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 :-)
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