Ken Downs Email & Phone Number

Managed Ellucian's CRM Advancement Solution for Higher Education. Ellucian serves 2,900+ global higher education institutions.• Established strategic partnership for integration and reseller agreement, enhancing product positioning, competitiveness and opening future revenue opportunities.• Prioritized and streamlined the product roadmap, reducing time to value and achieving a record number of go-lives.• Set the vision for new durable and flexible integration APIs to be utilized by partners or customers for accepting or declining data changes. • Successfully led cross-functional teams to optimize requirements with available resources, improving team efficiencies, release cycles and launch events.

Instrumental in driving the growth and success of ScholarshipUniverse (SU) to becoming CampusLogic’s fastest growing product, ultimately acquired by Ellucian in 2022. This industry-leading scholarship management software received prestigious awards such as a CODiE Award from the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) and Keystone Award from the National Scholarship Provider's Association.• Called upon leader to cross-functionally support school partners, Product, Customer Success, Marketing, Sales, and Dev teams as a subject-matter expert.• Selected by my peers in Sales for the first cohort of "It Takes a Village" award.• Led several complex and large institutional onboardings to successful go-lives. • Requested expert author and speaker on product, category, and best practice content for national conferences, webinars, podcasts and blogs.• Co-produced the Higher Ed Shift podcast - identifying guests, topics and questions helping establish CampusLogic as the category leader for Student Financial Success.

Tucson, Arizona Area

Developed ScholarshipUniverse, a homegrown scholarship management software solution for the University of Arizona and licensed to leading EdTech SaaS company, CampusLogic.• Identified a licensing opportunity to commercialize the software leading to 10 years of royalties for the institution. • Garnered two national awards for the software from leading education publishers (Campus Technology 2012 & University Business 2015).• Performed agile product management, competitive analysis, planning and design, evangelizing, testing, marketing, training and onboarding, as well as budgeting, hiring, and proposal-writing.• Managed 15+ team members, including graduate and undergraduate students, graduating on to work for Microsoft, Amazon, Uber, Facebook, IBM, Expedia, eBay, Lexis Nexus and others.

Tucson, Arizona Area

Conceptualized, coined, and collaboratively launched “Scholarship Universe: We search, you apply,” the UA’s homegrown web-based scholarship management solution.• Managed the UA’s groundbreaking MacScholar (Apple Program), first product recruitment strategy in the nation.• Re-engineered scholarship searching and terms & conditions on OSFA website for prospects and scholars.• Eliminated the need for 250 UA Study Abroad students to request deferments of their scholarships annually.• Counseled college students and their families while coordinating millions of scholarship and financial aid funds from both the Federal and State Government, banks, private donors, endowments and the UA under many regulations and systems.