It's a very slow week for me so I'm not really finding a lot of inspiration for blogs in my job at the moment. So I'm going to reach into my back pocket and pull out an idea from my last job in admissions (though it could be applied to any area of higher ed really).
If you take anything away from this blog, I hope it's the idea that we can't get tunneled visioned on the web because the web is not the end-all be-all experience that our users have with our institutions.
As web professionals, we tend to get so caught up in what we're doing and all the cool possibilities that all we see is this:

To be truly effective at our jobs, we need to pull back and get the 40,000 foot view of everything that's going on:

These touch points do not exist in a vacuum to our users and they aren't differentiating them as coming from different parts of the university. Whether you're targeting prospective students or alumni, they expect us to all be talking to each other and coordinating our communications efforts. It should be seamless and the medium should never call attention to itself. They should be taking the call to action without having time to even think about it.
Unfortunately, higher education is less than conducive to the type of communication required to keep things seamless for the users. Too many egos. Too many people obsessed with being "the director" and thus being "the decider" ;-) That means that its up to you to be proactive and find out what other areas are up to because even when you ask, its hard to weasel information out of people. Start with the base assumption that any time ANY event happens on campus that affects a significant external audience, there will be a print piece and its your job to get your hands on it BEFORE it hits the mailboxes of its audience. I'll illustrate why through an actual example from my last job surrounding an open house invitation:
I had sent out an email to everyone responsible for any sort of print piece to prospective students asking them to show me any print piece that was going to go to prospects before it was sent so I could make sure there was a web component to it. I knew there was an open house invitation in the works but didn't know when its drop date was and had hoped that when it was produced, a copy would make its way across my desk. Rather predictably however, no one paid attention to my original email.
Below, I've mocked up a sample open house invitation that went out (obviously this is to illustrate a point and is not an exact replica...but its pretty damn close):

Now, had I seen the open house invitation before it hit the streets, this is how my mind would have worked:

Unfortunately I didn't see the invitation before it went out. The website was already set up and was pretty solid based on previous years and I had just assumed that when the invitation was ready, a copy would be circulated. Instead, here is how I found out the invitation went out:

It turned out the invite had gone out a week or so beforehand. Even though there hadn't been a call to action on the web, I think I had "trained" the prospective students at the time to expect some form of online RSVP so for them, it was still a viable option to log on for more information. It's actually a good thing there wasn't a push to sign up online because since I had never seen the print invitation, little did I know that the information it asked for was different than had been used in previous year and the online form did not match up. By the time the mistake was caught, over 70 students had registered online for the event and now we needed to track down all of them and say "Oops, our bad that we didn't ask you for the right information in the first place." Here's the plan that was put in place:
1) Open house form revised with new fields
2) New form created that collected information from students who had already submitted the original form
3) Email sent out to all students who had RSVPed online, sending them to the new form to collect additional information.
It also took about a day of my time to assess the problem and fix it that could have been spent working on other things.
Now by itself, aside from being a complete pain in the ass, this whole fiasco wasn't a hugh deal. But if its representative of a larger problem and your users are consistently being needlessly inconvenienced because of your lack of planning or your institution's lack of buy-in then I would begin to qualify it as a problem. After a while, your users are going to look at you as amateurs. Consider, for a second, that the prospective students this invitation was targeted at were actually prospective donors with the ability to make a $35,000/year contribution to your institution. Would you treat them like this? If so, I don't think you would have a job for very long.
Key Takeaways (new feature on karlynmorissette.com :-) ):
1) A user's experience does not exist in a vacuum and should be seamless across mediums
2) If you know what the other marketing touch points are, you can better hone your web presence for effectiveness.
3) People obsessed with being a director are usually tools.
2 comments:
People in Academia with egos... who? Communicate... what's that? Why does anyone need to know what I do I'm in charge if it and I KNOW what I'm doing...
At Wofford we have a saying. "There's a right way, a wrong way, and the Wofford way."
I feel your pain far to often...
Hahaha it's not my pain anymore ;-) One of many many MANY reasons why I no longer work at my last job.
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