Fast Tip Friday: Being easy to work with can go a long way

I woke up this morning to an email that said the two-person department made up of my boss and I were the easiest to work with at Dartmouth.  What a great compliment!  It's not because we automatically say yes to everything or allow ourselves to be walked on.  Rather I think it's because we listen to what people want/need and we do our best to fulfill that need.  This applies especially to the little stuff.  Don't dismiss requests as unimportant and never say "no".  Instead, give alternatives.     

This seems like something that wouldn't need to be commented on, but in the six years I've worked in higher education I've found that more often than not, people like to make things difficult just to prove they are "in charge" of something.  Then they find themselves excluded and complain about it.  It's unnecessary.  If you're laid back and easy to work with, then people will want to include you.  If you're not, then they'll try to work around you.  It's as simple as that.

My "prospective Dartmouth student" experience.

Yesterday was a beautiful day and I didn't really have a lot going on in the office (plus my boss had been bugging me to do a campus tour) so I got my butt down to campus and played prospective student at Dartmouth for a day.  

The first stop was an info session in the admissions office, given by their senior assistant director of admissions.  The first thing that struck me was the complete lack of photography in the admissions offices - I've seen some great, dramatic and powerful photos taken by the school's photographer but the walls were completely bare.  I thought that was odd - an admissions visit is just as much about selling the school to the students as it is the students selling themselves to the school.  If not photography then put something up to make the room a bit warmer and more inviting.

The information session I was in was great.  It was probably the most unique way I've ever seen a school do it.  The presenter talked a little bit about why all admissions visits at all colleges seemed the same and then just opened the floor up to questions about anything - Dartmouth specifically or just generally applying to college.  She acknowledged that Dartmouth wasn't a perfect place.  The whole thing just came across as really authentic - it was about helping the students and their families instead of selling the school with a boring presentation that is the same as every other school out there.    

She gave KILLER advice on the essay - having read about 9 billion essays during my time as an admissions officer I was totally with her: Get a copy of the application and your high school transcript.  Then get a piece of paper and make two columns on it.  In the first column, write down all the things your admissions person is going to know about you based on your application and high school transcript (for example, you played soccer for four years, captain of the team, youth coach in the summer, etc...).  You'll find that an admissions person will know very little about you from that information.

In the second column, write a list of reasonable assumptions the admissions person can make about you based on the information in the first column.  So in the soccer example, you can assume the kid has persevered, has leadership experience, has learned all sorts of valuable lessons from playing sports, etc...

Now, based on the information they already have on you in those two columns, figure out an essay topic that makes you a real, three dimensional person.  The kid in the soccer example is probably going to write his essay about soccer and all the valuable lessons he's learned...but the admissions officer already knows that.  It doesn't give them any more information than they already had to really make the case for why a school should except you.  A real person is much harder to deny.   

Another thing I liked is that Dartmouth actually requires a peer evaluation on their application. Most schools require a guidance counselor recommendation (and they're usually just a form letter and boring) and a teaching recommendation but a peer evaluation allows them a different perspective on a student - one from someone who knows them well and is not in a position of authority.  I thought that was a great idea and probably much more interesting to read than the usual letters.

So then I moved on to the tour.  I'll be honest - the tour didn't really do much for me.  I've only been to campus a few times and had already seen everything they showed us so walking around and seeing the outsides of the buildings yet again really wasn't that helpful.  Plus the tour guides annoyed me with their presentation style - you could tell they were friends and they spent most of the time talking to each other ("You really do that?!  Oh my God!") instead of to the audience.  I also thought they came across as a bit fake - like they had really been trained about what to say and what not to say.  I felt like I left it with no additional information than when I started it, aside from places to get free food on campus.  Maybe the prospective students ate it up though?  I'm not sure.  

All in all, it was good, but a bit anti-climatic after the killer info session but still better than I've seen other schools do it.  Plus I got to be outside on a nice day instead of stuck in the office, so really I can't complain :-)

Empower Yourself

Everyone complains about the slowness of higher education and one of the most common excuses I hear is that people don't feel empowered to make decisions and take actions.

Let me ask you this: Has anyone specifically told you that you CAN'T make decisions and that you CAN'T take action?  If they have, I would consider looking for a job at a place where you're a trusted and respected employee.  If they haven't, then stop making excuses and empower yourself.  Start making decisions.  Start DOING things instead of talking about them on your blog.

What's the worst that can happen?  Is the sky going to fall?  Is it going to be the downfall of your institution? Sure, you might catch hell for it but that's about the worst of it.  But if you do, take responsibility.  Stand up and say "Yes, I did it, this is the reason I did it and I would do it again in a heartbeat!"  No one is going to be right all the time.  I'm far more impressed when people fall down hard but had built a good basis to be able to stick by their work than people who have great ideas but don't have the balls to try them.  

There are all sorts of day-to-day things that don't need to be run by committee and that you are the best person (with the most expertise) to be making decisions about them.  Just do it and deal with the consequences later.  I think most of the time, you'll find that it'll really be OK.

Fast Tip Friday: Google Analytics URL Builder

If you are using Google Analytics on your website, it's also helpful to instrument outside links with campaign URLs to better track referrals and purchases.  We use these campaign URLs on all of our email campaigns as a secondary form of tracking since they allow us to know which customers made gifts after clicking on a link in the email and how much their gift was for.  We also use them for unique URLs in print pieces, by creating a short URL and redirecting it through the GA tracking code.  Use their handy URL builder to create your links: 

Then, you can go into Google Analytics and find your results under Traffic Sources => Campaigns.  In this case, we are looking at the e-commerce screen. 

Using this method will give you much more data to work with when you do your eventual ROI calculations. 

The Internets isn't just something the kids use...you can raise big bucks on it too!

The Chronicle of Philanthropy released its annual online fundraising statistics this week and I'm sure many old-school fundraisers (who think the Internets is just something the kids use) were surprised at the results.  

One article discussed the findings of the Defenders of Wildlife that email communications to donors can lead to larger online (and offline) gifts: 

• Donors who contributed through traditional means (mail, phone) and who did not receive email communications gave an average of $40.
  
• Donors who contributed through traditional means but did receive email communications gave an average of $59. 
  
• Donors who gave exclusively online made average gifts of $65-$70
  
• Donors who gave both online and offline made average gifts of $105-$110.  These donors were also the most likely to make repeat donations. 
  

The organization also found (not surprisingly) that people are much more likely to give more if they receive an e-mail appeal right before or right after a print appeal, though the follow-up was more likely to have a bigger effect. 

In the same issue was another article discussing donors who make larger gifts online.  Increasingly (and I think in no small part because of the Wired Wealthy report, released back in March), non-profits are becoming open to the idea that it's OK to ask donors to make large gifts online.  Though some experts say this is most effective for donors who will make gifts of up to $10,000, there are organizations out there who have reported receiving gifts of over $200,000 online.  This means you have to make sure that you are capable of accepting large gifts - we had an incident a few months back where a donor tried to make a gift over $50,000 online, but our system wouldn't let him!  We don't traditionally court donors with asks of over $25,000 online, I don't think it occurred to anyone to make sure we could accept large gifts.  This has since been fixed (pushed up to $150,000, which is the limit of the bank) and I believe since then we've received another large gift ($83,000 if my memory serves).  Not too shabby, but I have to wonder what would happen if we started actually ASKING people to make larger gifts online!  

Key Takeaways: 

1. Email leads to larger gifts, online and off
2. People will give you large chunks of change online if you ask them
3. Make sure your systems are set up to take large gifts, whether you are asking for them or not.  You don't want to lose out on $100,000 because your website can't process the credit card. 

Ode To Twitter

In honor of my 1000th Tweet, an Ode to Twitter.  (Ok...yeah...it's really not that clever, I know.) 

Twitter, my world hasn't quite been the same since your birth

140 characters to articulate my random thoughts to all corners of the Earth

Twitter, oh Twitter, you are so very cool

you let me hear the wisdom of gurus like Kathy Sierra, John Maeda and Jared Spool. 

though there are some that i'd rather hit

like CSS guru Christopher Schmitt 

it's oh so terrible that you can't figure out a way to get paid

but at least @jetblue will let me know if my flight is delayed

off in the distance, we can see large banner ads lurk

still, (unless you fail) you allow me break up my day at work

they say no one's figured out how to use you as a marketing tool

I disagree...@amazondeals gives me discounts on all that is cool

@barackobama tells us where the next President will be a guest

plus, as a bonus, we can rip apart Sarah Lacy for that lame ass interview at SXSW

but most of all twitter, i love the conversations you allow to take place

all sorts of people with different experiences to showcase

the occasional debate with @brianwmniles or @bradjward

direct messages from @debrouillard to get me fired up make me feel so adored

from anticipating the next smartass remark from @tsand

or @tonydunn announcing a new Tales From Redesignland

to @wnalyd antagonizing me with the latest news about "email's death" being to blame

and random updates from the original doteduguru, @kylejames

and to all the others whose name I didn't say

when I chat with you all on twitter, you make my day

and so Twitter, on the day of my 1000th post, I salute you

on the 10,000th post, maybe i'll get a Twitter tattoo :-)

What Web 2.0 means to me

Generally speaking, I recoil when the term Web 2.0 is brought up in conversation.  It's a sham term that is generally applicable in every possible situation involving the Internet.  Honestly, if you look at definitions of Web 2.0 out there (and had no experience with the Internet prior to 2004), you'd think things like design, usability and standards just weren't important before Web 2.0 came along to tell us that they were.  

So for me, when I think about Web 2.0, I view it more in terms of a new kind of marketing philosophy. The web has obviously evolved from a medium primarily to gather information to one where people can actually "do stuff".  This has opened the door to new kinds of messaging that weren't available before. 

Push versus pull: There are a lot of definitions of push and pull marketing out there (mostly having to do with tangible products that require distribution channels and such) but when I think of these terms, I think of direct marketing versus stewarding brand loyalty.  In this case, direct marketing is primarily email.  It's an active approach - you're pushing a message out there directly to your users and asking them to do something.  Conversely, I view things like blogs, forums or social networking primarily as pull marketing - you're putting stuff out there but the onus is on the user to visit your blog or participate in your forum/social network.  If you've done a good job of creating brand loyalty, you won't have any problem with finding interested users to participate - but they will typically only be the ones that are super psyched about what you're offering instead of just your run-of-the-mill customer.  It is important to do both types to keep users engaged at the level that they want to be. 

The different between mass messaging and individual message: The days of sending out a message directed at a mass audience are over.  It's the difference between "Dear Sir or Madam" and "Dear {FirstName}".  Users expect you to know who they are and how they've interacted with you before.  Each message you send out should create value on an individual level for each and every person. 

Be authentic: People are thirsty for companies to be real (no spin!) and transparent.  They have a world full of information at their fingertips now so they can check the official company line against all of the unofficial information floating around.  Now, this one is tough.  I get it - when people have a mirror held up to them and they don't like what they see, they tend to blame the person holding up the mirror instead of themselves.  Nonetheless, straight shooting with your customers will build their trust in you and create some deep brand loyalty. 

Let go of control: If you want engagement with your product online, you have to be prepared for the fact that not all the comments are going to be glowing and fluffy.  People are going to say things you don't like, but you have to refrain from trying to control or censor it.  That will only blow up in your face.  The last school I worked at actually had rules against students saying negative things about the institution, and towards the end of my time there, tried to enforce them against online speech.  How do you think that went over?  I'll give you a hint - pretty soon a Facebook group popped up calling for the president's resignation and it had a ton of pretty active, engaged users.  Oops!  Instead of trying to censor, engage your users and show them that you care and are listening to their concerns.  Better yet, show them that you are doing something to fix their problems.  Their feedback is like a constant (and free!) focus group for you to pull information from.  Utilize it for all it's worth!  

Fast Tip Friday: Be Consistent

It never ceases to amaze me how many emails I get with "monthly" or "weekly" in the title which don't actually come out on a monthly or weekly basis.  Someone is too busy, they don't have the content for it...pick your excuse.  Users will notice if you say you are sending regularly but really don't: "What do you mean weekly?  I didn't get anything from you last week!" 

If you know you're going to have trouble being consistent, play off of that in the email - "the every once in a while newsletter" or the "sometimes monthly update".  There's nothing wrong with that - it manages the expectations of your users by letting them know that if you have something to say, you will. 

Getting Real Recruiting Results with Interactive Technologies (eduWeb 2007)

I was surfing the web looking for a something I wrote for my MBA and randomly came across the PowerPoint slides for the presentation I did at eduWeb in 2007 titled Getting Real Recruiting Results with Interactive Technologies.  I still think a lot of the points are very relevant to admissions offices so I thought I would throw them up here in case someone found it useful.

Getting Real Recruiting Results with Interactive Technologies

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

I believe in Santa Claus

Nothing drives me crazier than the "I believe" argument.  

"I believe email is dead"

"I believe you shouldn't email people on Fridays"

"I believe that teenagers will respond better over social networks"

Well I believe in Santa Claus.  Does that make it so?  I have no verifiable evidence to back up my assertion (and, in fact, there are mountains of evidence against it) but that doesn't matter.  I've made a pronunciation about my belief in Santa Claus on a blog and people will buy it. 

"But Karlyn, that's CRAZY!  Obviously Santa Claus isn't real!"  

But is it really that crazy?  None of the above pronunciations are any more real than Santa Claus, yet they've been made and people eat them up!  No statistics are offered to prove them and, when they are requested, never given.  

If you call yourself a marketer, you have to do all the steps - not just execute the tactics.  How do you know if what you did actually worked?  Stats are important and can oftentimes be very surprising.  We all carry around pre-conceived notions of what we think works but we can't be so pompous as to close our minds to the reality of what the statistics tell use work.  An honest look at the numbers always reveals the truth.  It's just not sexy, so most people skip it altogether.   

So I beg you: Never believe a pronunciation you hear someone make until you've tested it for yourself.  A helpful guide it may be, and if it works great.  But do your own research and figure out for yourself what will work.  Don't be afraid to try something that 90% of the people out there say will be a failure.  Never assume something was successful or unsuccessful because you hear anecdotal evidence - there are always ways to measure quantifiably.  All any of us speak from is our own experience and your experience with your audience may be completely different.

And never get in a discussion with me where you say "I believe" without giving stats.  It just doesn't fly :-) 

Fast Tip Friday: Exclamation points do not make things more exciting.

I've decided to add a new weekly feature.  Since we all have the attention span of 5-year-olds on Fridays in anticipation of the weekend, I've decided use it as a time to write short posts about a topic that can be digested in a minute or less.

The first topic: Exclamation points

You can always tell when a person is inexperienced in writing marketing copy based on the amount of exclamations points they use.  They rely on them, instead of words, to make boring copy more exciting.

Repeat after me: An exclamation point at the end of a sentence does not make that sentence exciting if the copy is boring.  Two or three exclamation points just make you look silly.  To avoid the appearance of being an immature writer, follow these simple rules: 

1. Limit your copy to one exclamation point per page
   
2. NEVER use multiple exclamation points
   
3. Proofread, proofread, proofread - really ask yourself why you selected the exclamation point in the first place and what you're trying to convey.
   

Happy Friday!

Failures can be more interesting than successes

I was talking to my boss about blogging last week and she suggested that I include posts about failures in here.  Everyone has failures so I'm not ashamed of admitting mine.  It's about reflecting on them and learning what you can.  So here goes: 

Two years ago I put together a strategy for the last school I worked at to include video on our website.  The original point was that it would be shot by current students and be really true to their experience.  It was purposefully going to have an amateurish quality to it, since I think that adds authenticity.  I got approved to get a ton of video equipment, final cut and an iMac but it took a while to get it ordered and delivered so I didn't actually get my hands until Spring 2007.  I had been toying with the idea of having a student do a video blog for a while and I recruited a kid that I had known for years to be my guinea pig.  He shot video for about a month and then came to ask if he could take the camera on his trip to London.  I said sure, not seeing any real downside to the situation.  Unfortunately said student thought it would be a good idea to ignore signs at Westminster Abbey that warned him against any photographic devices and had all of his tapes confiscated.  He lost everything.  

So Summer comes and I had nothing to work with.  Plus there were very few students on campus at this point so really there was nothing to shoot.  But I was lucky to have a very industrious student interning for me named Geoff Ankuda.  Now hear this: if you ever get the opportunity to hire Geoff, do it.  Even as a student, I viewed (and treated) him like a professional and he lived up to every expectation I had. 

I gave Geoff a lot of freedom that summer to work on projects he wanted to and one of them was video.  The college had a great summer program for high school students that recruited a lot of students for the school so Geoff decided to take on shooting video of the camp and edit it as one of his projects.  I was thrilled.  Not only would this be great recruiting material for the camp, but it would also be great for former campers to really show pride on their social networking profiles about what they had done over the summer by posting the videos (we were just going to use Google video to host the files).

Geoff spent weeks laboring over this - when the summer camp was running, he was out there every day shooting.  In between, he was sitting in my office editing.  He ended up creating dozens of short video clips about this camp, which not only included some of the interesting activities they did but also really candid interviews with the campers.  The end product was exactly what I had envisioned it being.

But I wasn't the one who had final approval on it.  The people running the camp did.  And they didn't like it. It was a bit too real it seemed, and lacked the sort of marketing fluff and dramatic music in the background that are typical of recruiting materials.  So well I put it up on Google video anyway (where I'm positive you can find it to this day), it never made its way to the main site like I had originally intended.  Both Geoff and I were disappointed.  I felt terrible that he had put so much work into something only to be told no.  While it's a harsh reality that you have to deal with in the real world, I was hoping to shield him from that while he was a student and still gaining confidence in his abilities.  

This project for me was like a comedy of errors and there were definitely times throughout it when I looked up to the sky and, with my palms turned out, said "why????"  Every time something started to go right, something else would happen that would blow everything off track.  By the time I left this school in the fall, we had used some video on the site, but were certainly not at the level I had hoped for.  

What did I learn and what would I do differently: 

1. Manage expectations.  I think the primary reason the video never got used was the fact that people didn't really understand what YouTube style video meant.  They thought it was going to be professional quality recruiting style video, when that was never the point.  Next time I would make sure everyone understood and had viewed and approved an example of the type of video I was talking about.
   
2. Set ground rules.  I'm known to be pretty lax with student workers.  I think if you trust them (and play a major Catholic guilt trip on them), they will usually rise to the occasion.  In the name of authenticity, I basically gave a student a video camera and said "don't break it and don't film anything that could get you expelled or arrested....go!"  It never occurred to me that the student would lose a month's worth of footage by bringing it somewhere he shouldn't.  If I ever do this again, I am definitely going to come up with a few common sense guidelines.
3. Time management.  I'll be the first to say it - I am HORRIBLE when it comes to taking way too much stuff on.  I know it sounds like one of those fake answers you give when you're interviewing and they ask what you're weakness is, but its true.  Looking back, this video thing was huge and I just didn't have time (along with everything else going on) to deal with it.  I also didn't want to stand up to my former employers and tell them that, because it just wasn't something that was done in the culture of that office.  I wanted to be able to do it all...and that's good...you want employees that are excited about their jobs and have high goals...but sometimes you just can't achieve it all. 
4. Some things are just out of your control.  Well it's important to reflect on the things you could have done differently, its also important to say that some things are just out of your control.  I couldn't control the fact that the director of this camp has a vendetta against Geoff for not being a cadet at the school and therefore wasn't inclined to use something he produced.  I couldn't control that they decided showing students use a wooden (fake) knife in survival training was just too scary a scene for prospects and parents when they didn't have a problem with us filming it in the first place.  You're always going to have things in a project that you just have no control of mitigating and for your own sanity, its important to acknowledge them.   

Have you had any projects that were colossal failures?  Share them in the comments, along with what you learned!

IE6 margin fix

You'd never guess it from some of the posts in this blog, but in addition to marketing, I do actually build websites ;-)

I was finishing up a project yesterday and (predictably) when I went to test in IE6, it was all fouled up.  Here's how it looked in Safari and FF: 

And here is how it looked in IE6: 

Basically, IE6 has decided it wants to double the margin on the floating sidebar I have on the right.  So I did some research and found a super-easy method to fix this: add "display: inline" to the floating element.  

Magically, it works!

Just thought I would share in case anyone else found this useful :-)

Look mom! I'm a .eduGuru!

Last week, Kyle announced a new format for .eduGuru by making it a multi-author site.  I'm thrilled to be one of the two new authors, along with Michael Fienen.  Most of you know that I'm a huge fan of Kyle's - I think he puts out some of the best blogs out there, and he does it on subjects that are sexy enough to be tackled by other bloggers.  He's got a great new direction for the blog and I really can't wait to see where it goes. 

Read my first post: New Standards for Email Subject Lines »

But fear not, faithful readers - just because I'm blogging at .eduGuru now does not mean that this blog is going anywhere.  If anything, I'm looking at this as an opportunity to focus and refine the content of this blog.  I'll be the first to say it: Most of the time I don't put a heck of a lot of advanced planning into what I write on here.  I have an idea or I'm working on a project and I just feel like writing a blog, so I do.  I think sometimes they come out pretty good and sometimes they come out "ehhhh", but I also like the quality of posts that are too edited and thought out.  I suppose its the difference between formal marketing fluff and being authentic.  I suppose this is just a long-winded way of saying that though the style will stay the same, the subject matter will be a bit more planned out.  

I'm sure if you're reading this blog, you've already found Kyle's but on the off-chance that you haven't, go add it to your RSS feeds immediately.  He and Michael are quality and worth well worth you time reading!