The Blue Pig Campaign: FTF + Facebook + Twitter + More = Annual Fund Increases

An integrated campaign focused on improving undergraduate donations to Emory University’s Annual Fund relied on social media (Facebook and Twitter) for outreach to Emory students and a boost in undergraduate giving to the Class Gift Campaign.

This year was the second year for Emory’s Blue Pig campaign. When the Class of 2011 entered the university, they were given a blue plastic piggy bank, with messages about the importance of giving even small amounts to Emory. The Class of 2012 received their own pigs when they arrived on campus. And this year, Emory’s Annual Fund staff created an integrated campaign to reinforce the value of giving—and having fun while doing it.

Here’s a brief explanation of the Blue Pig, from an Annual Giving FAQ:

Since the mid-1500’s, the piggy bank has been used throughout the world as a tool to teach the value of saving and mindful spending. The Blue Pig is starting a new tradition and serves as a symbol that a little change can make a world of difference. We are presenting each member of the entering Freshman Class with a special edition piggy bank to highlight the importance of giving back, while each sophomore will receive a blue pig t-shirt at our events, you’ll receive a special thank you gift in return. We ask that you keep the piggy bank in a prominent place so you can remember to fill it with your spare change, which will count as a gift to your Class Gift Campaign. We will have periodic “Piggy Round-Up” events on campus throughout the year where you will have the opportunity to drop off your piggy bank savings.

An integrated campaign begins

This year, sophomores received bright-blue t-shirts with a pig emblazoned on the front and the slogan “Feed Me. Love, the Blue Pig” on the back. “This works incredibly effectively as free advertising, and by only offering it to the sophomore class, these highly popular shirts have created a quasi-black market among the upperclassmen, which in turn, has created a student-driven hype that is its own form of fantastic publicity,” said said Cassandra Young, who, as program development coordinator at the Emory Annual Fund, coordinated the Blue Pig campaign.

Initially, the Blue Pig campaign relied on email for monthly communications, but staff members wanted more of a dialog with students. So they turned their attention to social media and other online forums where they could interact directly with undergraduates.

For his year’s Blue Pig campaign, Cassie Young created a Facebook page for the Blue Pig—and it turned out to be a little bit too successful. “I created a profile page for The Blue Pig, treating him as if he were a person. After I got about 1,000 followers, Facebook closed the page down because there were too many updates,” Young said. She recently joined Emory’s Alumni Association, leaving the Blue Pig temporarily without a human spokesperson to Facebook or tweet on his behalf.

Once the Blue Pig had a lot of friends on Facebook (and on campus), Young and her colleagues staged a “pignapping,” buying an ad in the student newspaper, publishing a ransom note on Facebook, and postering the campus. They “demanded” a ransom of $3,500 by the end of the semester for the Blue Pig’s release. The money raised would bring back the pig and provide students with stipends for textbooks.

Young also created a Twitter ID (@thebluepig), which has 62 followers and 44 updates and was one of the early Twitter accounts at Emory.

More engagement

As part of her commitment to online engagement, Young also monitored other public online forums. “I responded to a lot of comments.” Part of the challenge, she pointed out, is educating Emory undergraduates about why their gift is important. “We’re trying to be as transparent as possible and use language that students understand and relate to.” Indeed, the language on the Class Gift Piggy Bank web page is clear and straightforward.

“Engagement,” for Young, meant a lot more than social media. “Opening up a dialog meant that we wanted to be approachable, so I went to every single event and talked to students. I was able to have face-to-face conversations with them and answer their questions directly.”

Young manages the campaign herself—and it’s a lot of work. She ran a photo contest for students, inviting them to photograph their blue pig piggy banks on campus and offering a prize for the best photo. She didn’t put together a Flickr gallery from the results just because she didn’t have the time.

And the results?

Young said, “The students love the pig.”

OK, but how has the campaign worked? “The giving rate has jumped enormously; in the first two months of the fiscal year, we’ve doubled what we’d done before,” she added. According to The Chronicle of Philanthropy,

Since adopting the pig as the class campaign mascot, the annual fund has attracted a 157-percent increase in the number of gifts from undergraduates. And the total amount from undergraduates collected for first seven months of this fiscal year has reached $12,915, compared with $682 raised during the same period last year.

Giving for the Class Gift Advisory Board reached 100 percent participation in one month. And here’s some more data:

As of 31 May 2009, the total undergraduate giving rate more than doubled over 2008. First-years had a 9 percent participation rate and there was a 579.42 percent increase in total dollars raised and a 734.88 percent increase in the average gift. Sophomores were in the second year of the Blue Pig campaign, there was a 1300 percent increase in dollars raised and a 518 percent increase in participation rate; gifts increased by 424 percent.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Michael Stone Moves On

I got an email yesterday from my friend Michael Stone announcing that he was retiring after more than 35 years at UCLA. It took me back, way back, to 1995 and my first big consulting gig.

In 1995, UCLA’s vice chancellor John Kobara liked my idea of a “communications audit” of UCLA.edu. He thought it would be a really good idea to think about how all the separate websites in the UCLA domain could link up and how University Relations could work with other units to be proactive in developing UCLA’s site. He hired me to lead the intake and charged staff member Michael Stone with leading the project. Imagine, if you will, the administrative assistant who was making calls and telling people—among them, faculty—that she was making an appointment for Michael Stone and Michael Stoner to talk with them about the university’s website. I’ve imagined the responses she received and chortled over them many times in the years since.

Michael and I spent days meeting with units all over campus from academic units to students. I’d worked at Lehigh and Princeton (and attended a liberal arts college, a state university, and the University of Pennsylvania), so I had some idea of what what higher ed was like. But I often felt as if I was back in a folklore or anthropology class, doing fieldwork for an ethnography of kinship systems and power dynamics in a feudal state.

Our work led to a report and an approach that helped University Relations structure a relationship with other units on campus and create a new approach to UCLA.edu. According to Michael,

Our early work together on the UCLA web site was instrumental in my building credibility for what was then called University Relations to take over the UCLA Gateway and to work effectively with colleagues across the campus.

As for me, I learned a great deal from that project. I didn’t know much about marketing then, certainly at the level that Michael had practiced it as head of marketing for the UCLA Extension, and I gained some great insights from questions he asked and observations he made. And the process we used for that project—including the necessity of involving many people in listening and feedback sessions—became a cornerstone of the process that mStoner still uses.

Michael and I haven’t kept up with each other much over the years, though I knew that he remained at UCLA and continued to contribute to marketing efforts there. In his email to me, he noted that, “Old marketing guys never die, they just start to transform themselves.” He’s already worked out a gig with a marketing company that works with the travel industry: I can see that there are going to be horizons a bit more interesting and scenic than the ones in Westwood in his future.

So, Michael: Thanks for that important early partnership and what you taught me. Have fun reinventing yourself. And best wishes.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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UB: report from the front, week nine

I believe that Amy Grant’s music, much like rose wine, is much maligned. There’s a line in one of her songs, for instance “… how do you argue with a feeling in your bones about what is and what isn’t meant to be.” Makes me think of the UB project.

Let me explain, and sorry—by the way—for not keeping up with my posts on this initiative, it’s been a bit of a whirlwind set of weeks.

Last I reported, we were beginning interviews for our mental models. Five different audience segments, 70 individual conversations. Three interviews in, both Rebecca and I sensed that something was amiss. We couldn’t quite articulate what wasn’t working, but we knew that we weren’t getting the information we needed. Part of the issue, we thought, was not having the right people to interview. But there was more to the issue than that, we knew. She and I talked, decided to sleep on it; when we met the next day, we found that we’d arrived at the same solution by different routes. The answer: re-engage mental models mastermind Indi Young to help us revise our scope statements, re-write our prompts, and lead one model interview for each of the audience segments we were studying. And that’s exactly what she did, and it’s exactly what we needed. (And Indi, if you’re reading this, you’re my hero!)

Toggling like this cost us some effort—it meant rescreening and rescheduling a number of people. It cost us money. It cost us time. And it also cost us some comfort—I had to learn a different and new way of interviewing. But it was exactly the right thing to do for the project, and it also led to some really terrific outcomes:

1. We learned that we didn’t need to interview as many people as we originally intended. In fact, we were able to cut the list by over 30%.
2. We found a new audience segment—people we call pathfinders, that fall between matchseekers and solution seekers.
3. We found that our six audience segments divide into two clusters, or clouds, or continuums, if you will—each cloud having a number of shared characteristics.

The interviews are rocking and rolling now (go, UB scheduling team!); we’re slated to finish them up in the next week or so. And in the meantime, we’re going to start combing through each of the completed interviews for behaviors, feelings, philosophies, intents, and motivations. How fun is that!

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
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AIGA Annual Members Meeting

Last night I attended the Annual Members meeting for AIGA at the Art Institute of Chicago. They handed out three awards. First a Corporate Design Leadership award to Crate & Barrel, which included a thorough presentation and history of this Chicago based company formed in the 60s. The idea started when Carole and Gorden Segal were asking themselves why they couldn’t find the aesthetically pleasing housewares they’d found in European countries locally, and on the cheap. They knew there must be other couples like themselves who would appreciate the same level of design in the household. There’s more to the story, but I liked the background and how it was focused around making design accessible, bringing simplicity to the table and spelling it out in clean, black and white adjusted Helvetica. It was mentioned that the Crate & Barrel logo was created by a store clerk who took over the task after several unsuccessful design firm submissions. I’ve always been more of a shabby chic, but my shower curtain is CB, and I like it a bit more now.

Next, the AIGA Fellow Award which recognizes mature designers who have raised standards and excellence in design. Recipient: Morton Goldsholl. My lights came on seeing his portfolio of identity work. Most of them simply iconic…no type. I admire the fact that this design is decently abstract. I mean this is the Pilsbury Co. tradmark!

The final award was the 2009 AIGA Chicago Student Enrichment Scholarship, given to Adam Muran, a Senior at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Check out his Design Hygiene Series. A few people applauded when they heard the school name, and I think that meant they were relieved to hear a name other then any of the art schools within our 5 mile radius. The two other honorable mentions offered were also awarded outside of that radius. What’s up inner city design students…too many Empty Bottle shows? The AIGA has a new policy in place: student scholarships will be funded by student membership fees.

dK from mStoner headquarters. Happy Friday.

Posted by Kevin Rieg
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Powered By Orange: A Comprehensive Social Media Campaign

Powered By Orange, launched in March 2009 by Oregon State University, is the most comprehensive university social marketing campaign that we’ve seen to date.

With an integrated marketing communications plan already in place, OSU’s next step was to create a campaign to raise awareness of the university in Portland, Oregon’s biggest media market.

Unfortunately, the budget for TV time or outdoor advertising wasn’t available. But, drawing on insights from the original communications plan, a group of team members from the University Advancement division developed a plan and creative concepts to take advantage of an integrated social media campaign. They tested these ideas with a mixed group of campus staff and leaders, including representatives of the OSU Foundation, the OSU Alumni Association, college communications representatives, admissions staff, and others.

These ideas evolved into Powered By Orange, which is now well-entrenched at OSU and appears to be on the verge of going viral.

According to Luanne Lawrence, vice president for advancement at OSU, “The feedback was consistently supportive of the Powered By Orange concept. So, we developed the campaign a bit more and tested it at a few alumni events and in focus groups and discussions with faculty, staff and students. Each conversation improved the concept and grew it to where it is going (and is still growing).”

What’s Powered By Orange?

What’s Powered By Orange? Here’s the answer from the PBO website:

“It’s you—the network of alumni, students, faculty, staff, friends and fans connected to Oregon State University. It’s the positive impact you make every day in Portland and beyond—on the economy, the environment and the community. Use this Web site to tell your story and connect with the other practical idealists who are Powered by Orange.”

One of the key insights from the research that led to the integrated marketing plan was the necessity of connecting with younger alumni, who are critical to future giving. Testing showed that this audience in particular wanted reassurance that OSU was making an impact on the world. “Not only did the research gave us insights into the needs of some of our key audiences—but it was a no-brainer to reach out to young alumni through channels that they were familiar with,” said David Baker, OSU’s director of web communications.

In short order, Baker’s Web Communications unit, in collaboration with University Marketing, designed a website powered by Wordpress to serve as the hub for Powered By Orange. Planning and execution of the site and social networking components, Baker said, “took a couple of months from first concept to site launch. We were able to move quickly because we had that research.”

[Note: for those interested in the details, Web Communications at OSU has six staff members: a director, assistant director/developer, web designer, writer, multimedia producer and a social media specialist. Baker said, “This last role is brand new as of last month, and we currently have it filled temporarily by a recent grad with a marketing background. If it works out (and it’s going nicely), we’ll make it permanent.”]

The PBO online ecosystem

The PBO website aggregates a significant number of social media tools and social networks.

• A focal point of the site is a Google Map that allows people who are Powered By Orange to place a dot to mark their location. Baker said, “Lots of people are adding themselves to the map because they are connected to OSU and OSU has played a part in making them who they are. They’re showing that they are part of their community—and not just through their profession. In fact, this reinforces how community-oriented OSU students are.”


• Content from the PBO Blog is featured prominently on the site; it is also syndicated to the PBO LinkedIn group and to OSU’s Portland Metro website. It will also be featured on OSU’s top-level pages, which are currently being redesigned.


• OSU has also focused heavily on developing video content for PBO. A YouTube video is featured prominently on the PBO home page, and this is just the start. Videos are housed on a YouTube page that currently features 36 videos. The videos are created primarily by a graduate assistant with video experience, though Baker emphasized the importance of having a cache of Flip videos that can be loaned out to faculty and students; at OSU, Flip video is often edited into video shot with the university’s high-quality video camera.


• The videos are syndicated into the Powered by Orange - 10,000 Beavers page on Facebook. And there’s an extensive Flickr gallery where people can post photos of Benny, the OSU mascot, in various places. An image of Benny can be downloaded from a gallery that includes computer desktop wallpaper; a doorhanger; and PBO website tags.


• OSU’s Twitter feed (@poweredbyorange) and a LinkedIn group are part of the package, too.

PBO now far beyond Portland

Though originally targeted to Portland, the campaign took off quickly. “Believe it or not, we’re still in the quiet phase of the launch,” Baker said. “We haven’t done much promotion to speak of, no print buys, no advertising, no PR. But we already have more than 10,000 page views on the PBO site and more than 1,600 members in our Facebook group. PBO has resonated well with the alumni who’ve discovered it, both young & old.”

With such a bold campaign, Luanne Lawrence knew that she had to be proactive in unveiling it for many OSU constituencies. She observed, “Like all other states, Oregon’s immediate financial future is dim. With a higher-than 12 percent unemployment rate and university reductions in the 12-22 percent range, morale was low. So, I decided to try to take PBO out on a road show to gauge its ability to create excitement, shared vision, anecdotes, and dreams of how to implement it. We also wanted feedback on how to make it better.”

She continued, “The response has exceeded my expectations. PBO has become something for people here to ‘hold on to.’ Faculty, staff and students are defining what the campaign means in their own way. My goal is to not control this campaign, but let others run with it. I want Beavers of all walks of life to define what it means to be ‘powered by orange’—to define their contributions as Beavers to their professions and communities; to use our main color, orange, to express themselves artistically, to make it their own.”

One big surprise of PBO, Baker said, is that this has actually happened. “Other departments and units at OSU became so interested in adapting it for their purposes. That made us change our thinking and change our direction to enable people to use the campaign to be their own advocates. We’re trying to be flexible in giving up control. The flexible theme resonates with people who are used to having control over their communications, rather than having it dictated to them.”

For example, the Athletics department simultaneously rolled out the ”I am Orange” campaign. Luanne Lawrence noted, “We are seamless in using the color to self identify and create spirit … at least in this first phase.”

The campaign handed out PBO stickers to this year’s graduating seniors, who showed up at graduation with the stickers on their caps.

Luanne Lawrence reported, “We intended to keep this in the quiet phase until September when we planned a major public launch, but now I prefer to say that we are in the ‘viral’ phase before the public launch. It has been embraced by many people already.”

“It has really taken off on campus—students really like it,” Baker said. This could be just one more sign that the PBO campaign may be set to go viral.

Tracking results

Baker emphasizes that OSU is not only in a “launch and learn” phase with the PBO campaign—but also is assessing its impact. Most of the feedback to date has been anecdotal—and positive. He noted, for example, “Feedback from Luanne Lawrence’s presentations to different groups has been very positive so far, as it has from the focus groups we’ve conducted.”

Baker is also tracking the PBO Twitter feed. “We only have about 260 followers, but they are mostly business owners who are interested in sustainability. This could be very useful in the future.”

When asked whether audience members were contributing content—in particular blog comments or homemade videos—Baker noted that audience participation was heaviest on PBO’s Flickr gallery, where people were posting and tagging photos. “We found it very difficult for people to produce videos—which is an experience that is fairly common on other websites, too.” As for blog comments, he observed that the blog is an institutional blog and has less of a personality and, as a result, less engagement, than a personal blog might have.

In any case, OSU is quite satisfied with the results of the campaign so far.

Advice to others

When asked what advice he’d give to people at other institutions who wanted to launch a campaign like Powered By Orange, Baker noted three key points:

• Do some groundwork. “One of the reasons we were able to do this so quickly is because we had spent a year doing research and planning an integrated marketing campaign for OSU,” he pointed out. Still, expectation setting is really important, he emphasized.


• Launch and learn. Be prepared to make adjustments to your strategy and your campaign after you launch it.


• Think of it as a grassroots effort that builds over time.

There hasn’t been much pushback on the PBO campaign, Baker reported. And, what little has occurred, Luanne Lawrence noted, comes from communications professionals who are uncomfortable with the notion that OSU is launching the campaign and doesn’t intend to control it. “I run up against some who subscribe to older models—pushing out press releases, paying for ads, controlling events, etc. While we still have these tactics in our mix, we are risking as much as we can to empower larger communities.”

Lawrence added, “This is not a high-comfort area for some in higher ed, so I have learned that it takes a tireless and enthusiastic leader to ensure that this approach is successful. If I weren’t a vice president with such a passion for making this campaign viral and in using a mix of traditional with very nontraditional media, I’m not sure this PBO campaign would have seen the light of day.”

In short, to ensure success of a campaign like this, one has to take risks.

And no campaign with perceived risks will be successful without a visionary and indefatigable leader. Clearly, PBO has two such leaders who are willing to venture out, but not recklessly. OSU’s approach demonstrates that research, planning, and thoughtful experimentation increase the odds that such ingenuity will be rewarded.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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mStonerblog Turns Six

Last year, Kyle James posted ”The Six Month Post - Revisiting This Blog’s Purpose.” One of Kyle’s points was that a blogger needs to look back and take stock of what the blog has accomplished. After I read that post, I thought: “That’s a cool thing to do, I should do it.” So I made some notes and started writing a post of my own.

Then I realized that I wanted to publish that post today. Why? Because today marks six years since mStonerblog launched.

Ah, those early days!

It’s hard to believe today, but way back on 13 June 2003, there weren’t many blogs focusing on education marketing, branding, communications, PR, technology, admissions, advancement, and related issues. Not only was mStonerblog one of the first blogs to focus on these issues, but I believe we were the first communications consulting firm for .edu to blog. (I’m happy to be corrected in this and am interested in knowing about others that were launched before or around the same time; please leave a comment or send me email.)

In part, the story of this blog is the story of mStoner. Voltaire Miran, Rob Cima, and I launched mStoner in 2001. Rob and I had been working together since 1997 at a Chicago marketing firm where I was vice president for new media. I hired Voltaire in 1999. It was logical for the three of us to continue the great working relationship we’d established and launch our own company.

Our vision for mStoner was that we would be a different kind of communications consulting firm. In 2001, we believed, there was no other firm that focused on the website as the centerpiece of an institution’s communications and marketing. We envisioned mStoner as a company that would do that and—and support the development of stellar websites and other communications with the appropriate technology, technology that clients could sustain as well as own.

By early 2003, mStoner was thriving. We decided to create mStonerblog so we could share our insights and ideas—insights into useful tools, implementation strategies, best practices—and augment the workshops and conference presentations we were doing. At the time, blogging seemed to be a powerful and distinctive way of furthering our mission of sharing knowledge and building awareness.

And now: What’s changed, or changing?

We’ve been fortunate since the beginning of our company to have many talented staff members. mStonerblog was intended to be a company blog where all of us could share our ideas and insights. But the reality is that I’ve written the majority of the posts, sometimes blogging regularly and at other times not posting for weeks. Now, though, all of us at mStoner are trying to focus more on the blog, posting regularly and sharing what we’ve learned from our client work. So you’ll see more of our staff members blogging.

When we launched, blogging was less about building a community around your blog and more about sharing your viewpoint. While we’re still sharing our individual points of view in our posts, we’re also trying to do more to invite comments and gain broader engagement. Though I must note that our primary work is not our blogging, but serving our clients.

The blog has evolved over time. Initially, our posts were short, primarily sets of links with a little commentary about them. Now, we tend to do longer, original posts. I tend to write more about research than my colleagues do and, not surprisingly, Doug Gapinski and Laurel Hechanova write a lot more (and a lot more intelligently) about design than I do.

I’m spending more time on Twitter these days, so I tend to use it to share links to articles that are interesting, but that don’t evoke a strong reaction from me (I tweet as @mStonerblog: please follow me!). At one time, I might have written a blog post about some of them.

We’ve redesigned the blog at least twice. We launched a major redesign about a month ago, pegged to a redesign of our corporate identity that we implemented about two years ago. We’re still using Expression Engine as our blogging platform—and now it also powers our website.

And we’re talking and thinking more about how to measure the impact of this blog. Just how to do that is not as straightforward as you might imagine, though. I’ve never been someone who believes that having a huge number of followers or comments is important, so it’s not particularly important to me to amass a huge readership (or, for that matter, thousands of followers on Twitter).

OTOH, I’m well aware that our blog has impact. People tell me that our blog posts are valuable to them. I get emails about blog posts I’ve written. When I visit clients, I hear about how much they’ve appreciated something we’ve written. I’ve been in meetings with presidents, heads, or CEOs who want to discuss a blog post their staff has shared with them. I’ve seen our Google Analytics numbers go up before—or just after—I visit a prospective client. That’s all impact: but much of it is hard to quantify.

I also know that our blogging makes mStoner fairly transparent. Anyone who’s interested in hiring us can find out a great deal about how we practice by reading our blog. Much more, in fact, than any of our competitors. As a firm, we pretty much practice what we preach. I believe that’s extremely valuable.

But why should people pay attention to mStonerblog?

About a month ago, Karine Joly asked me to answer some questions for a post about mStonerblog prior to the conclusion of judging for the Edustyle awards.

Karine asked a good question, one that might not have occurred to me when I was writing this post: In your opinion, what is the biggest differentiator of your blog? What makes it different from the other higher ed blogs? I liked the question and have thought some more about the answers I gave Karine.

One of the key differentiators about mStonerblog is our credibility. The day job for (almost) every member of our staff involves solving problems for clients: collectively, we’ve worked on more than 350 projects involving issues of Internet strategy, web development, change management, identity development, staffing, web or print design, content management selection, coding—and more. We’ve served more than 200 institutions ranging from boarding schools, through liberal arts colleges, research universities, professional schools. Our smallest client was an institution that wanted to recruit about a dozen students a year; we’ve worked for state institutions that recruit thousands. Yesterday, Rob, our CTO, told me that we’ve done more than 150 content management system implementations. I was shocked: I’d lost count!

Our posts have a breadth that it’s hard for a solo practitioner, or a small group, to achieve. We’re not sharing observations based on theory about how things work or observations based on knowledge of a few similar institutions. Instead, our views are based on experience with many, diverse institutions that we’ve worked with to solve varied problems in admissions, fundraising, advancement, alumni and other areas.

As a result, we can be more authoritative: we have a good sense of what works and what doesn’t; where the sticking points are; what organizations are capable of and what they’re not capable of. It pleases me to hear that staff members use our posts to shape decisions that their leaders are making—that’s one validation of our ideas.

Ultimately, mStoner will be judged by the quality of our work, so we work very hard to deliver the first-rate strategy, content, design, coding and other work products our clients expect. But we also want our colleagues and friends to be able to count on our blog to deliver the kinds of unique insights they’ve come to expect for the past six years.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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The Recession: the Prospective’s Perspective

According to a survey conducted by the National Association for Business Economics, leading forecasters predict the end of the recession to be imminent: “About 74 percent of the forecasters expect the recession—which started in December 2007 and is the longest since World War II—to end in the third quarter. Another 19 percent predict the turning point will come in the final three months of this year, and the remaining 7 percent believe the recession will end in the first quarter of 2010.”

But while it lasts—and even after it’s over—what kind of impact will the economic downturn have on college enrollment? We marketing and admissions consultants and institutional professionals have had plenty of time to think about our points of view and ponder some of the big questions, such as: What will happen to admission trends in the next 10 years? Is there going to be a marked shift in the admissions landscape?

Meanwhile, consider the perspective of future students and families looking to send one or more children to college. They are worried about their own challenges. Loans have been much harder to come by and many households have one or more breadwinners out of work, so finding affordable ways to send students to college is a common source of frustration for American families.

Sometimes hearing personal stories is the best way to understand how the recession is affecting the people our institutions serve.

I found this collection of NPR stories and streaming audio from the last 11 months. If you’re interested in hearing a series that takes an empathetic approach to telling the story of the recession from the point of view of students and families who want to send their child to college at a bleak point in the American economy, check out the link. The streaming audio gives you the freedom to listen while you work .. after all, we’re not out of the recession yet!

Posted by Doug Gapinski
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Teens to Advertisers: We Don’t Want Your Texts (and Other Insights from YPulse Mashup)

I’m attending the YPulse Youth Marketing mashup in San Francisco, hoping to learn how top brands among teens and tweens manage to be successful in marketing to this incredibly discriminating audience. [You can follow #ypulse09 on Twitter if you’re interested.]

One of the best panels I’ve heard so far was a presentation by Bill Carter, a partner in Fuse Marketing, who talked about a study that Fuse did in conjunction with the University of Massachusetts on brand advertising aimed at teens. The survey—done with teens in “Sarah Palin’s America” (e.g. not just teens from the coasts and big cities)—aimed at whether advertising was memorable and presented in a channel that appealed to teens.

Carter emphasized the disconnects between what marketers believe is true about the power of various channels and what teens and tweens think, using these examples:

• TV is not dead to teens: 75% prefer and/or believe it’s appropriate for brands to reach them via TV ads.


• Teens are not interested in interacting with brands on social networks—at least the way brands represent themselves currently. Teens use social networking sites to connect with friends and do things that are fun—they don’t relate to brands online. Only 30% of teens have “friended a brand” on a social network.


• Official company websites aren’t dead: 80% of teens have gone to a official company’s product site and used them to make purchase decisions.


• Only 10% of teens approve of advertising in video games—teens just don’t believe that having advertisers in a game makes it more realistic. Carter said that ads for Burton snow boards in a videogame about snowboarding could make sense, but only because they’re in context.


• Teens aren’t interested in or receptive to ads in text messages: only 10% of teens approve of texting by advertisers; this ranked dead last in approval ratings by teens in what was acceptable in communications. Carter said that he believes this is mostly due to the way that current advertisers are using the medium, but it’s currently the case.


• Teens still read magazines: magazine ads receive high approvals and are the second-most-effective medium in reaching them.


• Teens say that the most effective advertising includes “people who look like me.” Only 20% prefer ads with celebrities or athletes as endorsers. The most memorable ad among teens was Verizon’s “can you hear me now” guy, Carter said.

In the Fuse study, 83% of those surveyed were average or heavy users of the Internet; 80% were average or heavy users of TV; 63% were average or heavy users of email; and 47% were average or heavy users of social networks.

Of the 80% of those surveyed who visited an official product website, 80% somewhat or strongly agreed that the site was valuable.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Articles, handouts, downloads / Marketing and branding / Real life

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Share and Tell

Here’s a sampling of some of the links that got passed around the mStoner offices in the last month… links dealing with social networking, higher education, search engines, and yes, streaking.

Posted by Doug Gapinski
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The UB Project Report: Week Five

End of week five, Buffalo. Last week, we completed a fairly intense daylong workshop with Indi Young and Eric Fain, devoted mostly to the principles of non-leading interviews and the process of combing through transcripts for the tasks that will eventually be the building blocks for our mental models.

I’ve come to two conclusions:

First, the best interviewers for this process are the ones who have:

a) gone through several years of therapy and/or have a parent in the counseling profession
b) done a good deal of teaching in some sort of setting
c) led an awful lot of intake meetings over time

As Jeremiah put it, it’s a hard thing to pull back from “tell me what you want and need, oh my wonderful client” to allowing the conversation to go where it needs to go. Indi likens it in her book to the kind of conversation you’d likely have with someone at a cocktail party. (Funny, but those are the hardest to remember through the martini haze.)

The second conclusion is that parsing human behavior is a hard, hard, hard thing to do. One of the things that I really love about Indi’s mental models framework is that it provides a fairly granular and scientific methodology for understanding your users’ expectations and needs. It’s time- and labor-intensive (and it also requires a great deal of discipline in consistently dissecting from interview to interview), but it’s thorough and the resulting IA is imminently defensible.

Our project team spent most of this week laying the technical groundwork for scheduling, recording, and processing phone interviews—Google Apps, Skype and plugins, Garageband, and Quicktime, oh my. Next up, 66 one-hour calls over three weeks. We’ve got four interviewers and four audio-transcript combers prepping for the breakneck effort. Let the wild rumpus start!

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
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