Who Owns My Expertise?

When I write about admissions recruiting, donor communications, or any of the dozens of usual topics I cover on this blog, I sometimes wonder:

Am I going to get in trouble for this?

I rarely write anything specific to my work at Notre Dame. I don’t mention many specific clients or projects. And I certainly don’t give away any trade secrets.

But what’s the line? Will my boss freak out? Would our lawyers claim we were giving away important knowledge? Our culture is sometimes very opaque and risk averse.

The other day, one of our staff members put together a great mini-benchmarking study on how higher ed institutions implement news and events on their homepages. Immediately, I thought about how interesting this could be to readers of this blog… so I could invite her to guest post. Or better yet, she could post it to our new AgencyND website. I’m sure it’ll be posted there soon.

More than the worry about being censored, there’s something that bothers me about how much I worry.