This has been a trying year for many of us, what with the economic uncertainty and budget cuts that have been endured on virtually every college and university in the country.

It’s because of these unprecedented challenges that we’ve recently made a very tough call to cancel this year’s Brand Manager’s Summit, which had been scheduled for October 19-21 in Denver.

It was a difficult decision. But the truth is that over the past few weeks we’ve fielded many serious concerns from Summit registrants over deepening budget cutbacks, freezes on travel, and an increasing number of incidents of the H1N1 virus across the country.

Since we are committed to maintaining the Summit’s premier quality and highly interactive nature, we believe that it’s in the best interest of all of our registrants to cancel this year’s event.

We do so only reluctantly, since we know the decision will disappoint many marketing professionals who were looking forward to this year’s Summit. We were, too.

It really is the only venue of its kind where marketing practitioners can truly focus on discussing and creating real-world branding strategies and tactics for their institutions. And we’re absolutely committed to bringing the extraordinary Summit event back next year, bigger and better than ever.

Meanwhile, we’ll continue to provide a full calendar of interactive online workshops through the Online KnowledgeBuilders program. We’ll try to migrate some of the Summit sessions to these online seminars, too. Check out the KnowledgeBuilder schedule for a list of topics.

We certainly hope that you are not being affected by some of the same issues, and we really appreciate your understanding.