Dan Anderson

Daniel J. Anderson joined Elon in 1998 as director of college relations. He was appointed assistant vice president in 2004, was named vice president for university communications in 2011 and was named special assistant to the president in 2021. He is a member of the university's senior staff.

At Elon, Anderson has helped create and implement communication strategies during a period of tremendous growth. He has written, developed and carried out multimedia communications plans for all major university initiatives, including the following:

• Elon's Imagining the Internet Center and Imagining the Digital Future Center
• Elon University Poll
• Elon's ongoing response to the COVID-19 pandemic
• Boldly Elon Strategic Plan
• Elon Leads Campaign
• Elon's 2017-2018 presidential search and leadership transition
• Elon University 125th Anniversary celebration
• Elon Commitment Strategic Plan
• Elon University Web site
• Ever Elon Campaign
• Establishment of Elon University School of Law
• NewCentury@Elon Strategic Plan
• Transition from Elon College to Elon University
• Selection of the Phoenix as Elon's athletics identity
• Elon's 1999 presidential transition
• Elon Vision Campaign

Anderson has also been a leader in Elon’s emergence as a national university, managing outreach to national media and numerous college rankings surveys that consistently rate Elon among the nation’s top universities. He has led development and evolution of the university’s website and social media initiatives as well as the development of Elon's marketing, messaging and visual identity systems.

Anderson is a native of Fargo, North Dakota. He was a news reporter/photographer at Fargo's WDAY Television and WDAY Radio from 1976 until 1993, earning numerous awards for excellence in broadcast journalism, including an Iris Award for documentary work by the National Association of Television Program Executives. He was named the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) Region 9 TV News Photographer of the Year in 1979 and served as chair of the NPPA National TV News competition for three years. In 1993 he was named News Bureau Director at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, and oversaw creation of the college's first website.