our research said the same. Now ask yourself: is that confidence backed by complete, accurate, effectively-used data? If the answer is anything other than an unqualified yes, you're living the paradox.
The engagement crisis in higher education - as in charities and cultural organisations - isn't caused by a shortage of ambition or technology. It's caused by cultural blockers, underdeveloped capabilities, and weak connective execution. The institutions that will win aren't those who buy more platforms. They're the ones who invest as seriously in culture as they do in code.
Research & Insights
We’ve published two comprehensive whitepapers exploring the "Engagement Gap" in detail. These reports synthesise data from:
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Sector leadership: Insights from 400+ leaders in UK charities and visitor attractions
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Public sentiment: A deep dive into the expectations of 2,000 charity donors and 2,000 cultural venue visitors.
Download Curating Connection: Transforming visitor engagement in the cultural sector
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