Integrating print, web and email

I believe that the key to success in any marketing campaign is integration of your look, feel and message across mediums, which constantly reinforces what you want your audience to get out of it. For example, a lot of people ask what day and time is best to send out email. It's the wrong question. Say you ask that at a conference and the speaker says "Tuesdays are the best day to send them out". Then everyone in the room starts sending them out on Tuesdays and it instantly becomes the worst day.  Specific time/day, in my opinion, just isn't that important.  What IS important is how you integrate it with every other part of that marketing campaign.

Here's an example of that. We just launched a fundraising challenge to get alumni to make their annual fund gift before the end of the fiscal year.  Below are some of the key marketing pieces: 

Print mail (Inside):



Home Page Promo:

(www.dartmouthcollegefund.org)

Challenge Landing Page:

(http://www.dartmouth.edu/~alfund/june_challenge/index.html)

The first (of many) segmented emails promoting the challenge:


Other lessons from this challenge:

1) When I was originally designing the landing page, I was REALLY worried that it would look too much like the print piece. The last thing I want is for a page to look like we just took a picture of the print piece and then slapped it up and called it a web page. At the same time though, I think consistency is very important. People may glance at the print piece or the promo or the landing page or the email, but if they all have the same look, feel and message, they'll still be mentally associating all of them and maybe gleaning a bit more each time they see one of the components.

2) A simple javascript ticker will make you look like a genius. I'm not kidding. When I first set it up, I was worried it would come across very cheesy...I still think its cheesy, but I also think its quirky and fun and works within the message (TIME IS RUNNING OUT!). If you're going to do it though, you have to go all out...when the idea was originally brought up, someone joked that it should be to the second but then consensus was that it should just be a countdown by day. I think expanding it and actually doing it to the second is what makes it cool.

3)Doing things like this requires you to be proactive. It's very difficult to pull it all together at the last minute. When you're relying on other people for content, this can be an extremely frustrating point. I'll admit, I about flipped out on a few people in trying to get all this stuff together.

Getting what you need from people who don't view the web as important.

There is not a single web person out there who hasn't had to deal with the harsh reality of people not seeing the power or value of the web. Whether they be upper administration or colleagues on your level, there will always be those who don't understand why the web should get any of their time. Unless you have a full blown web team with writers and designer and producers, chances are that you're going to have to work with other, non-web, professionals at your university....which can often lead to headaches. Your expertise is ignored. They don't deliver content on time. When they do deliver content, it is half-assed. Ultimately, this reflects on you since you are delivering the final product and you will perpetually feel like punching a wall.

But you have to work with them anyway. Since very few of us have a full-blown web team to work with, here are some strategies to get what you need out of your colleagues who may not see it as a good use of their time to provide material for the web:

1) Be proactive: Plan things in advance, instead of on the fly. You'll have a lot more ammo if you go to someone saying "You know three months ago that we were going to need this" rather than "You knew three days ago that we were going to need this." Involve them in the process of creating your master calendar so that they feel like they have buy-in.

2) Talk to people like they are human: All too often in higher education, people get very territorial and treat every other person they work with like they don't know what they are doing. We all get hired for a reason (seemingly because we are viewed as an expert on the day of our job interview) but those reasons tend to get tossed out the door as soon as we start the actual job part. Don't buy into this. Treat the people you work with like they are the experts that people saw in them on their interview. Make them feel like you respect them and their opinions and they will be much more open about having a dialogue with you regarding what you need from them. It also doesn't hurt if you ask them leading questions so that they feel like they came up with the ideas themselves (this tends to work more with men ;-) )

3) If all else fails, babysit: No one likes to babysit but it is sometimes necessary. Make sure that everyone knows their deadlines well in advance and that you have notified them in writing (preferably email). Remind them of the deadline EVERY TIME you have a conversation (in person or electronically) on the topic. Send last minute reminders before deadlines to check on progress. If they miss the deadline, send follow-up reminders. If missed deadlines are still a problem, make sure your (and their) supervisor knows of the issue and has the documentation.

Finally, make sure you use positive re-enforcement when people do what you need them to do. Thank them. Show them the results of their efforts. Make them feel like you value your contribution. I find that the words "thank you" or "great work" are so often ignored in our business and when you're having a bad or stressful day, knowing that people value your efforts can make all the difference. So be nice - but only AFTER you get your stuff. Being nice before then just makes you a pushover.

It's your job to be "in the know"

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.

The power of the letter (or an interesting pr idea...)

Like most people, I don't write a lot of letters.  Hell, I barely send out birthday cards.  If I want to communicate with someone, I'll send them an email or call them on my cell phone.

Except for my friend Aaron.  For reasons I'm not remotely going to go into here, Aaron is in jail and the main way I have to communicate with him is by writing letters.  So I got a valentines day card from him yesterday and I'm looking at the envelope and I see this in the corner: 

I'll admit, I was intrigued.  So I typed poweroftheletter.com into my browser and ended up here:

A MINISERIES? Ok, I'll admit I was expecting something a bit more profound.  But I started clicking around and it's actually not a bad site.  The post office is running a promotion where you can get a free greeting card that they will personalize with your picture through the end of March.  It also provides links to photos of some of John Adams original letters to his wife and, of course, you can watch a preview of the mini-series.  I found myself thinking that it was a clever little PR move to promote this mini-series, except for one thing: 

No one bloody writes letters anymore.