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.

Salaries: The Ultimate Indication of Value

Whenever someone declares the "death of print media" in the higher ed blog world, usually a discussion about financial parity of the web and print in the budgeting process is not far behind. People try to use this as a measuring stick for how much institutions value the web versus their value of print publications. I've previously argued that this notion is naive at best. 

I think a better indicator is salary.  I touched on salary as a motivating factor for employees a bit yesterday and have been pondering it ever since. I don't think it's the only motivating factor, mind you - a great boss, work environment and buy-in to the core values of an organization goes a long way.  But let's be honest - we all have rent or a mortgage to pay and money doesn't grow on trees. 

Let's look at some background.  We all have different titles and job responsibilities so here is a sampling of national average salary ranges from Salary.com for the following positions: 

Web Designer

Web Producer

Web Content Manager 

Website Manager

If an institution truly values its web presence, then they will do their best to bring salaries more into line with national averages.  This is the only way to attract high quality employees.  The old adage "you get what you pay for" holds very true.    

Now, to be fair, I think that we all know that higher education is not going to pay as much as the corporate sector. I view it as a trade off for better benefits and job security (for the most part) and eliminating the cognitive dissonance of working for "the man." But I think reviewing our salaries within the context of national averages is very telling.  

As with many blogs I write, here is my personal story to illustrate the point: When I started as interactive recruitment manager at my last school it was a brand new position and the salary was pegged ridiculously low - mid 30s.  I could say that of the descriptions above, it was a hybrid of content manager and designer.  I found out a year later that it was so low because it wasn't pegged as a technology position at all - it was pegged as an admissions counselor position even though I had no caseload.  I fought them on it and got a modest raise out of it, but the situation really left me dumbfounded.  This is a place that would go on and on about how much they value the web and how powerful it is...but they didn't want to pay their employees to actually develop it.  That really showed me a lot about how much the institution ACTUALLY valued the web or the people they had managing it.  It was the first thing that really got me hemming and hawing about whether I would stay in that position any more than a few years.   

Fast forward another year and I'm interviewing for my current job.  In my first phone interview, I was asked what salary I was looking for.  In my head, I'm thinking "my salary is a joke now and I'm looking for a substantial increase" but I didn't think that would go over well and refused to answer, explaining that I had been forced to fight for my current salary and that their initial offer would really show me how much they value their web employees.  They respected that and a few weeks later, after an in-person interview, I was offered the job.   I had already made up my mind to accept if it was offered but the fact that I also got a very decent salary offer that was in exactly the range I was looking for put me over the top.  This was a place that wanted me and valued what I could bring to the web team!  It just starts it off on a great foot.  They don't have to prove to me anymore that they put value into what I do - they've already shown it.  So now, if I run into problems with other employees that are still stuck in the "print as the only meaningful tool" era, I know its not a matter of my office valuing or not valuing the web - it's really more of a call for me to present the case that the web is just as powerful and back it up with numbers.  Attitudes won't change overnight but I don't go home at the end of the day feeling like I'm viewed as a superfluous employee.   

Salary isn't everything, but it's definitely an indicator. Higher education is all about politics and like any good politician, higher ed administrators can pay lip service all day long to calm their uppity constituents down.  But they show their true colors when it comes to the numbers.  If they truly value the web, they will value every part of building and maintaining it - particularly the employees they've brought on to manage it.  If they don't truly value it, they are going to undervalue you and the work you are doing.  

Print Still Works (or arguments for web financial parity of naive at best)

I was reading Ron Bronson's blog yesterday and really just couldn't disagree with one of his positions more.

Presidential candidates are making unprecedented amounts of money on the internet and we still have schools publishing bulky print materials to the oldsters, because that’s the way they’ve raised money in the past, so why change it now?

You change it now, because you want to raise money from the oldsters of tomorrow. The alumni who will run this country and who will feel less connected, less engaged and more cynical about their college years with debt rising and feeling as their prospects are grimmer than they were when they first started as wide-eyed first year students.

Bronson's post was ironic because he made the huge leap from talking about authenticity in admissions marketing (which I completely agree with) to discussing the elimination of print materials in marketing the university to potential donors. Having worked in both worlds now, I can emphatically say that one has little to do with the other and what works in admissions may not necessarily work in development at the same school! Admissions should be more authentic than it is - you're selling a product and the buyer should know what they are getting into so that your retention doesn't suffer. On the other hand, fundraising can be more nostalgic. There are iconic images at any school that defy generational nuances.

Plus, the fact remains that statistics clearly show that print is still an extremely effective way of raising money. There was an article just this week in The Chronical of Philanthropy about this subject: Direct Mail Beats Predictions, Study Finds.

As with most things, the key is to find a happy medium: I make donations all the time that are initiated by print mail. Now, I may not write a check and mail it back to the organization that has asked me for money, but I will log onto their website and give if there is an easy way to do it on there. But the print piece is what convinces me 9 times out of 10. Should we not consider this a successful print piece just because I elected to respond by a different medium? At 27-years-old, I wonder if he would consider me an oldster because I responded to a print mailing?

This blog also brought up a broader point for me: I'm not insinuating that Bronson is advocating this because he doesn't in the text of the blog I'm referencing, but you hear all the time that the web should have parity with print in marketing materials because it is just as effective, if not moreso. Now, I think we can all agree that it is just as effective, but to say that it deserves financial parity with print is the most naive argument I've ever heard. The fact is that it costs more to produce quality print materials than it does to produce web work of the same quality. I can cover my email budget for the year for $15,000 but that may not even cover the cost of doing one print piece. As long as the web is supported in my organization and I have the resources I need to do my job effectively, I'm covered.

Bottom line: Print works. Web works. You can appeal to both old and young audiences without breaking a sweat. Change doesn't always involve choosing one thing over another - it often involves integrating the two, which will ultimately give you a better result than either one could on its own.

Key Takeaways:
1) It is not about print vs. web. It is about the two working together harmoniously to achieve a final result.
2) Print still works when it comes to fundraising.
3) Arguing for financial parity of the web and print within your organization is unrealistic. Rather, work on getting the web valued as a marketing tool within your organization.

Begin With the End in Mind: Implementing Technology with an Eye on ROI

Just finished writing up my presentation description for the Stamats Conference. I don't mind saying that I had a really hard time wrapping my head around this one - not that I feel uncomfortable discussing technology implementation or tracking for ROI. Rather, I think that fitting it all in one presentation and giving really practical, usable advice to your audience is difficult at best. However, I've come up with a framework that I think is going to make for a really good presentation....it may even be a bit more fun than people will expect (Let's be honest - ROI is not sexy. Hence why it's usually overlooked).

So here it is:

Begin With the End in Mind: Implementing Technology with an Eye on ROI

We've reached a point where most universities understand that interactive technologies are beneficial in marketing their institution to prospective students, alumni, the media and internal audiences. But many don't go beyond a year-end report in assessing the results of their strategies. The real potential of using technologies as a component of your marketing mix is in your ability to track ROI in real time and adjust your tactics as a result of that tracking.

So, what does success look like and how do you measure it from the get-go? What is a blog view worth to your organization? A click through on a link in an email? A post on a message board? A visit to your site as a result of a Facebook ad? How do you calculate ROI for user actions that don't have a price tag attached? This presentation will seek to answer these questions and more. It will cover the following areas:

-Setting up tracking methods and measurable goals during implementation instead of after-the-fact
-Integrating Google Analytics with your technologies to taking tracking to the next level
-Assigning monetary value to metrics to take your success beyond anecdotal evidence to hard numbers
-Relating results back to the business goals of your organization to illustrate ROI to your higher ups

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."  

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 :-)