Recipes for Success: Independent schools break the mold when it comes to social media

My article “Recipes for Success: Independent schools break the mold when it comes to social media,” appears in the print edition of January’s CASE Currents and on CASE’s website [though a login is required to read it].

Here are some key takeaways:

• Because of their small scale and relative lack of bureaucracy, it’s often easier for schools to experiment with social media.


• Aside from embrace of social media—with some encouraging results at places like Baylor School and Beaver Country Day School—there’s some really innovative work going on. Northfield Mount Hermon has merged social media feeds into its website and Worcester Academy’s mashup brings the voices of many members of the school to WAMash.

CASE has generously given us permission to distribute a reprint of ”Recipes for Success.” [Thank you, Currents staff!]

And I wrote up interview notes from some of the people I talked to as a series of case studies:

• Baylor School, Small Staff, Smart Choices Yield Social Media Success So Far for Baylor School


• Beaver Country Day School, Social Media in Action at Beaver Country Day School


• Northfield Mount Hermon School, Northfield Mount Hermon: Social Media Done Right


• Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?


• Worcester Academy, Living Institutional Life Online at Worcester Academy

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Timing is Everything

If you’re considering changes to your website, chances are that one of the first questions you’ll hear from your campus community is: “How long will it take?”

Unfortunately, that’s not an easy question to answer.

First, you’ll need to decide whether the project is a simple redesign—adding some new graphic elements, content, or features—or involves totally rebuilding the site. (We’d call this a “redevelopment project.”)

A site redesign can take a few months. But, with or without help from an outside consultant, a website redevelopment process is time-consuming. We estimate that it takes from seven months to one year to perform a complete site redevelopment project that includes a content management system implementation. A more limited project can be accomplished in less time, of course. But remember the old adage: “Fast, good, or cheap: pick two.”

Managing a web redevelopment project takes a lot of time, so if you’re the project manager on campus, you can expect to be very busy during the project. Nancy Prater, who managed the redevelopment of Ball State University’s website (BSU.edu), estimated that she spent 25-50 percent of her time on the website relaunch project while it was underway; during the final six weeks before launch, it was 100 percent. (Nancy shared some of her insights about her experience in this post).

Susan T. Evans led the redesign of William & Mary’s website. Here are some estimates of the time she spent on this project from May 2006 to July 2008 (totals include her time only, not that of the other members of her team):

• Preplanning/assessment/needs analysis (prior to hiring a consultant): 125 hours


• Kickoff/RFP: 280 hours


• Redesign (working with mStoner): 2,700 hours or 30 hrs/week for 104 weeks

Of course, William & Mary is a fairly large, complex university with undergraduate programs and graduate and professional schools. If you work at a smaller professional or independent school, you won’t spend as much time as Susan did on the project-but it will still take a lot of time.

How about the amount of time it will take to accomplish different phases of the project? Here are estimates of how long it takes our team of experienced writers, designers, and developers to complete various phases of a web project:

• Write 50 pages of web content: from start to finish, including research, writing, and editing: six weeks


• Develop three creative concepts: from creative brief to presentation: three weeks


• Develop six templates from a finished home page concept: two weeks


• Poduce HTML files from completed designs and test them in preparation for CMS templating: three weeks


• Implement a set of nine templates in Drupal (an open source content management system): four weeks


• Beta test a new, 500-page website: four weeks

Note: This is an excerpt from our new white paper, “Redeveloping Your Website: Asking the Right Questions, Finding the Right Partner.” You can download your own copy and share your comments about it.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Broad Engagement Abhors a Caveat: or, a Giant Learns to Fist Bump Without Crushing the Townspeople

NBC Chicago’s masthead. 03 November 2009

Today my city is “laughing about Jessica Simpson ripping Melrose.” I’m not specifically, but it’s plausible that many other Chicagoans are.

Clicking on the quote (notably displayed in NBC Chicago’s masthead) brings me to a page showing that over half of sampled Chicagoans find Ms. Simpson’s diatribe amusing. Further, a quarter of us could care less, and the rest of us are evenly split as being either “thrilled,” “sad,” “furious,” or “intrigued.”

How did a large corporation get us to admit this without coming across as our painfully-uncool-but-tries-to-be-hip Dad? Essentially, it did three things:

1.) It scaled itself down to a smaller, more personable entity. For the purposes of this audience, NBC became NBC Chicago. Bravely, “NBC” isn’t even stated. It’s implied by their logo. (Granted, it’s not that brave when your logo is as well-known as theirs, but for a media behemoth, this act is a veritable trust fall.)
2.) It lowered the barriers to participation. If you’re a member of their site, all it takes is some brief introspection and a mouse-click to voice your opinion on the subject.
3.) It overtly displays the results of participation. Your response to a survey gets added to the tally, the results of which show up larger than the headline of the story. This kind of treatment says, in a very immediate way, that what you think, dear reader, is as important as the subject matter itself. Stating a group’s opinion as a kind of citywide status message on the site’s front page, reinforces that message and invites discourse.

Plot twist!
Point number two is qualified: “if you’re a member of their site.” I’m not. I didn’t participate in the poll. Although, I made it most of the way towards doing so. I skimmed the article, formed an opinion, and clicked on “intrigued.” Then, one last hurdle popped up requesting my email address and a password in order to become a member. As a member of dozens of other sites already, I felt the weight of all of my username and password combinations (which are attached to one or more of my four main email addresses) bear down. In fact, each time a site asks me to create a new account I become increasingly wary and less likely to do so. This time was no exception, and I closed the window and left the site.

Obviously, this hurdle wasn’t too high for the others who participated in the Simpson/Melrose survey, so the value of getting an email address might be enough for NBC to keep it in place. One begins to wonder, though: how many others like me have they lost as potential participants? Moreover, asking for identification corrupts the notion that they genuinely want everyone to participate. I’d posit that more value is gained by getting me to dive into the site and stick around than by getting my email address. If they emailed me anything, I’d most likely just delete it. Or, I’d open it and immediately scroll down to the bottom to unsubscribe.

Them’s the brakes, NBC.

The Moral
While they did more than most to engage their audience, NBC might want to reconsider that last step. My advice to all of you: keep the barriers to participation as low as you can afford to, and keep the longview in mind when you define “low.”

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Small Staff, Smart Choices Yield Social Media Success So Far for Baylor School

Immersing yourself in social media isn’t easy when you manage communications and marketing for an education institution, even a small one. There’s already a lot on your plate: events to produce and publicize, magazines to put out, a website to update. That’s certainly true at the Baylor School, a boarding and day school in Chattanooga, TN, where Barbara Kennedy, associate vice president for external affairs, manages communications.

Kennedy’s team is responsible for marketing, media relations, publicity, PR, publications, a magazine, BaylorSchool.org, and programming and promoting the school’s summer programs. It’s a small staff: just Kennedy with a director for summer programs, a webmaster, a designer, and a freelance editor who helps with the school’s magazine.

Despite the existing workload, Kennedy knew that it was important to learn about social media and to incorporate these tools into her work. “I knew that I had to be responsive. I’m a 25-year PR veteran and I knew I had to adjust to these changes myself. And I know our audiences expect us to communicate in this way.”

So in spring, 2009, she and Bernard Fertal, Baylor’s webmaster, began exploring social media. “We wanted to be in the lead, but we didn’t want to proceed without really thinking through the advantages and disadvantages,” Kennedy said. “I think some people thought social media was just a fad that would soon fade away—and still others chose to ignore it. But we looked at it as a revolution in how we do our jobs.”

After some experience, she added, “Bottom line: we look at social media as a powerful way to leverage traditional marketing and communication tools that we already have in place.”

Pilot project focused on a class trip

After doing some exploration and research, Kennedy developed a pilot project to launch over the summer, when she had time to focus on it: a travel blog about a student trip to Washington D.C. with photos posted on Flickr. “This was only read by the students who were on the trip and their parents and there wasn’t much interaction, but it gave me a reality check on the time commitment. Then we started tweeting. And I had already been immersed personally with Facebook, so the Baylor School fan page was the next logical step once classes began in August.”

These continue to be her focus. “I’m amazed at how quickly the Facebook page took off: it has grown virally, as has @BaylorSchool [1216 fans and 103 followers as of 28 October 2009]. We plan to do a radio promotion directing people to follow us on Facebook and Twitter, so we’ll see how those numbers grow.”

Kennedy’s main focus is The Baylor Blog, which feeds the fan page. She said, “Since I am generating all of the news items on our website and much of the information that we share with parents and students on a regular basis, I do the updates on Facebook and the blog.”

Tweets are drawn from the school’s daily announcements and other web content and lead back to news stories on BaylorSchool.org. Fertal manages @baylorschool and handles most of the tweets.

As a communicator, Kennedy appreciates the flexibility social media gives her in telling a story—and allows her to watch how her stories spread. “As someone in communications, the feedback and data I get on posts is invaluable.” As an example, she talked about some photos she posted of Korean students celebrating a Korean holiday. “I’m interested to see how many of those kids will interact, showing me if it’s viable to reach students in Asia this way. I may not get much interaction, but I’m watching what happens.”

Kennedy also appreciates how much she can learn about her audience. “Our total fan base is predominantly ages 13-24, almost evenly split male/female. As a boarding school, it is also of great value to see that 1,002 of our Facebook fans are from outside of the state, and 39 of those fans represent 19 different countries. Having the data also informs my choices on what to post, and will no doubt shape our communication strategies in the coming months. For example, 100% of the interaction has been from females (ages 35-44, 40 percent), (ages 45-54, 40 percent), (ages 13-17, 13 percent), and (ages 55+, 7 percent).”

She continued, “This week, we have pulled in 17 percent participation from males and our younger fans are becoming more active. So I’m thinking harder about posts that I feel will keep connecting with them. Our next step is to leverage this information with admission and fund-raising.”

And this data helps her to gain support from Baylor’s board. “I felt that some of my colleagues were just being polite when I talked about social media, but when I shared some of this data with the board, they really responded. They got that it was a whole new way of communicating.”

Challenges? What challenges?

When asked about challenges in putting social networking into practice, Kennedy said, “It has been ridiculously easy, but it was personally scary for me to let go of some of the control. I was blocked for awhile on creating the fan page because I wasn’t sure anyone would respond to it. Silly, huh?”

Kennedy and Baylor have not encountered any discipline problems or issues with their own ventures in social networking, but that doesn’t mean that Kennedy hasn’t had “an aha moment” around potential abuses of social networking. “A couple of years ago, a reporter ‘friended’ some students on Facebook to get a quote regarding a controversial issue on campus. He ran the story with a student’s quote and I was just blown away. Because I also handle media relations, it was a teachable moment for me, the student, and others in our school community. That was my first experience with Facebook—and, when you think about it, it’s a miracle that I grew to love it!”

Although being an active blogger and Facebooker take more time in her day, it hasn’t been a big burden for Kennedy. “Honestly, it takes me just a few more minutes a day. I would be developing news content for the website anyway, so copying and pasting into the fan page and tweeting about it—is really just a few extra minutes.”

Even the interaction is manageable, Kennedy has found. “I don’t follow up much, though I do spend time reading comments and think about how they might inform what I post. For Twitter, I’m looking at what people are reading, RTing, and I’m thinking about they say. This takes 10-20 minutes a day. I could spend more time on it, but I don’t. I have to set some boundaries.”

The effort she’s put into social media—and its payback—have resulted in some plans for the near future:

• Silverpoint, Baylor School’s web partner, is designing a mashup page that pulls together the school’s various feeds; it should go live this fall.


• Kennedy is also exploring how she can incorporate a Flip video camera and iMovie into her communications retinue, and her immersion in social media is causing her to rethink how she will present Baylor’s magazine when it moves online. The current print magazine is mailed twice a year to 10,000 people. Kennedy isn’t sure what an online version of the magazine will look like, but she is sure that her effort won’t involve slapping a PDF on BaylorSchool.org. “I’m thinking about how we can tell stories through video and audio,” she said.


• Finally, there’s a need for other voices to join the conversation online. She’d like to include more student voices, but that hasn’t happened much yet. One of her concerns is the amount of time they could spend: “I don’t have a lot of confidence in their level of commitment to it—they have a whole lot of things going on,” she said. And she’d like to see other departments involved in contributing to and sustaining Baylor’s social media activities. “We need other voices to join the conversation and in doing so contribute to the effort,” she said.

Note: This post is the result of research and interviews for an article on innovations in social media by independent schools. It will appear in the January 2010 issue of CASE Currents. There are four related posts:

• An interview with Chuck Will, from Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?;


• A case study on how Northfield Mount Hermon School’s new website will incorporate social media;
• 
  
• A post about online life at Worcester Academy.


• A case study of social media in action at Beaver Country Day School
.

Update: The mashup page went live the week of 2 December:

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Social Media in Action at Beaver Country Day School

At Beaver Country Day School, an independent school in Brookline, MA, social media plays an increasingly important role in marketing and communications and in the classroom. Jan Devereux, BCDS director of communications, said that the school’s laptop initiative and significant investment in information technology and professional development has accelerated the momentum for these (and other) online communications.

In contrast to the social media activity at Worcester Academy, most of what an outsider sees of BCDS’s social media is targeted toward prospective families, alumni, and other external constituencies and is produced and managed by school staff. Behind the scenes, though, there’s much more going on. Devereux said, “In our classrooms, teachers are using all sorts of Web 2.0 applications as learning and teaching tools—blogs, Ning groups, wikis, YouTube. etc. This effort was piloted in 2008-09 and is now active in every class.”

Devereux said that she began exploring how BCDS could use social media more effectively in its marketing and communications activities when planning began for a relaunch of BCDSchool.org in 2008. “A goal of that redesign was to make the site more interactive,” she said.

She’s encountered no obstacles to rolling out an array of social media initiatives. The school’s administration was very supportive: “We are lucky that our administration has been very supportive and trusting of our experimenting in the social media arena without a drawn out trial and approval process.”

She added, “At Beaver, it’s in our DNA to ‘try new things.’ Peter Hutton, our head of school, says, “We’re going to make mistakes but we’re going to make excellent mistakes.”

Devereux is clear about what BCDS is trying to accomplish with social media, at least for now. “Its purpose is two-fold: to promote connections with and among members of the community (hopefully resulting increased financial support and school spirit) and to enhance our brand image (hopefully boosting admissions),” she said.

Social media in action at BCDS

BCDS social media initiatives include the following:

Facebook: Devereux said, “We have a fan page where we post photos, videos, and brief news items designed to keep in touch with our 413 (and growing) fans and to promote school events. We also have a private alumni group (currently with 146 members), which we use primarily as a platform for alumni to (re-)connect with each other. Here, we post alumni events, but not news.” She added, “There are also a couple of class-specific group pages started independently by alumni.”

BCDS is a WhippleHill customer and uses the company’s Facebook Connect feature, which allows visitors to BCDSchool.org to share news to their Facebook, Twitter and other social media accounts.

Twitter: BCDS has a main Twitter account @BCDSchool and a second, @BCDSweb, which used by the communications staff. Devereux explained, “We post to the main account a couple of times a week—sports scores, news of guest speakers, a photo now and then. We try to keep it lighthearted and upbeat, and are somewhat wary of bombarding our followers with every little thing.” @BCDSweb is used primarily to network and share info with other school communicators and education marketing/media folks.

@BCDSchool feeds directly into the school’s portal, making the tweets accessible to non-followers.

LinkedIn: As far as LinkedIn is concerned, Devereux noted, “We created a Beaver group on Linkedin where current and former faculty and staff can connect with each other and alumni. We have not used it to post job openings at the school.”

Classroom activity: Various social networking tools and applications are used in all BCDS classrooms as a part of school’s 1:1 laptop program which began this year. Some of these sites are linked to BCDS’s mashup.

Devereux and her communications colleague Matt Clobridge manage the Twitter Facebook accounts. BCDS’s alumni relations director, Shira Lewin, also works with them to update Facebook. Lewin has reserved @BCDSalumni but hasn’t started tweeting from that account yet. Deveruex said, “We’re not sure there’s a separate audience for alumni-specific tweets.”

Finally, A new page pulls various social media and social network feeds into BCDS’s website giving current and prospective families a window on how social media are being used as teaching tools.

The biggest challenge? Finding the time!

So far, the biggest challenge in putting social networking into practice, Devereux said, is time. “Managing social media could be a full-time job,” she remarked. “In general, the online side of our jobs is taking a huge amount of time—and it’s getting bigger. In five years, the balance has shifted to doing just about everything online.”

She observed that social media has become an organic process. “We do it as it happens—we don’t ‘plan,’ but respond to opportunities because there’s always something going on on campus.” But it’s not as if it’s random. “We keep in mind what we want people to know about us: today, we had four kids who were recognized by National Merit Scholarship. We want people to know about this so, we posted it. The next tweet might something about sports or a guest speaker.”

The immediacy of social media appeals to Clobridge. “Yesterday, a singer-songwriter came to an English class, so we took a Flip video camera and covered it as a web news story.”

Clobridge came to BCDS from a public elementary school and appreciates the fact that his current environment provides many more opportunities for him to take action without overthinking them or seeking approval.

Although Devereux joked about the risk of making mistakes on their social media activities, she said, “There haven’t been any major gaffes.” And there haven’t even been snide wall posts or negative blog comments. Clobridge said, “People have been respectful and haven’t done it.”

At BCDS, Devereux noted, “There’s a culture of respect and tolerance that carries through everything Beaver does. Teachers talk to students about how their online identities are a reflection of who they are and the importance of being respectful in a public forum.”

Note: This post is the result of research and interviews for an article on innovations in social media by independent schools. It will appear in the January 2010 issue of CASE Currents. There are four related posts:

• An interview with Chuck Will, from Proctor Academy, Innovator: Chuck Will, The Longest-Running Blogger in Education?;


• A case study on how Northfield Mount Hermon School’s new website will incorporate social media;
• 
  
• A post about online life at Worcester Academy.


• A post about how the small staff at Baylor School handles social networking.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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When You’re Hiring a Consultant, Does Education Experience Matter?

“We want a fresh perspective, so we selected a consultant who has never worked in education before.”

That’s something we occasionally hear from someone who is calling to tell us that they hired another firm. They believe a consultant who works with other kinds of clients will deliver a different solution, one that they wouldn’t get from us or other firms who work primarily with schools, colleges, and universities.

Pardon me, but I’m skeptical.

It’s true that some consultants who work in .edu do seem to crank out work that looks very similar (though most don’t). But much more importantly, I haven’t seen a whole lot of evidence of fresh thinking or new perspectives in the websites, viewbooks, brand work, and other products emerging from the partnerships with consultants with that vaunted experience outside education.

Why is that the case? Here are some hypotheses:

• Schools, colleges and universities are complex institutions. So consultants who haven’t worked in .edu need to learn the business. But more importantly, they need to understand the culture. And it’s not easy to understand how to operate within the unique culture of an institution where power is diffuse, decision-making is often unclear, and relationships can be complicated. Even with a firm grasp on these dynamics, it can be hard to move the needle. So consultants that don’t understand colleges and universities have a pretty steep learning curve.


• By their nature, colleges and universities are conservative institutions. Most are unwilling to step too far out ahead of their peers—to take too many chances. So even when some people at an institution say they want something different, when it comes down to final decisions, they’ll likely opt for the safer option rather than the riskier one.


• Even if institutions are willing to sign off on a risk, key constituents aren’t. I can think of many examples in our own work where edgy designs—considered front-runners by the staff members we were working with—have been rejected after testing with target visitors and constituents. Or the college staff who told us “No purple on our web design!” and changed their minds when alumni missed their school color. And despite all the talk about the changing needs and interests of web audiences, there are certain standards and practices that work—and our testing shows that people want those standards maintained.

So, does experience in education really matter when you’re hiring a consultant? I believe it does. Here are some ways in which consultants with .edu experience bring value to a project:

• A consultant’s experience in working in education will help you avoid mistakes of regression specific to independent school, college and university projects. Having a history of what’s been done before and how best practices have evolved—especially on the web and in print—can save you a lot of time and money.


• A consultant’s experience provides you with cover. You may know what you need (or think you do), but there’s a big difference between having the right solution and selling it to the people whose support you need to make it happen. Fair or unfair, hearing feedback or recommendations from a consultant with years of experience in education may hold more weight with your colleagues, helping you lay the groundwork for positive change at your institution.


• The consultant’s past work helps them to understand the culture of education and the challenge of building consensus in an environment where decisions are influenced by, if not determined by, many voices.  A consultant with experience in education will be familiar with the way things do (and don’t) get done in an environment like yours and can be a strong ally helping you to navigate your institution’s peculiar obstacle course.

What do you think?

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Innovators: Roger Johnson, Founder of Newswise

Thom Canalichio (left: that’s @newswise to his followers on Twitter) and Roger Johnson.

Last week, Jeremiah Owyang tweeted a query to his followers, asking about the first social network that they had used. Jeremiah followed up his tweet with a blog post, in which he asserted:

People often make the mistake that Friendster, Tribes, or some early social site was the first social network. People also make the mistake that Facebook is the largest social network to date, in reality, the largest social networks are email. Let’s run the numbers: … Hotmail has 375 million active accounts worldwide, Yahoo mail is reported at 280mm, and Facebook only has 200 million but growing. Email is the first—and largest—digital social network and will likely continue this path of domination, and hey, that’s coming from me, a social technology analyst.

I really appreciate Jeremiah’s perspective. I’m keenly aware of how email enhanced my own ability to network. [And in some ways, I could argue, email was a more effective bond for social networks than many of today’s options. But that’s the subject of another post.]

Roger Johnson, the founder and currently president and creative co-director of Newswise, is someone who appreciated early-on how powerful email and online forums could be. Before many people used the Internet—and even before Mosaic enabled people outside of a tiny community of researchers to use the Web—proprietary online services like Compuserve and Prodigy provided online communications (and social networking) through email, bulletin boards, and forums.

Roger, who was trained as a scientist, recognized how powerful these tools could be and founded Newswise to allow researchers; PR people from colleges, universities, and other nonprofit organizations; and news media to communicate with each other. According to the Newswise website:

Journalists look to Newswise as a trusted resource for knowledge-based news, embargoed research results, and expert contacts from the world’s leading research institutions: universities, colleges, laboratories, professional organizations, governmental agencies, and private research groups active in the fields of medicine, science, business, and the humanities. Newswise maintains a comprehensive database of current news, searchable archives, subscription wire services, and advanced information-management tools to enhance the value and efficiency of research-based news delivery for both journalists and source institutions.

Newswise also sponsors PIONet, a listserv (and social network!) for public information officers at colleges, universities, and other research organizations.

We asked Roger to respond to a series of questions about his experience founding Newswise and his observations about how the world of online communications has changed—and remained the same—since its founding.

What experience did you have in higher education before Newswise?
I earned a BS in chemistry from the University of Florida and a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Illinois Medical Center, Chicago. Then I was a postdoctoral fellow at both the University of Texas, Southwestern in Dallas, and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. While at Wisconsin, I changed careers from science research to journalism and participated in a science writers training program and courses in communication and writing.

I also later wrote for the National Institutes of Health, which is sort of a higher education institution, and worked for a scientific society (Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) whose members were scientists at universities throughout the US. I wrote about their research and coordinated my work with theirs.

What gave you the idea for Newswise? How did you get started?
Since buying my first personal computer in 1980 (Osborne with 5-inch screen and CP/M operating system) I was keen on using computers to improve my effectiveness. In the early days of bulletin board services (1990), I came up with the idea of creating an online, comprehensive source for digital information about science and medical research and started the first such service in 1992 on CompuServe‘s Journalism Forum.

This was before the Internet was widely used by academics, much less journalists, and before Mosaic was released [Mosaic, released in 1993, was the first web browser and made broader use of the web possible.]

What were some of the big challenges you faced in getting Newswise off the ground?
When I started Newswise, there was no demand and little perceived need among higher education news offices for digital information or delivery. Few people had email addresses. University news offices were mailing news releases; some were playing around with faxing. I gave our service away for three years because they were unwilling to pay for it.

What are some of the major changes Newswise has made to respond to changes in technology?
There have been many changes, including many operating systems and the move from CompuServe to the web. Now everyone in the profession, both PIOs and journalists, is online and has email. The introduction of video to the web has been big. Probably the most important improvement to the web has been the development of search engines, such as Google.

The media industry is changing; how will Newswise change in response?
The downsizing of major news media will not, in itself, change our service. Journalists are still important and providing the best technology for accessing them with research news by the most state-of-the-art technology will remain a major objective.

However, the decline of news media is correlated to the rise of the “new media,” and that presents a major new opportunity. This is bringing to fruition the goal of taking higher education information directly to the public. Newswise has embraced that new opportunity for helping our clients access a more diverse user base. We’re in the midst of working with clients to reach those users with a variety of social media tools and platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, blogs, etc.

What technologies are you tracking as you think about the future of Newswise?
It’s not so much the technologies as the strategies that are important right now. For example, you could say that Twitter is a technology, and most people in our profession have not even begun to try it, much less understand how it could be useful or made to be useful.

At Newswise, we’re pursuing a hypothesis for how Twitter would be useful—how could we create a broadcast channel? It involves two major problems: How do you create the content for the Twitter frame (140 character limit and ephemeral info) and how do you create an audience? These are the cutting-edge issues at this time with Twitter, which is the rave but clearly has unproven value. We are using Twitter to drive users to our clients’ research news on Newswise, and it is working. (Follow @newswise on Twitter.)

What key lessons have you learned from your experience in creating and running Newswise?
This is a tough question. Looking at the issue of relationship, it seems that the critical lesson is that our clients are really two groups with somewhat different—and sometimes even competing—interests. We have to maintain a balance between serving both those clients who pay us to deliver the info, and the journalists who read it. That is occasionally a delicate balance. It requires creativity, and that’s where the fun derives—to maintain the balance while being innovative. Similarly, a lesson is to always listen to feedback, even criticism, as if it were a contribution and the core of an idea for improving. The goal is to create partnership relationships. That is what makes work rewarding. It’s not much fun being categorized as a vendor.

When it comes to the technology part, summing it up seems too early—there’s too much happening right now. But one lesson is that with all of the changes in the medium, delivery, packaging, and platforms communication remains a separate thing, like the difference between brain and mind. For example, with the recent swine flu epidemic and the experience in the news media and the new media, I take a very positive view. It looks like collectively—the news media, new media, government, and public—handled it very well. With the exception of the slaughter of pigs in Egypt (and I’m not sure that wasn’t an urban myth) there were no horrible outcomes.

Technology has improved communication. It has democratized the process and brought more people into the process. Guy Kawasaki (the Twitter maniac) says he uses information “as a weapon.” I don’t take that view. It can be a weapon, but with public involvement in a responsible system, it brings us all to a higher level of participation, and we’ve passed a threshold where the system has developed learning mechanisms and is behaving like an intelligent entity.

What’s the next big thing that advancement/marketing/PR folks in higher ed need to pay attention to?
Clearly the social media/new media is the big sea change right now. (Maybe this is the cause of the melting Antarctic ice cap?) It’s evolving so rapidly that it is difficult to settle on a plan, so the plan needs to be more of an experiment and rapidly responding system. It is also complex and diverse. Just to use Twitter effectively, for example, requires using at least eight applications. I just read a blog that suggested monitoring your brand with 13 different apps. Relating to bloggers is far more complicated than relating to journalists. Social media is like the web before Google.

What I’m hearing from the majority of higher ed PIOs is that they are novices at social media. Most don’t have a plan to utilize it. What’s more, most don’t understand how to begin to create a strategy or have an idea for what is possible or what they should be trying to achieve. Some are starting a Twitter feed, but they are unclear who is the audience, how to recruit that audience, and what content they provide that audience. I’m not critical—it’s hard to have a plan when the landscape is changing so rapidly and the best approach might be to experiment or even play around. But allocating time to playing around doesn’t seem to resonate well, because people feel pressured to jump in and don’t have time to play around.

We’re in the early days of social media, and just as in the early days of the web, Newswise is trying to provide leadership by creating a strategy based on a collaborative model. I hypothesize that one university by itself would have difficulty creating a content channel that would interest national journalists or thought leaders or knowledge workers. Newswise can add value by gathering the content into a collaborative channel that creates more interest among these users.

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Flight of the Flyers: Social media and real-world action

Flight of the Flyers, produced by Nazareth College in Rochester, NY, was developed to be an amusing and engaging way for the college to connect its reunion alumni—and for them to connect with each other.

Nazareth also hoped to reconnect with inactive alumni; increase attendance at reunion (yes, its face-to-face reunion!); and improve the information it had on alumni. And to build pride in the Nazareth—one goal that has been surely furthered by the two CASE awards the site has already earned.

The judges’ report for the 2009 CASE Awards of Excellence for websites, in which Flight of the Flyers won a Gold, noted:

One judge remarked, “This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in this judging. A smart use of the web that promotes engagement and prompts action in the real world.” The site definitely exhibits a sense of humor—and appeal—given that 47 percent of visitors came back for two or more visits and pre-registration for Reunion is up 22 percent. Nevertheless, this is one of the sites that generated a lot of discussion among the judges. Some of the judges argued that the site deserved an award because of the way it linked the real world with the virtual one; others noted that it seemed a bit childish and its design is uninspiring. But, as one judge put it, “You can’t argue with success. That’s increased engagement in a time when perhaps people can’t afford to travel to reunions, or perhaps older people can’t travel to reunions but this is a way they can engage.”

The current Flight of the Flyers site represents the second generation of the project. According to Kerry Gotham, Nazareth College’s director of alumni relations, the program actually began in 2007 as a way to encourage participation in the college’s 2008 reunion—the second year in which reunion was to be held in spring, rather than fall.

“At that point, we wanted to grow our program. We had 450 people at our 2007 reunion and wanted to do better in 2008. I was intrigued by the Travelocity commercials featuring the roaming gnome and wanted to see if we could find a way to do something like that to build interest in our reunions. We wanted to go beyond the norm, do something different with the potential go have a peer-to-peer component.”

Thus was born Flight of the Flyers. The college decided to send stuffed “Golden Flyer” mascots to alumni in reunion classes and invite them to forward the birds to other reunion alumni. [That’s a total of 3,000 potential alumni who are registered members of reunion classes and can receive a (stuffed) Golden Flyer mascot by mail. Nazareth has 23,997 addressable alumni.] They set up a simple forwarding system using the U.S. Postal Service’s Click-N-Ship program.

Despite comments by naysayers—one of whom said, “Alumni will never pay to send these things to other alumni”—the program took off. During that first year, Nazareth staff logged in the travels of the Golden Flyers and added alumni comments to their website—by hand. “It was a lot of work,” Gotham said.

Planning a web-enabled Golden Flyers program

Believing that the campaign would be more engaging if it was web-enabled—and that the college could save a lot of staff time—the alumni staff began focusing on integrating the 2009 edition of Flight of the Flyers with some innovative social media tools.

The Flight of the Flyers website that Nazareth launched last year took the “Golden Flyer Challenge” to a new level. People who receive a Golden Flyer could take a photo of it in location, check in on a Google Map on the site, and send the Golden Flyer to another reunion classmate. Members of reunion classes can request a bird through a form on the site.

And alumni in other classes can participate by printing out a Golden Flyer and taking a photo of it, then checking it in on the Google map.

The site incorporates a lot of features that encourage alumni to engage with each other:

• Alumni could post their own updates and read info that others posted via the map and a profile generated by visitors to the site;


• Alumni could invite less-active classmates to participate;


• “Lost” alumni could request a Flyer and reconnect with the college, sharing their contact info through a form on the site;


• The College collected the updates and data in a database, rather than hand-entering the information as in the previous year.

All told, the site took about 310 hours of staff time to plan, build, and manage. Wall to Wall Studios provided strategy, design and development for the project. Gotham said that Nazareth was planning to use the same basic site for five years, allowing them to amortize staff time and direct costs and resulting in a very cost-effective campaign for Nazareth.
The Flight of the Flyers site was very much a team effort, Gotham said. “I have great partners here—it wouldn’t have been possible to do this without everyone pitching in.” In particular, he credits Mimi Wright,
Kerry VanMalderghem, Colleen Brennan-Barry, and Fran Zablocki.

Results

Nazareth is delighted with the results of the Flight of the Flyers—indeed, it’s successful by any measure of engagement for a small college.

“Demographically, we have a good range of participation pretty through the years, with as many as 60 participants in one class; we had 10-15 participants in the the classes with the lowest numbers. We had more than 260 people participate in all. We had 600 people at reunion this year.”

The broad response was a surprise to Brennan-Barry, the person in marketing responsible for oversight of the Nazareth website. “We had some initial concerns that our “older” alumni might not be as comfortable and engage with the site as much as new alumni. That was happily proven incorrect when we realized that the classes that were placing in the top three for Flyer miles traveled included the classes of ‘59, ‘64 and ‘74!”

This is an important reminder, she points out, “that we can certainly reach different segments of our core population via different media, and that the preferred media of those segments is changing and evolving all the time.”

Plus, Gotham added, “We’ve had a lot of great anecdotal and written comments about Flight of the Flyers. People said how how much fun it was to take the picture of their Flyer—they enjoyed being creative with the photo and showcasing where they live or where they were traveling.”

Also, the site worked in helping people to connect with each other. “People did make connections, they followed up, and we know that in addition to boosting attendance at our reunion, the site sparked informal reunions. People used a Flyer as a rallying point to get together in their area.

Brennan-Barry noted that visitors appreciated the absence of a direct “ask” on the Flight of the Flyers site. “I am glad that we made the decided choice not to use this site as a vehicle for direct fundraising, but more as a vehicle for connection. We did include a “Donate to Nazareth” link on every page, but we listened to users when they told us that they have solicitiation fatigue from ‘constantly’ getting asked for money from every organization to which they belong. Our choice to make this more of a place for us to connect with alumni and raise excitement for Reunion 09 was, in retrospect, a good one.”

As far as metrics are concerned, here’s some data from this year’s effort, from 1 June 2008 to 30 June 2009:

• 3127 unique site visits.


• 1867 visitors viewed 5.91 pages/visit and spent an average of 3.56 minutes on the site.


• 47% of visitors return for two or more visits.


• 180 alumni checked a Flyer in via the site (note: only four Flyers per each of 10 classes have been circulating since 6/08).


• 123 alumni used the form on the site to request that a Flyer be sent to them.

And of course, the CASE awards don’t hurt: the entire program won the Grand Gold in Alumni Relations in addition to the Gold for the Flight of the Flyers site.

Lessons and advice

When asked what surprised him about the Golden Flyers program, Gotham replied, “To be honest, I was surprised at how well it did take off, both years. I thought it was kind of a harebrained idea. We wanted to have some fun—I had no idea how much people would like it.”

One ancillary benefit of the Golden Flyers program is that it’s brought the Golden Flyer mascot to the attention of people on- and off-campus, Gotham said. “We’ve only had an athletics program for about 30 years, and many people just didn’t connect with our mascot. So this was a clever, visual, and direct way for them to make that connection. And they have.”

Gotham noted that there were a few skeptics when the idea was originally floated. “But I did have the support of my boss, our vice president. Without that, it wouldn’t have been possible.” In the two years of the program, only one complaint has surfaced about the cost of shipping the Flyer to the next recipient (it costs about $5 and it’s easy to print the Click-N-Ship label from a computer).

As far as the site production is concerned, Colleen Brennan-Barry noted, “We did some light usability testing about 2/3 of the way through the project and I cannot stress how important and useful this was! I know that testing is almost always the first thing to be cut if a project is short on time or resources, but never discount the value of user feedback as you’re creating this kind of interactive site. For a handful of $5 Starbucks giftcards, we received back a great deal of helpful information that saved us time and user confusion in the end.”

Speaking to the need for monitoring how people use it, Gotham noted that next year, Nazareth is planning to simplify the Flight of the Flyers site. “Even though the website is cool, we are going to make some changes in it. Alumni weren’t as interested in the individual birds as they were with connecting with other people in their class. We’ll make it easier to find who in your class has already received the birds, and who wants them.”

Brennan Barry noted, “As we look at revising and reestablishing Flight of the Flyers for the Reunion 2010 classes, we will be looking more closely at the communications by which we publicize the site and the program with the world. This year, the site received strong traffic and interaction with minimal communication; I’m excited to think about how we might be able to connect with our alumni if our communications are stronger.”

And next year, Gotham noted, they’ll work out a definitive solution for the fact that the site worked too well, disappointing some alumni: not everyone who requested a bird actually received them. That will change next year, he asserted.

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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.

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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.

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