Executive Strategist in Communications, Brand, and Organizational Leadership
Elley Prior is an executive strategist in communications, brand, and organizational leadership with deep experience supporting complex, mission-driven institutions through periods of change and repositioning. Her work focuses on shaping clear, credible strategies and narratives that reflect institutional reality, support shared governance, and build confidence across diverse stakeholder communities.
​
Elley brings senior executive experience in highly regulated and decentralized environments, including serving as Associate Vice-President, Communications and Marketing at the University of Guelph, where she led institutional brand, communications, marketing, and digital strategy. In that role, she worked closely with executive leadership, academic leaders, and administrative teams to align organizational strategy, narrative, and execution across a complex university environment.
​
Her doctoral training informs how she approaches strategy and leadership in practice. It shapes a systems-oriented view of communications, brand, and external relations as mechanisms for organizational sensemaking, alignment, and decision-making. Grounded in research and behavioural insight, her work focuses on helping institutions interpret complexity, surface shared understanding, and make choices that are credible, defensible, and sustainable over time in publicly accountable environments.
​
Elley brings particular strength in working across decentralized organizations, listening carefully to varied perspectives, and synthesizing research, insight, and lived institutional experience into coherent strategic direction. She uses qualitative and quantitative research not as abstract input, but as a practical tool to clarify judgment, support executive decision-making, and build durable alignment across complex stakeholder environments.
What I'm Reading
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI,
Taking us from the Stone Age, through the canonization of the Bible, early modern witch-hunts, Stalinism, Nazism, and the resurgence of populism today, NEXUS asks us to consider the complex relationship between information and truth, bureaucracy and mythology, wisdom, and power. Harari explores how different societies and political systems have wielded information to achieve their goals and impose order, for good and bad. And he addresses the urgent choices we face today, as non-human intelligence threatens our very existence. Penguin Random House Canada
Marketing Higher Education: Understanding How to Build and Promote the University Brand
This book provides a comprehensive and accessible guide to marketing Higher Education institutions, discussing how universities are service providers and how education is a service, both of which need to be defined and marketed together.
Strategic Brand Management in Higher Education
This book is unique in providing a composite overview of strategy, planning, and measurement informed by ground-breaking research and the experiences of academics. It combines theoretical and methodological aspects of branding with the views of leading exponents of branding in different contexts and across a range of higher education institutions. Expert contributors from research and practice provide relevant and varying perspectives, allowing readers to access information on international trends, theory, and practices about branding in higher education.