Assigning value to determine ROI

One of the most powerful arguments you can make to your senior management to support web initiatives is their Return on Investment, or ROI.  In my now infamous debate with Matt Herzberger on his blog on Friday, the subject of how you measure ROI for things that are not so easily quantifiable came up.  The answer is simple: If something doesn't have a clear value, you assign it one.  How much is an online application worth to you?  How much is a page view?  A click on a link in an email? 

Here's an easy example for email marketing with the call to action being the completion of an online application.  The numbers are (almost) completely arbitrary.  The American Marketing Association has a great ROI calculator to use with stuff like this, which we'll be utilizing here.

Say it took 200,000 emails at a cost of $0.015 per message ($3,000) to result in 9,000 clicks (response rate of 4.5%) to an online application, which converted to 2,000 completed online applications (1% conversion rate).  The last thing we need to decide is how much an online application is worth to us.  Let's lowball it and say $1,000.  Plug those numbers into the ROI calculator and we get an ROI on these emails of 2,900%: 



I would actually argue that an application is worth more than that to many universities.  Say the cost of attending your institution is $36,000/year.  After financial aid paid out by the institution, your average student will pay half that, or $18,000.  You get 3,000 applications a year, of which 650 (or 22%) students will ultimately enroll.  So you're going to need 5 applications for every 1 enrollment so we can value an application at one-fifth the total revenue brought in by one enrolled student, or $18,000/5, which equals $3,600.  We can now plug that into the ROI calculator for new new ROI on these emails of  10,700%.  Not too shabby.



What I'm trying to show here is that assigning value isn't based 100% on hard numbers, but that its not entirely arbitrary either.  Some guess work is involved but its calculated guesswork. I'm also trying to show that even if your boss rejects the premise of your calculated guesswork and you have to lowball it, you're still going to get a significant ROI that will outpace any print publication you have.    

A tougher example: 

Ok, the above example is easy.  But what if you have something that isn't necessarily going to provide you with a conversion rate of any kind, like a blog?  First, you need to decide what your ultimate goal is with the blog.  I can't express how important this is and it is the step that is most often skipped over with any new web initiative.  For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to break the goals into two categories: Your blog is probably either going to have a direct call to action or its simply going to be a place for your users to gain more information about your institution.    

If you've got a call to action included in the blog template, such as making a gift to the institution or filling out an online application, your numbers are pretty straight forward.  Just set up a tracking mechanism so you can see how many people converted from the blog to complete your call to action.  Assign that conversion a value and complete the ROI calculations the same as above.  (However, as anyone reading this probably understands, a blog is not necessarily the best tool for prompting your users to one specific call to action.  It's more about an ongoing engagement.  Therefore, this calculation is probably not an accurate representation of total value.)  

If it's informational, then you've got a trickier question on your hands.  A good place to start is to look at how the corporate world evaluates these things.  Charlene Li of Forrester Research came up with a great chart to get us started: 



I mostly put the chart here for food for thought.  For our purposes, the best (and easiest!) measurement will probably be total visitors and number of people commenting.  So what's a visitor worth to you?  They must have some value or I would hope that you wouldn't have started a blogging program in the first place.  Even if one visitor is only worth $1 and a comment is worth $2, you're still probably going to garner an ROI because of how cheap it is to start a blogging program ($150 for a premium Typepad account).  That's part of the beauty of working on the web - it costs less for us to run an entire initiative than it does to pay the mailing costs of one print publication.

Including internal staff time

If you're really getting saucy, you'd also include how much an hour of your time is worth, multiplied by the number of hours it took you to do something and add it to the overall cost (salary + benefits / ( 8 hours a day X 5 days a week X 52 weeks a year) = your cost per hour ).  This may seem like a bad idea at first, as it will bring down the total ROI of the project.  However,  if you show you are putting a ridiculous amount of hours into one aspect of your job that could be easily streamlined this addition will allow you to make an argument for a piece of technology that may cost a lot at first but will help you to significantly streamline your work.  For example, the senior leadership team in the my office just approved the investment of tens of thousands of dollars in an external email service provider.  One of the key arguments in getting this approved was showing how much internal staff time it was taking in troubleshooting the problems with our current system - hundreds of hours, which equated to thousands of dollars in cost to the college in just a few months.

Stories are great, but numbers are what really get them going

You can apply these techniques to almost any circumstance to assign some sort of numerical value to a project.  It seems as though most web people prefer to illustrate their accomplishments through stories of their user's engagement.  Anecdotes from your users about how great a particular part of your page or marketing plan is are great and completely appropriate. But nothing makes senior administrators perk up like numbers.  It makes them go "wow, this is something that is ACTUALLY important...this is something I need to pay attention to."  

Time for an "official" bio....

It was inevitable that I would have to break down and do the "write about yourself in the third person" bio at some point ;-)

And...begin!

Background/Work Experience

Karlyn has been tinkering on the web in one form or another for over a decade. She created her first website when she was 16 to ridicule a boy she went to school with who she thought was a pompous ass (no, she didn't have a crush on him) and got her 15 minutes of fame at 17 after taking honorable mention in a fan website contest for WWE star Chris Jericho. She continued to build professional and personal websites throughout college, though found herself getting burnt out on the web by graduation.

In 2002, Karlyn was bit by the higher ed bug when she interned at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in the Communications office (where portions of her work are still available here and here, as well as credited photographs published online and in print publications). She liked the environment and the benefits and enjoyed the option of not being forced into working for "the man" at an evil corporation.

In 2003, Karlyn joined the admissions staff as an Assistant Director of Admission at Norwich University. Though her primary responsibility was to carry a recruiting caseload and college fair schedule, she started to tip-toe back to the web. She was a key team member in the website redesign the University completed in 2005 (honored with the MITX award) and was the catalyst for getting instant messaging and student blogs instilled as tools in the overall admissions communications plan. The same year, Karlyn left behind her caseload and was promoted to the newly created position of Interactive Recruitment Manager, one of the first positions of its kind in the country. She was responsible for maintaining the admissions webpages, managing the student bloggers and creating and executing an integrated marketing plan which included email, message boards, chat, MySpace, Flickr, institutional blogs, and video.

In late 2007, Karlyn moved to the next stage of her career, accepting the position of Web Producer at Dartmouth College in the Development office. She is responsible for maintaining multiple web properties (here and here and here), as well as advising the office regarding web, email and social networking strategy.

Karlyn's work with student blogs and admissions email marketing has been featured as examples of excellence at conferences around the country. She was acknowledged as an innovator in TargetX's Email Minute newsletter and was a presenter at the 2007 eduWeb conference on the topic of Getting Real Recruiting Results with Interactive Technologies. Her passion at the moment is giving practical, usable advice about integrating the web into the overall business strategy in higher education.

Education

-Bachelor of Science in Communication (focus in Public Relations) from Boston University, 2003
-Master of Business Administration from Norwich University, 2007

Computing

-Operates both a MacBook Pro and a sweet Alienware laptop, though she much prefers the Mac OS
-Browser of choice: Safari
-Email client of choice: Mail
-Project management tool of choice: Basecamp
-Tracking tool of choice: Google Analytics
-Secret Weapon: Simpleviewer
-X/HTML and CSS proficiency, prefers to hardcode in Textmate
-Software: Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Visio, Mindmanager, Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat, Flash, Final Cut Pro
-Basic knowledge of PHP, MySQL, Javascript, Ruby on Rails, which she's working on expanding

Personal

Karlyn lives in Norwich, Vermont with her two ferrets, Monkey and Scampi. She refuses to move west of Massachusetts because then she wouldn't be able to call herself a "northern liberal elitist" any longer. In addition to www.karlynmorissette.com, she is an avid blogger on the subjects of politics, religion and life in general on MySpace where she has consistently ranked in the top blogs on the network (though she only legitimized her blogging to her family when she out-ranked the Dave Matthews Band one day). Karlyn is minorly obsessed with The West Wing on DVD and has been known to have marathons of all 7 seasons that last weeks at a time. She's admittedly a bit sarcastic, opinionated and weird, but doesn't consider it to be a bad thing ;-)

-fin-

The Wired Wealthy Report: Full Review and Takeaways

A few days ago I posted an article from the Chronicle of Philanthropy about the newly released Wired Wealthy report. I finally had a chance to sit down and read the full report and all I can say it wow. The summary does not do the findings justice. You can download the full report on Convio's website.

This report focuses on donors who have given over $1,000 in the last 18-months through any channel (online, mail, etc...). Demographically, they are baby boomers but they are also extremely web savvy - they spend an average of 18 hours online a week and do most of their basic finances online, including paying bills, making purchases, etc...

My key takeaways:

Your donors can be separated into three groups in terms of how much they want to be engaged online:
1) Relationship Seekers (29%): They WANT to engage with you online. Predictably, they are usually younger and more inclined to spend their free time online

2) All Business (30%): These are the older crotchety donors that just want you to leave them alone after they give you money. They are usually older don't want to receive any online communications beyond a year end gift receipt. They also usually plan their charitable giving a year in advance and are very pragmatic about it.

3) Casual Connectors (41%): This group is the happy medium between the first two groups. They want periodic updates that tell them a charity is using their money efficiently and effectively.

THEY ARE NOT INTERESTED IN TYPICAL WEB 2.0!!!! They aren't going to join the social networks for the most part and only occasionally read blogs (which they will rarely if ever comment on). They do like YouTube though, with more than half of respondents having watched at least one video on there. This actually makes sense to me - they are busy people and probably aren't sending their free time galavanting around online.

However...Relationship Seekers and Casual Connectors are looking for a more inspiring experience on your website. You website rarely exceeds their expectation, which are very modest to begin with. They are interested in reading stories about the successes of your organization. What this tells me is that this is a great opportunity to subtly utilize technologies such as blogs or video as a means of telling your story. Just make sure that its about the STORY and not the TECHNOLOGY. The medium should be an afterthought to the message being conveyed.

Your websites are NOT for the "All Business" audience: They are going to make their gift and then never come back more than once or twice a year. This is actually a good thing, because your website is never going to be good enough for them. They don't want to be connected with you by your site, or engaged or inspired. It's a futile effort. Use your web presence as an opportunity to engage and inspire your other audiences, while also providing a very easy mechanism for the All Business types to visit and make their annual gift.

Email: Lots of opt-in levels: All of your email should be anticipated, personal and relevant. 75% of your wealthy donors think you send them too much email. If you give them the opportunity to tell you HOW they want to be communicated with, they will appreciate it. There should be different levels between opt-in or opt-out. This them the opportunity to sign up for news or challenge alerts, success stories, end-of-year receipt, etc... It's OK to email them a lot if they tell you to but its NOT OK if they haven't opted in. Also, NEVER look up a donors email address in an outside database if they haven't given it to you - its a big time no-no.

Show tangible and ongoing results: The things that keep your Relationship Seekers and Casual Connectors coming back to your site throughout the year are the opportunity to seek the results of their donation. Show them what their money has bought and update it on a regular basis.

Segment for maximum results: Whereas some organizations filter higher-end donors out of their e-communications plan entirely, this study clearly shows that's the wrong decision. Instead, create a special e-communications plan built specifically for their needs and desires.

The report has great recommendations for next steps that charities and organizations should take to enhance the online experience of their wealthy donors. It really is an extremely valuable read for anyone working in fundraising to see the direction things are going.

Friday Video Fun: Free premium TV Shows and Web 2.0

I think The Tudors is one of the best shows on television but I don't know whether to be impressed or peeved that I pay good money for Showtime and now people can watch it on YouTube LOL: 

Showtime says its an edited version, but still. I think its a bold move for them to create their own YouTube network and will be very curious to hear if they suffer in subscriber rates (though, lets be honest....all their shows/movies are already out there on the web to watch for free if you know where to look).

We Think - This is kind of like the Web 2.0 video:



Speaking of Web 2.0...



A lot of people say Web 2.0 is nothing more than a marketing term. I disagree. I think it's a philosophy. It's how you approach your users and their involvement/experience with your product. Web 1.0 is like the instant gratification of a one night stand whereas Web 2.0 is about the give and take of an ongoing relationship.

Anyway, I digress....Happy Friday!

Financial aid calculators - there are better ways to illustrate your institution's story

On uwebd, there was a post yesterday by someone who was looking for quick and simple source code to do a financial aid calculator on their website.  Another member responded that he would only point her to the code if she promised that it wasn't because she read in a report that 83% of students wanted it.  I thought to myself "well, there are certainly worse reasons for wanting to implement something on your website than meeting the needs/expectations of a user."  

I always said that one of the reasons I felt I had been successful as the interactive recruitment manager at my last job was because I had done the one-the-road recruiting/admissions counselor thing before it.  That was 80% of it in my eyes.  It's hard for those who haven't seen that side of the house to understand it but when you do college fair after college fair and end up getting asked the same questions over and over and over again, you find out pretty quickly what is ACTUALLY important to students (and it isn't a school having a social network for them!).  Here's the deal: 
-PARENTS are interested primarily in the location of the school.  If you've ever heard the term black hawk, you understand - they don't want us pulling their precious son or daughter 3000 miles away from them when they aren't necessarily ready to cut the cord just yet.  
-PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS, ironically, are primarily interested in finances.  They want to know how much your school costs and how much debt they are going to be in upon graduation. Don't get me wrong, parents are also very interested in this and are likely to be more vocal about it than their students, but it doesn't top their list of concerns.  Students, like all the studies say, are more covert about it but if you talk to them at fairs or in interviews or do testing with them on your website, you'll see where they gravitate to.  

So how do school best meet this need on the web?  I'm not a huge fan of financial aid calculators because anyone that has worked in admissions will tell you that the financial aid process is usually far more complicated because of the competing priorities of the institution - things like major, gender, geographic region and ethnicity may receive more financial aid than others depending on the type of student body your higher-ups are looking to attain.  A simple, down and dirty, financial aid calculator can hardly be expected to take those outside variables into consideration since the financial aid package any student ultimately receives will come at the end of a very large and complicated algorithm.  

I've always liked MIT's way of illustrating their financial aid story (and I don't know for sure that MIT started this but I first saw it in a mailing they did in 2005 so I'll credit them).  They tell the stories of their students, some of whom come from wealthy families and some of whom don't, to show that anyone can afford an MIT education: 



You can read more stories on their website.  They then go one step further and offer a detailed look at sample financial aid packages to illustrate that they will always cover a student's demonstrated need, while also listing examples of extenuating circumstances that also may affect the overall package:

You can visit the full website here: http://web.mit.edu/sfs/afford/sample_aid_packages.html

Here the rub: Stuff like this isn't sexy and its hard to quantify.  Although I would put money on the fact that this is one of their most visited admissions/financial aid pages, you will never be able to say a student applied or enrolled as a result of a page like this but that doesn't make it any less vital to their decision making process.  It's also not a snazzy piece of technology that you developed or implemented that would look good on a resume.  Now for schools like MIT, I don't think it matters as much - they're going to get students regardless.  But say you work at a tier three school that costs just as much as MIT that is trying to attract future engineers through stellar financial aid packages.  If you don't demonstrate up front that you're going to cover these students financially, they're going to move on to another school that has a better brand name than your school or has shown they will cover full need and then some to get the student there.

Ultimately, students and their families want to be able to know they are going to be able to afford your school without being up to their ears in debt before they invest too much time/energy/money in including it in their college search process.  This is one of the basic questions that needs to be answered before they'll give you the time of day.  Once you show them they can, it becomes easier for the black hawks to cut the cord and explore the opportunity with their child.  

Treat your "customers" like you know them

My car was 3,000 miles overdue for an oil change so I finally broke down and dropped it off at the mechanic this morning.  While I was there, the manager of the service department reminded me of one of the cardinal rules: treat every customer  you have like you know them. I've only been to this place a few times and I know damn well this guy didn't remember when I came in this morning...but he made me feel like he did.  And it makes all the difference in the world in terms of how inclined I am to bring my car there again and again, even if they are more expensive than the place up the road.  

It's helpful to start thinking of your audience as your customers.  They may not be buying things from you like they do from the mall but its a sale nonetheless.  Whether you are in admissions, development or anywhere in between, you are selling your audience on your institution being a worthwhile component of their life.   

The easiest way to implement personalization into your web marketing plan is through email.  I don't think colleges go far enough with customizing their email marketing to the direct needs of their customers.  Once you have a template built, employing different techniques to segment your list and varying the message slightly to appeal more directly to the needs of your audience.  I use to do a monthly admissions newsletter that was segmented into 21 different parts.  Coming up soon, I'm going to be involved in the creation of a challenge email campaign that could have as many as 70 different parts.  It's really not any more or less tedious or challenging than any other aspect of working on the web to create that many templates.  

Also, colleges should go further with opt-in lists.  Sure, we can consider a person to be "opted in" to our communications based on their relationship with the institution, but why not go one step further for people who have told you that they want to receive specific communications?  For example, I posted an article earlier today about the wealthiest donors being interested in receiving electronic communications about how the organization has used of the money they've given.  The highest end donors are telling you EXACTLY what they want and they are the most important audience out there to appeal to on a one-on-one basis.  Giving them what they want reminds them that you know who they are and that you've listened to what they've told you. 

Wealthy donors WANT to give online

Chronicle of Philanthropy
03/24/08
Wealthy People Increasingly Give Online, Study Finds

By Elizabeth Schwinn

Affluent people are increasingly likely to use the Internet to make their charitable donations, according to results released today of a study of nearly 3,500 donors.

But charities are turning off some of their biggest donors -- people who give $1,000 or more, the survey found. Some charities send too many messages to donors who say they don't want them, while others don't take take advantage of the interest many donors express in expanding their online interaction with nonprofit organizations, the survey found.

"Most charities are not paying attention," says Mark Rovner, president of Sea Change Strategies, a fund-raising consulting company in Takoma Park, Md. "The people responsible for larger gifts need to start taking the Internet much more seriously than they have."

Sea Change conducted the survey along with Convio, an Austin, Tex., company that provides Web-based software for nonprofit groups, and Edge Research in Arlington, Va., which does research and polling for nonprofit organizations.

The survey was based on data from 3,443 donors who had made gifts of at least $1,000 to a single cause in the past 18 months and donated an average of more than $10,896 per year to charities.

Sixty-four percent of the donors were age 45 to 64, and 57 percent had incomes of at least $100,000. The donors' names were provided by 23 organizations that represent an array of causes, including advocacy groups, health organizations, international relief groups, public television stations, and Christian ministries.

Among the key findings:

Four out of five donors said they had made a charitable gift online, and a little more than half, 51 percent, said they prefer to use the Internet for their donations. Some 46 percent said that they expect to make a greater percentage of their charitable gifts online within the next five years.

Fifty-six percent said that charities send too many e-mail messages, and 47 percent said they do not read as many messages from charities as they did in the past.

Seventy-four percent said it's inappropriate for a charity to obtain their e-mail address from a commercial database, while 82 percent said they don't think it's right for charities to send them messages about another organization.

Ninety-two percent of donors like getting year-end tax receipts by e-mail, while 83 percent want to get electronic updates on a charity's finances and spending. Seventy-four percent said e-mail messages are appropriate when notifying donors that it's time to renew an annual gift or to explain how a donation has been spent.

Eighty-one percent of donors dislike messages that take an urgent tone in seeking a repeat donation.

Forty-six percent of donors said the charity's messages do a good job of making them feel connected to the organization, while 43 percent said the messages are well-written and inspiring.

Most of the donors want more say on the quantity of e-mail they receive from charities.

In a follow-up call from researchers, one donor told them he is disappointed that charities often give him just two choices for receiving e-mail messages: "always" or "never."

"Instead of just having me check a box that says 'Never,' they could actually grade it and say 'only contact me once or twice a year, exceptional events,'" he said.

The poll results suggest that charities need to stop treating online communications with wealthy donors as little more than an electronic version of direct mail, says Mr. Rovner.

"It really behooves these organizations, particularly with these higher-dollar donors, to look into how to sort these people out," Mr. Rovner says. "It may be OK from a financial standpoint to throw mediocre stuff at the small-dollar donors but it's not OK to e-mail that stuff to the high-dollar donors."

The survey was conducted last fall and had a margin of error of 1.5 percentage points. It was based on e-mail addresses of big donors provided by 23 large nonprofit organizations.

The people contacted for the survey represented only 1 percent of all the e-mail addresses the charities have collected from donors and other supporters but accounted for 32 percent of all the annual gifts made to the charities. An executive summary of the survey, The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect with Your Middle and Major Donors, is available free.

An extended version of this article will appear in The Chronicle's next print edition, which will be sent to subscribers later this week.

Kick ass Mac vs. PC ad on the Wall Street Journal website

The Deviant Approach to Creativity

At my last job, I had a collection of Freddy Krueger toys in my office. I had everything from the original 80s freddy glove to the bobble-heads to the rare limited edition statue to the motion activated one that said "Welcome to my nightmare" anytime someone came in my office. I just did it because I've been obsessed with the Nightmare on Elm Street movies since I was a kid (yes, my parents let me watch them as a kid and I am better for it) but it seems I may have been onto something regarding inspiring creativity.

Creativity is a vital component of our jobs and you can put yourself in an environment that fosters it. Most office environments, unfortunately, do just the opposite, by making you come to work in a shirt and tie and forcing your office to be a relatively sterile (and thus grossly uninspiring) environment. But a new study may give you ammo to get your boss to lighten up a bit. After all, most of us spend our days sitting in front of a computer screen rather than interacting with prospects or alumni. Jens Forster found that deviant imagery in your office (like the Sex Pistols poster you wish you could hang above your desk or :::ahem::: a Freddy Krueger collection) would promote divergent thinking. They divided their participants into two groups and had them come up with a strategy for using a brick while they were looking at posters of the letter X. One group had all the same color posters while the other had one X a different color than the other posters. The second group with the deviant X produced more ideas and exhibited a higher level of creativity.

The moral of the story? Don't be afraid to be a bit different and stray away from your typical "office space" mentality. Your boss might give you the evil eye at first, but you have a legitimate business reason for doing it!

Friday Video Fun

Create a YouTube Video, win a film scholarship! This isn't necessarily a viral video, I just think it's a really cool partnering:

Greenpeace "Grow Up, Cool Down" (contender for the DoGooderTV Video Awards)


O'bama the Leprechaun (just funny stuff :-)

So you need to create a marketing plan...

I had a great phone call with Nick from Campbell University today. What originally started out as a reference check for an email provider that he uses (and that I'm thinking about going with) turned into an hour long chat about the struggles of being the resident interactive marketing person in admissions. One of the things we talked about was his struggle in creating a marketing plan, which is not an uncommon problem at all. I've seen it happen a lot when people kind of randomly land in admissions jobs (or in this case, a "e-admissions" job) and maybe they haven't had experience in marketing before. If you find yourself in this position, here are my tips:

There is no "right way": The largest hurdle seems to be that they get wrapped up in what a marketing plan should look like. Let me be clear: There is NO one-size-fits-all approach for creating a marketing plan! This is primarily a document to help you so your workflow and style needs to be an integral part of it if you want it to be valuable.

Get a 40,000 foot view: What I mean by that is that it's important that your interactive plan is integrated with everything else that is going on in your office. What worked for me was having a master calendar that I created in Visio:



If you're doing a lot of collaborative work, you might want to consider a web-based solution like Basecamp. Regardless of the specific program you use, it's just helpful to have a full view of a month at a time. I usually created my calendars in the summer (I considered the start of the interactive recruiting season to be September 1) and would start by inputting any important events or dates. From there, I would back out my schedule. For example, if there was an Open House on March 22, I would find out when the print invitations would be sent for that and then schedule the announcement email campaign to go a week after the print invites, and the followup email campaign to go a few weeks before the event. Here are some things that should be on your calendar:

• Major recruitment events such as open houses or specialty showcases
• Any specialty academic programs your college runs that could be targeted towards prospective students (i.e. academic summer camps)
• Major college fairs your recruiters are attending, with a geographically segmented email component
• Any regularly scheduled email newsletters you do for your prospects
• Any scheduled live chats
• Any type of triggered email
• Any type of special date-specific emails (like a holiday email that gives them the give of a waived application fee if they apply by the end of the year or a FAFSA reminder on January 2 that they can submit their financial aid)

This is the base of your marketing plan. Now, parts of this will be tricky because you're going to have to rely on others in your organization to give you information about their schedules if you want it truly integrated, and they are not always going to be inclined to do that. It's your job to illustrate to them the importance of making sure your interactive plan is fully integrated with traditional communications.

Continue to build out and refine: Now that you've got your base plan, you can continue to build off of it. For example:

• What emails are going to require segmentation? I always found it very worthwhile to segment emails by high school graduation year, even if the content wasn't different, do see how different audiences reacted to different messages easily.
• What are the landing pages you are going to push the students to and is there any correlating web work that needs to be accomplished? For major events, its very helpful to have the print invitations to make sure your online RSVP form matches with the print RSVP form.
• If you do email newsletters, what content will you need to go into those newsletters and is it something that you can get and setup in advance? If you need to coordinate the delivery of this content with other staff members, make it due at least a week ahead of when you ACTUALLY need it because they rarely will get it to you on the deadline you give them.

And so on, and so forth.

Do you have additional web-based features? I'm thinking things like a page on MySpace or Facebook or your own social network, a Flickr account, student blogs etc... You need to work these things into your email plan to keep them robust and effective. What can you do on your website or through email to promote them? For example, does an acceptance of an applicant trigger an email for them to join your homegrown social network? Do you have a link to your Facebook group at the end of every email newsletter? Do you have your student blogs linked throughout your school's website, particularly in places where the content is relevant (i.e. a biology major blogging is linked off of the biology website)? Ensure complete integration is the only way to get your best results.

Keep if flexible: I typically tried to do my plans a year out, but with the caveat that everything should always remain flexible. Your college might win some huge sporting event or something else that you just can't predict that might need to be built into the plan at a moments notice.

I hope some find this helpful. Since I don't work in admissions anymore, I don't feel like I have to hold on to any secrets for the sake of winning the competition for students ;-)

ByStudents.com

Yet another website has launched that are going to push colleges off the authenticity cliff: www.bystudents.com

They also have a Facebook group up at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9551069964


I got all this info from the eMarketingCollege mailing list, which you should be on if you aren't already: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/emarketingcollege/

Facebook Launching New IM Client

I think the impact of this with be either nothing or resounding, with little in between. If Facebook offers a really cool tool, they could really up the time that people (and I'm thinking primarily prospective students in this case) spend on the site, to the detriment of other social networks. Also, since Facebook is really the "it" social network of the moment, is this going to up the expectations of other networks? So, for example, if you have a home-grown solution for your prospective students, are they doing to be disappointed that they can't IM their new "friends" on it?


From ZDNet:

March 18th, 2008
Facebook privacy controls, IM on the way
Posted by Larry Dignan @ 12:02 pm

Facebook will roll out new privacy features and instant messaging the company said in a press briefing Tuesday.

According to News.com’s Dan Farber and Caroline McCarthy Facebook will roll out these features tonight or Wednesday morning.

Among the two features:

-Facebook will enable members to choose how much of their profiles are visible to friends in a “friend of friends” option. This feature is way overdue given the mix of professional and personal friends on your Facebook profile. For instance, I probably don’t want PR people seeing me pounding beers.

-More disruptive may be Facebook’s instant messaging service, dubbed Facebook Chat. IM is a nice addition to Facebook and will give folks an excuse to stay on the site longer. It’ll be interesting to see how Facebook Chat impacts current IM clients out there. Facebook IM will be launched in about two weeks.

Perception of authenticity will be key

This is a very interesting article from Time magazine: http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1720049_1720050_1722070,00.html

Thursday, Mar. 13, 2008
Synthetic Authenticity
By John Cloud

Not long ago I found myself in a Hermitage, Tenn., supermarket studying a bottle of something called All-Purpose Bourbon-Chicken Grill-n-Dip. At the bottom of the label were the words AUTHENTIC FOOD COURT FLAVOR.

It seemed like a joke at first. A sauce surely can't be authentic if it tastes of a food court and not, say, of your mother's stove. But it wasn't a joke. Promoting products as "authentic" is serious business these days. You will notice the word and its variants being used to sell just about everything—Stoli vodka (whose new ad campaign urges you to "Choose Authenticity"), Kool cigarettes ("Be Authentic"), the now expired presidential campaign of Mike Huckabee (who called himself an "authentic conservative"), the website Highbrowfurniture.com ("Authenticity. Period."), the Claddagh Irish Pub chain (which claims to have an "authentic 'public house' environment," whatever that is) and the state of Maryland, where "even the fun is authentic."

Legendary business consultants James Gilmore and Joseph Pine II have written a book about what all these claims mean. In Authenticity (Harvard Business School Press), they argue that the virtualization of life (friends aren't friends unless you "confirm" them on Facebook; reporters are now all bloggers, and vice versa) has led to a deep consumer yearning for the authentic. America has "toxic levels of inauthenticity," Gilmore and Pine argue: most of the e-mail we get is fake. It's so difficult to reach a real person via an 800 number that we had to invent a heretofore unnecessary locution—real person—to describe the entity we are trying to reach. People live fake lives in Second Life. Corporate deceit reached epidemic levels after the dotcom bust. Depending on your politics, you might add that there were no WMD.

Gilmore and Pine run an Aurora, Ohio, consulting firm called Strategic Horizons that has an almost cultlike following in the business world because of their ability to accurately predict consumer sentiments. Nine years ago, in their first book, they argued that businesses had to start selling experiences—not mere products—in order to survive the new economy. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theatre & Every Business a Stage made the case that goods and services were being so thoroughly commoditized by Wal-Mart and the Internet that companies would fail unless they could create such diverting shopping experiences that customers would pay more for the same stuff they could buy for less elsewhere. The book helped explain the success of Starbucks, which sold not just coffee but an Italian coffeehouse experience. The Geek Squad was another example: the company thrived by staging computer repair as theater. Its repairmen arrive at your door literally in costume. The Experience Economy became a sensation in business circles.

Gilmore and Pine write as much about culture as about business, and their new book on authenticity has crystallized the interaction between self and commerce in the current era the way The Experience Economy did for the late 1990s. The aura of inauthenticity around some brands is killing them, Gilmore and Pine say. Just look at Sharper Image and all its shiny gewgaws—or Lillian Vernon, which sells tacky jewelry and fake "Forever-Fresh" daisies. Both companies filed for bankruptcy last month. "What [consumers] buy must reflect who they are and who they aspire to be in relation to how they perceive the world—with lightning-quick judgments of 'real' or 'fake' hanging in the balance," Gilmore and Pine write.

Behavioral Economics
Standard economic theory assumes that buyers are rational creatures who observe supply-and-demand laws. For centuries, this model worked pretty well to explain most economic activity. Two hundred years ago, agrarian Americans decided whether to buy a hoe mainly on the basis of whether it was available and affordable. But in the past 20 years, a school of behavioral economists has emerged to point out the obvious: consumers with higher living standards often make stupid, irrational decisions. We don't simply look at price and quality; we decide how we feel about a refrigerator or even a pair of socks before we buy.

Authenticity is a way of understanding this concept. Some see the iPhone as a silly pose; others find Apple products genuine because of their unique design and "Think Different" posture. Gilmore and Pine give a name to this ephemeral dimension of consumer behavior: in addition to the established dimensions of availability, price and quality, we are buying according to authenticity. If Gilmore and Pine are right, the dominant business polarity of the past decade—online vs. off-line—is irrelevant. The crucial factor dividing success from failure in the next few years will be whether a business is perceived as real or fake, authentic or inauthentic.

So how can companies deliver authenticity? What businesses will survive our jaded new form of capitalism? Gilmore and Pine offer two approaches. First, companies can strive to be transparent and exactly what they say they are. Chipotle Mexican Grill—"Food with Integrity"—goes for this approach, as does Honest Tea, the clothier Anthropologie, and Ethos water. These companies use the holier-than-thou strategy. Chipotle, for instance, serves meat only from animals that have never received antibiotics. But striving for complete authenticity can be dangerous. If tainted meat is found in a Chipotle outlet, the reaction could be something like what happened when JetBlue—which claimed to be the passenger-friendly airline—stranded travelers on runways for hours during a February 2007 snowstorm. JetBlue's stock price has fallen from about $12 a share to about $5 a share. Gilmore and Pine note that "being perceived and branded as authentic puts a bull's-eye on your back."

The best strategy for many companies is to openly fake it, to poke fun at their marketing excesses and admit their inauthenticity. A good example: last fall Verizon (a Gilmore-Pine client) "advertised" on 30 Rock with a product placement in which Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey extolled the virtues of Verizon phones; Fey then looked at the camera and said, "Can we have our money now?" Another example is Dave & Buster's, the restaurant-arcade chain. Dave & Buster's doesn't pretend to be a real arcade; it's a place where adults can drink a martini and play with little toy basketballs. And it's thriving.

For the average U.S. company, Gilmore and Pine have simple advice: think less about where to put ads—ubiquity is killing advertising's power—and more about how to shape the places customers interact with their products. Example: REI, the outdoor-gear company. In 1996 REI opened a flagship location in Seattle with a climbing wall and a walking trail. The climbing wall isn't some little display—in fact you have to pay to use it. The location also features a meeting space for local nonprofits. The store was more ambitious than any other the company had built, but it has become the city's No. 2 tourist attraction after Pike Place Market. Consumers bond with REI's goods in a way they never will with an ad. True, only 1.6 million people a year visit the REI store, but Gilmore and Pine reason that creating 1.6 million knowledgeable customers will be more lucrative than reaching 5 million with an ad campaign: "Stop saying what your offerings are through advertising and start creating places—permanent or temporary, physical or virtual—where people can experience what those offerings, as well as your enterprise, actually are."

Fake-Real
But what if you sell screwdrivers or bug spray? It may not be possible to create a "place" that offers an "authentic experience" that anyone would want. ("Tighten screws all day!" "Tour the mosquito museum!") Actually, once I began to think like Gilmore and Pine, I found myself coming up with seemingly authentic experiences for even the most insipid products. Sell tools? Cover a huge wall with construction materials so customers can try the tools in the store. Bug spray? Try it on a roach. Little boys would love it. Gilmore and Pine understand that in an era when even Wal-Mart is selling organic mesclun and gourmet coffee, people want their purchases to elevate them, to transform them. They want products to connect them to history or to a cause (how many products are "green," "raw" or "eco"-something?). They don't want to cook, but they do want the package on the manufactured food product to say USDA ORGANIC. Does all this striving for authenticity make us more fake or more real? Gilmore and Pine offer a third option: "fake-real." Economic offerings don't have to be exactly what they say they are (Canyon Ranch isn't really a ranch; The Daily Show isn't really a news show), but they must be true to themselves (you actually can transform yourself at a spa; you actually can learn something from The Daily Show). Today you are authentic when you acknowledge just how fake you really are. 

If you're asking what the next big thing is, you're asking the wrong question.

Admittedly, I rail on a lot of things in this blog. Sometimes it's easier to identify the things that colleges SHOULDN'T be doing rather than the things they should. So when I was working out last night, I asked myself "Karlyn, what IS the next thing colleges should be paying attention to? What is Web 3.0 going to look like?"

I quickly realized I was asking myself the wrong question.

I don't believe that colleges are going to be early adopters of technology in their web efforts for the foreseeable future. I also don't believe that our audience are going to adopt technology at a rate that's any faster than the general population. Let's remind ourselves what an adoption curve looks like:



Most people who consider themselves "web people" fall into one of the first two categories, while most of our audience adopts a technology much later. The "next big thing" to us is not the same as it is to them. By the time we've decided a trend is done, it's just making its way onto their radar.

To be fair, though, technology is adopted at a much quicker rate for the most part:



It's pretty much just like your regular adoption curve, but the adoption and decline of the technology takes place at a much faster rate as new technologies are invented to take it's place.

OK so my point with all this: Instead of asking what the next big thing is, we should be asking what effects the adoptions of the current and upcoming technologies has on the needs, wants and expectation of our audience. For example, I wrote a rant yesterday about the unwarranted hype surrounding social networking. That does not mean, however, that the adoption of social networking has not had a profound impact on the way that our audience uses the web and the expectations they have from us:

-Students have access to "real" information about your school from all the unofficial groups your students and alumni have set up and they will look for it. If there is a large disconnect between what your marketing materials say and what the unofficial groups say, you have a problem.

-Video is readily accessible and they can easily access content about any subject in the world.

-Blogs are a given and they aren't edited or censored.

-There is a certain amount of instant gratification involved with social networking: any piece of information is available at any time. Can your website or e-communications plan hold up to that expectation?

-It's all personalized and customized to their interests.  

This is the real impact of new technologies.  We're colleges - we're not expected to be cutting edge and I'm not entirely sure that unless you're an MIT or a CalTech, it's really in our interest to do so.  It's not the image that our audience is expecting, or one that they are looking for.  We are, however, expected to meet the needs of our users in relation to ever other website they have been on.  Taking inspiration from trends or technologies and applying it to our own practices is the real takeaway here.  

Social Networking is NOT innovative damn it!

Innovative is a word that gets flung around a lot.

innovative
adjective
1. ahead of the times; "the advanced teaching methods"; "had advanced views on the subject"; "a forward-looking corporation"; "is British industry innovative enough?" [syn: advanced]
2. being or producing something like nothing done or experienced or created before; "stylistically innovative works"; "innovative members of the artistic community"; "a mind so innovational, so original"

Given that definition, I think it's fair to say that, although it could have been many years ago, the time to classify higher ed marketing on a social network as innovative has passed. It's been at least three years since MySpace and Facebook became widespread and anything that happens three years after the fact can hardly be called forward-thinking. Yet it seems to be one of the most discussed things out there right now. I'm going to make a bold statement and say it's not NEARLY worth this much hype. What college out there can document an increase in applications, enrollments or gifts steaming from a social network? And why would you expect such a thing to happen? "Well, I wasn't REALLY going to apply or enroll at your school....but you have a FACEBOOK PAGE now so sign me up!" It just doesn't work that way.

"But Karlyn, we use it to COMMUNICATE with them over their medium of choice." That's a valid point but I would still argue that students who communicate with you on there are probably the same students who IM you every single day and participate in every live chat you have.  Don't get me wrong - I think it is a worthwhile venture to have a presence on the larger sites if a student suddenly has a burning question while surfing MySpace that he just can't be bothered to email you with, but let's be honest here folks: It's not going to change the way recruiting is done because, really, is this even the tool you want to try to be innovative with? You do it because, to a certain extent, its expected (like blogs a this point) but you should spend any more time on it than absolutely necessary because there are bigger fish to fry.

(And those of you who maintain these things for current students....well, I just don't understand. You're all in the same geographic area right? I know many of us live our lives behind a computer screen but do we really want to encourage current college students to eliminate actual social interaction altogether?)

Let's assume for a second, that it's four or five years ago and you were the first college to get your school's "official" presence on MySpace or Facebook. So? At my last job, we were one of the first colleges (that I know of) to have an official MySpace page, a bit over two years ago. I put a lot of time and effort into that page and here's what I found: Accepted students loved putting us in their top friends once they decided they were going to enroll but really didn't use the page to any significant degree to communicate with us. The real communication with students who were inclined to use the web came over IM. And, yes, this data comes from hard numbers. So I dropped a lot of my time and my assistant's time to create/maintain a presence on MySpace that no one really used and that energy could have easily been expended elsewhere for better results. It's what my good friend Rob calls "Return on Effort" (ROE). Running a page on a social networking site takes effort and doesn't really produce any results that couldn't have been obtained through previously implemented tactics. Now, add to that the fact that the new "big thing" seems to be creating your own social network. I hope you have a full-time interactive person on staff who does not carry a caseload (and even then, they had better be willing to work overtime)! I think if done properly, this idea could work but I also know that it's going to take a ridiculous amount of effort to get/keep that network engaging.

One final thought - I posted on this earlier, but when are we going to hit social network/Web 2.0 fatigue? I don't think it's far off. How many accounts is too many? At what point do you just decide to bag the whole thing entirely because between work/school, sleep and having some sort of an actually SOCIAL life, it just gets to the point of being too much? Do you really want to force your audience to add one more account to that list or do you want to make life easier for your users and go where they already are? Just some food for thought....if you really want to be innovative you need to start asking yourself "what's next" and "where is this stuff really doing". Asking yourself what you mainstream user really wants is not a bad idea either...

Web 2.0 bust?

I thought this was an interesting article. I firmly believe that we're going to start seeing a decline in new "Web 2.0" ventures in the coming years because I think people are going to become Web 2.0-fatigued. While I think it has fundamentally changed the way the broad audience views the web, it's also very telling to me that your average user can't even define what "Web 2.0" is.

From www.news.com:

Is venture capital's love affair with Web 2.0 over?

Posted by Martin LaMonica

Silicon Valley remains the hotbed of Web 2.0 activity, but the hipness of start-ups with goofy names is starting to cool in the face of economic reality.

Dow Jones VentureSource on Tuesday released numbers of venture capital activity in Web 2.0 companies and declared that the "investment boom may be peaking."

Venture capitalists put $1.34 billion into 178 deals in 2007, an 88 percent jump over 2006. But once you strip out the $300 million that Facebook raised from Microsoft and others, the numbers don't look as bullish.

The pace of deal flow, or the number of fundings, has slowed, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. Deal flow in 2007 went up 25 percent to 178 deals, but nearly all of those occurred outside the Bay Area, where the number of deals slipped downward.

"Web 2.0 deals in the Bay Area actually dropped from 74 deals in 2006 to 69 last year and investments were down 3 percent from the $431 million invested in 2006. It's clear that the real growth in the Web 2.0 sector is happening outside of the Bay Area," Jessica Canning, director of global research at Dow Jones VentureSource, said in a statement.


Breakdown of VC deals in Web 2.0 in 2007 and 2006

(Credit: Dow Jones VentureSource)

The second largest deal in 2007 was a $44 million first round for Ning, a service co-founded by Marc Andreessen that lets people build their own social-networking sites.

The New England region saw 20 deals valued at $158 million in 2007. Southern California had 14 fundings worth $115 million, while the New York Metro area had 25 deals worth $58 million. The Seattle area had 13 worth $140 million in 2007.

The median size deal has gone up to $5 million, but that is still a relatively cheap investment for venture capitalists. Start-ups can get off the ground efficiently by using open-source software and inexpensive hosting services.

But even with the relatively low capital risk, particularly compared with clean tech, Canning said that many Internet companies still have unproven business models that rely on future advertising revenue.

"2008 may be a make-or-break year for many Internet companies with business models relying on advertising," she said. "The slumping economy, coupled with a slowdown in click-through rates for online advertising, is going to pose a real challenge to their ability to generate revenues and position themselves for an exit."

Show Me The Money!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My last job wasn't in the hard-line budget of the university when it was first created and I knew there was a high probability that the day would come when I would have to show that they made the right decision in funding it to be able to keep my job. I literally had a folder in my documents called "Justifying My Existence" and in it contained all of my bragging material that showed the impact of the position as they DIRECTLY RELATED to the business goals of the university. That last part is the hardest - while some things are easily quantifiable, some just aren't even though you know in your gut that they have an impact.

Nonetheless, come budget time you're going to have to justify your projects to your higher ups to get funding for it and you don't necessarily speak the same language they do. I'm as guilty of any of using the "but it would be so cool!" argument, but that doesn't always cut it. Money and resources are always tight in higher ed, especially when it pertains the web because so few senior people in any organization really understand it (not that they aren't very smart people....it's mostly a generational thing). So how do you get them to see things your way? Give them numbers. I'll give you some real world examples of things they gravitate to:

You think your school's/department's website sucks and want to do a redesign.

How is this redesign going to enhance the bottom line? The primary business function of any college is educating its students. The majority of this money (I'll make a broad estimate of 65% at your average school) comes from tuition dollars, which most directly comes from admission. Another 25-30% come from fundraising/development/alumni relations. The rest of miscellaneous sources. How will your redesign enhance those areas? Will it even? If not, I would take the next step argument of saying that it will enhance current student engagement with your area and here's some testimonials from current students saying how much easier/better it would make their life.

You want to convince your boss to let you dedicate more time or money to email marketing.

A good email system can track any statistic you could ever want and even a half-hearted email marketing plan will give you results. In admissions, show how many prospective students go directly from receiving an email to fill out an online application (you can later use these results to show what percentage of these students ended up enrolling). Make a graph that compares online applications to paper applications and their change in popularity over time. In development, show them how many users went from receiving an e-mail to making an online gift (you can really easily do this with Google Analytics). With the total value of gifts derived directly from your email campaign, use the American Marketing Association's ROI Calculator to show the value these emails bring to the organization.

You hate making phone calls and want to move towards relying more heavily on IM with prospective students.

Instant messaging is nothing new in admissions and has certainly gained traction over the past five years. Yet phone call after phone call remain. You need to show IM are just as valuable, if not moreso, than that phone call. First, you have to find a way to track IM conversations, which should be as simple as utilizing an existing CRM (whatever you use to track phone calls/events/etc...if you don't have something, you have larger problems to worry about). Then you can run lists that show students you've had IM conversations with based on outcome (reject, enroll, accepted but did not attend, etc...). My past experiences tell me that the students who are going to contact you over IM are the super-excited students and the vast majority will either end up getting rejected or enrolling. Why wouldn't the university WANT to offer students that are already inclined to enroll an opportunity to communicate over their medium of choice?

You want to expand your web presence into the social network dejour.

Saying "because everyone else is doing it" is not a good enough answer. Find a way to relate this directly to the business process (i.e. $$$$$$$$$$). For example, I blogged a while ago about social ads on Facebook. Since we instrumented our ads with Google Analytics, we were able to show that, although we only got a hand full of leads from it, those leads were far more inclined than your average visitor to make a donation. It was very cheap for us to test the waters (about $80 or so for a full month of ads) but the return opened the door for future involvement on the site. Social networks, and student blogs to a certain extent, are tricky ones because they are really about engagement rather than hard numbers. You can have a group on Facebook that has 500 people in it but no one ever posts or you can have a group of a dozen or so really dedicated members that are on there 10 times a day. Which is a greater success? This is going to require some time to massage your manager into the idea of looking past the hard numbers to see the true value that can be attained, but it is worth the effort.


I hope you're seeing a pattern: Everything comes back to money.

Better website => more applications/donations => more $$$
-or-
Better website => more current student engagement => less transfers/more excited alumni => more tuition/more donations after graduation => more $$$

More email marketing => more applications/donations => more $$$

More use of IM => better recruitment of excited students on their medium of choice => higher enrollments => more $$$

More use of social networks => better leads once they are driven to your website => more applications/donations => more $$$


The last one is a bit of a stretch, but you'll have that. In addition to the numbers, many managers just want to know that you're actually THINKING about this stuff and if you show them you are, they will have more confidence in your abilities to make solid recommendations in the future. More-so, any manager worth their salt will translate that confidence like this:

More confidence in you => higher likelihood that they'll want to keep you happy as an employee so you don't get lured away to another organization (on average it costs an organization about $40,000 to fully train the employee that would replace you) => they give you a raise => more $$$ for you :-)

See, it works out for all involved.

A New (But Only Slightly-Varied) Direction for KarlynMorissette.com

Most nights when I get home from work, I relax by popping in a disc from one of the seven seasons I have of The West Wing on DVD, plopping down on my couch and doing needlepoint.

Yes, needlepoint. Bet you didn't see that one coming ;-)

I just made it to the halfway point of the project I'm working on now this weekend and as I was doing so, I had a revelation about the direction I see this blog taking. I never really started it with a specific purpose in mind, beyond collecting my thoughts and sharing them with the community. But I feel it veering in a direction I have discussed often in previous blogs and presentations: the business aspect of the web in higher education.



Needlepoint is a very slow process. You work in specific colors in small sections at a time. When you're working on one section, it's oftentimes hard to see outside of that to the bigger picture. You spend hundreds of hours making thousands of stitches before the project finally starts to come together. Now, if you think about it, this is not very different from the various aspects of higher education. There are any number of areas that have an impact on the web in higher education and each has a tendency to get tunnel vision:

-Senior Administrators: Focus on the bottom line but know very little of the day-to-day details of achieving it.

-Marketers: Focus on 40,000 foot view strategies of spreading the word to their constituents but don't necessarily know the best tactics to implement those strategies.

-Communications Folks: In higher ed, these guys typically tend to focus on print communications. Maybe they have a subset for the web or maybe the web is located outside of them in another department, but either way its usually an afterthought. They think linearly and focus on the story of the specific project they are working on at the time.

-Web Folks: These tend to be former designers or developers that have stumbled upon higher education. The Communications folks keep them around to translate print into the web. They think very non-linearly and can build out on print work, but also tend to focus too much on what is the cool technology of the moment rather than what is ultimately going to achieve the desired business result.

Now, I'm making broad generalizations here and understand that they will not apply in every circumstance. Nonetheless, think of each of these areas as one of the separate colors in the picture above. They are all very unique of one another, but if we pull back to see the big picture, we can see how they all work together, none being any more or less significant in the grand scheme of things than another:



By pure happenstance, I have a broad range of experience that spans all of these areas and I think that perhaps the best contribution I can make to the higher ed web community is that perspective:

-I've been designing websites on and off for over a decade and have been building customized and segmented email campaigns for the better part of five years

-In my last job, I created a web communications strategy start-to-finish that focused on story-telling and connecting with constituents on a human level.

-I have an undergraduate degree in public relations and a MBA, which gave me an understanding of a variety of marketing techniques as well as an appreciation for making wise business decisions that achieve the bottom line.

It wasn't until recently that I found a true appreciation for how unique this skill-set is and how lucky I am to have had the opportunities that I've had. I find that many people may have a good grasp of one or two of these areas but very few have an understanding of all of them. Not that there's anything wrong with that - I credit shear dumb luck of being in the right place at the right time rather than some brilliant master plan for gaining experience in all these areas (I barely know what I'm doing this weekend most of the time).


I think the most difficult of these areas is the business aspect. One of my most common criticisms is that so few managers treat their university like it's a business. Let's be honest: It's not sexy. Its not exciting. It oftentimes forces you to forego the strategies you would have the most fun implementing for the tried and true ones that are boring but result in significant returns. But we all need to acknowledge that although most of us work for a non-profit, the bottom line is just as important in our industry as it is to an evil corporation. So that's where the primary focus of this blog is going to be from now on - the business aspect of the web in higher education. Of course, I'll still post neat tools or interesting articles (and the occasional rant or two) as well.  

So I hope you enjoy it and get something out of it :-)  

Friday Video Fun: Facebook Day!

Social Networks Galore!!!

Higher Education Professionals (not web specific!) - Started about 10 minutes ago by my best buddy Meaghan: http://highereducationprofessionals.ning.com


Also, I was poking around TargetX's website yesterday and found the new version of their knowledge center, where it looks like they've partnered with Ning to create their own social network. If people get on it, it could be cool! Check it out: http://knowledgecenter.targetx.com/

The Greatest Facebook App Ever

I've wasted so much time on this tonight: Pieces of Flair

Isn't it ironic.....don't you think?

When you work in higher education, a certain amount of outsourcing is required. There's not a college out there that has the resources (whether it be time or money) to implement all of their efforts in-house, start-to-finish. This is particularly true with the web. Proportionally speaking, a TINY percentage of funding is dedicated to the web when compared to print media, phone calling and the like. It's just a fact of life in this industry (and I maintain the position of my haiku that we are all masochists).

So to a certain extent, we have to rely on vendors. But do vendors have our best interest at heart? No. They are a business. All businesses are interested in is the bottom line. Not that there's anything wrong with that - we are a capitalist society. The problem comes when colleges don't take the time to consider if an option being sold to them by a vendor (i.e. SALESMAN) is really worth it. Consider the following:

-Is it REALLY going to integrate with our internal processes?
-Is there a cheap or :::gasp::: FREE product out there that will get us exactly the same results?
-Is this something our USERS really want or is this just using technology just because we can?

The last is really the key question: How many colleges shelled out big bucks to build a Second Life campus? How many colleges send out huge email newsletters every month when we know from statistics that students don't read them? How many have implemented text messaging when it's not what prospects want? Don't get me wrong - I think there are a limited number of circumstances where stuff like this can work and garner a small ROI. But couldn't that money be put to better use? If so, you've made the wrong decision. The utter irony of it - using a business mentality to explain why you shouldn't patronize businesses. Then again you're also reading an MBA that will never work for an evil corporation (because if there's anything my MBA taught me its that they're all evil) and enjoys few things more than life's ironic twists ;-)

It's a give and take relationship. We need them as much as they need us. And I don't think it needs to be adversarial. I've had great relationships with a lot of vendors I've used in the past, which makes it a pleasure for me to give them my money. On the flip side, I've worked with some that make me want to pull my hair out. For example, I was on the phone with one email provider today and the man insisted on giving me a half hour lecture about all the steps I should take in my search for an e-mail provider and, no, he wouldn't give me references because we hadn't agreed to pick his company yet. His job is to take away my headache, not give me a new one! Do you think he's going to get my money? Not bloody likely (though I digress...)

For the most part, I think that if you've got a solid Email Service Provider, a solid Content Management System and an outsourced interactive feature or two, you can get away with doing things like blogs and boards and chat and and galleries, social networking for chump change. Get accounts on Typepad, Flickr, MySpace and Facebook and you're all set. Want to do surveys? Don't pay per submission through a vendor - get a SurveyMonkey account. Want a spiffy flash gallery on your page? Spend $45 and get SimpleViewer Pro (really, the greatest tool ever). A quick Google search will likely provide you with a more than adequate solution. You'll put the same amount of time in on your end but you'll get more of a return because you've spent significantly less money than outsourcing this stuff to a vendor. Plus you've probably had much less of a headache and you don't need any more web experience than your average 16-year-old kid to work most of it.

I suppose the overarching point is that vendors are great for some things but they'll also try to sell you a lot of stuff YOU DON'T NEED. I've watched so many schools fall into it and I just have to shake my head. You've heard of this company that will actually build your school's MySpace page for you? WTF??? How about places that will charge you up to $3,000 for an email template??? Are you kidding me?

This about sums it up for me (the first 30 seconds of it anyway....it was the best I could do!):

Now THAT'S Service!

Yesterday I wrote a blog inspired by my annoyance with companies that don't cater to the needs of their customer. Today I've got an example of the flip side: Dartmouth had been utilizing an external email provider, FireEngineRed, for a series of emails during our latest challenge as a temporary solution after getting ourselves blocked from two major ISPs for sending email in-house (something, as an aside, that I take no responsibility for!). After the challenge ended, we stopped sending a lot of email and started the search for a permanent solution to this problem. I've been demoing email providers like crazy for the last month and a half and have spoken to a ton of sales people. So when I got a phone call yesterday from the CEO and the COO/CTO of the company just to check in and make sure everything was still well, it was a welcomed change from your average sales person. I took advantage of the opportunity to ask them about a few features that they don't offer that I had seen in other providers I was demoing (specifically dynamic content and A/B split tests). They quickly said they were planning a big update and that those features, along with several others, would be available by the end of the summer. They continued: Did I want to be a part of the Beta test to see how these new features worked? Did I have any other "show-stopper" requirements that they didn't offer because they have 4 developers on staff (and are hiring one more) and can build them into future updates and are always looking for suggestions from their clients. Oh and if you even need to delay a payment due to a budget crunch, it's all good. We know you're good for it.

I was blown away. Talk about customer service! This type of relationship with the provider is difficult (at best!) to quantify when you're doing demos of their offerings but its one of the most important attributes to a successful partnership. Bravo to FireEngineRed for stepping up to the plate and putting the client's experience above all else. I wholeheartedly recommend them if you're in a search for a provider - there are few out there in the higher ed specific market or in the greater email service provider market that can match them.

Why do businesses hate their customers?

I've had a rash of experiences lately where I've gone to a business to GIVE THEM MONEY to provide me with a product or service of some sort and they just seem hell bent on doing everything they can to convince me to go elsewhere. Case in point: I blogged a while ago about using social ads in Facebook. And I'm still a firm believer of the practice. But behind the scenes, I didn't tell you that Facebook refused to accept our credit card and then (after a 2 day email battle) refused to give us a phone number to call for customer service, which forced us to use someone's personal credit card for the transaction. The whole time I was throwing my hands up in the air and thinking to myself "Why? I WANT to give you money? Why won't you take it???"

It's our job as admissions/development/higher ed web folks to make the experience for our user as seamless as possible. We've all read (or heard of) Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug but ever few of us seem to put it into practice. Why make prospective students jump through hurdles if all they want is information about a specific program or to fill out an application? Why make donors trounce around the website to find the give online form? (And once you get them on that form, you better damn well make sure you accept their credit cards!). Whenever I design something, I always take a second look to see if I've made it as clean and straightforward as absolutely possible. Ask yourself the following:

- What do I want to achieve with this page/email? If building a web page or an email campaign is just about the fact that you haven't had a new web page or an email campaign in a while, then you should rethink your strategy....

-What is your call to action? Ok, so you've sent the user this email or have gotten them on your webpage - how what do you want them to DO? The answer for most of us is one of the following: Admissions - submit an application or deposit online (do you have online deposits? You should.); Development - make a gift. Alumni relations - register for an event in their area. Every message you send out should be asking them to DO something and should make the path to them achieving that goal as clear as possible.

We sent out an email for a fundraising challenge we did a few months back and almost immediately got an email back from an alum who hadn't given in years but just made a $500 gift because "we made it so easy he didn't even have to think about it". This should be the goal we all strive for. Make them take our call to action before they even have the chance to second guess their decision.

eduStyle awards - who cares?!

All I've been seeing lately are things for the eduStyle awards. On mailing lists, on blogs, everywhere.

:::rolls eyes:::

I'm sorry, but who the hell cares? The best sites will never make their way into it - the people who build them are far too busy ACTUALLY WORKING than being part of the cool kids club you have to be in to be apart of those things. The sites that ultimately do win will be held up as the best thing ever (even though they are probably more mediocre than anything else) and then everyone will run to copy them (because higher ed works very hard to avoid having original ideas....why be creative when you could just copy someone else?) and then we'll have a sea full of websites that all look the damn same.

Now, please keep in mind that this is coming from a person who HAS been on teams that have won awards like this and who has had her work held up as pretty damn good. It's not from jealousy. I'll even say that, yes, I got wrapped up in it at the time. Maybe having been there and done it I just realize that I'm far more excited by the idea of building something and having it achieve a desired result than get patted on the back by the cool kids club.

It's like being in high school all over again. In my last job, I HATED working with the faculty. I always said they had "cool kids syndrome": they were the dorks in high school that always got picked on (which is why they focused on education) but they never quite grew up socially. Now they are faculty and see themselves as the cool kids who always picked on the dorks and are emulating that behavior. Now, I won't quite compare the "cool kids" of the higher ed web world to faculty that I hate, but I do think they have a dash of the "cool kid syndrome" themselves. Web geeks were, for the most part, the geeks in high school as well. Now they are identifying themselves as the cool kids and getting into a giant nation-wide clique so they can self-congratulate on how awesome they are.

So self-congratulate away folks....I'm going to go over here and actually build something.

(Sorry....it's Friday....I'm punchy....but this rant has been brewing for a while and I had to get it off my chest)

Friday Video Fun: Spiders on Drugs and Slow Ass Computer Syndrome

Good stuff.

My New Favorite Blog

No Sucker Left Behind: Helping students and families navigate college admissions and financial aid, and avoid the Great College Ripoff.

This guy is one after my own heart :-)

iModules rocks

I just demoed iModules today. If you're looking for an alumni community tool, look no further. They get it. They REALLY get it. It's completely integrated with their email tool so you can repurpose dynamic content from your site into your messages (automatically customized based on the settings specified by the user) and it's also completely integrated with social networking sites. It's so cool. I want it.

:::drool:::

Drawing inspiration from unconventional sources

Yesterday, I blogged from the Edward Tufte seminar in Boston. It was truly one of the most eye-opening experiences I've had since attending SXSW 2006 and was just the inspiration I had been looking for in a professional development opportunity. All too often, I think people in higher education tend to isolate themselves from outside sources of information, instead constantly asking the question "what are other colleges doing?" Don't get me wrong - it's important to know what other colleges are doing. But if you really want to be ahead of the game, you'll look outside that. I feel like a broken record for saying this so much, but people that are on your website are not comparing you to other college websites - they are comparing you to every other website that they've visited. Your ultimate goal should not be just to hit a certain number of visits or page views. It should be about user engagement.

Here are some of my favorite sources of inspiration:

www.edwardtufte.com - Just blogged about him yesterday, but if you're looking to learn how to present information effectively he's your guy. He's doing a bunch of seminars around the country right now and if you go, you get all of his books (which are beautifully produced). Though I think he less than gets the web, any web professional worth their salary will be able to take his ideas and apply them to the medium.

Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra stopped blogging a year ago due to death threats but her blog since remains extremely relevant. If you want to engage your users, she will teach you how to do it in a realistic and fun way.

Sam Seder - Sam Seder is a host on Air America. Whether or not you agree with his politics, the man really gets the power of the web and how to engage his users. Sam has developed a cult following on this site because of the level of interaction he offers his users. During his weekly radio shows, he does a video simulcast on his site, where he talks directly with his viewers over IM during commercial breaks.

Threadless - Threadless is a community-based t-shirt company that lets users upload their designs, which members of the site then vote on . The ones with the most votes get printed and sold. I think the business model used to engage the user on these sites is one of the most effective out there.

Pew Internet and American Life Project - Ok, so this isn't really a source of inspiration as much as it is a source of information. This is the direct source of information that most conference presenters use to build their cases for whatever technology they are championing at the moment. Avoid the cherry-picking of information that goes on by going straight to the source.

Any websites or email lists related to grass roots organization - Its an election year and this is a golden opportunity to learn how the pros do it. Set your personal politics aside and get yourself on as many of these lists and websites as you can because these guys know how to engage their audience like no other.

The most popular online retailers - These guys bring in the big bucks for a reason and it's pretty likely that you're already using them. Think about how you can make your web experience more like what people are use to when they visit these sites. For example, do you have a shopping cart option for gift opportunities? Why not?

Ultimately, it's all about your user - not about the organization. Higher ed still hasn't managed to get that. They think the college is the center of the universe and that everything else should revolve around it. It's time to sit back and take a realistic view of the situation instead of some manufactured idealist view from middle managers who THINK they know what works on the web but really have no idea.

Next time: My rant on why non-web people should not be making web decisions. This should be a fun one :-)