Six Reasons Why Your Institution’s Mobile Site Needs to Be a Priority in 2012

Making sure your audiences can get to vital information about your institution—wherever they are and whenever they want it—should be a top strategic priority of every college, university, and independent school. One way institutions can support this goal is to make sure they are providing audiences with web sites optimized for mobile viewing and use. If your institution doesn’t have a mobile site, here are some reasons why it should be a critically important priority in 2012. If your college, university, or school already has a mobile site, the sources below should help create a case for adding more content and utility next year.

Traffic to institutional sites from mobile devices is rapidly increasing.
Source: The College of William & Mary
Some institutions, such as the College of William & Mary, have seen as much as a 500% increase in traffic to their mobile sites in the last two years. A growing number of people are finding value on college and university mobile sites.

More smartphones are being sold than desktop computers.
Source: PCMag
It’s old news that smartphones are outpacing the sale of desktop computers (with tablet sales on the rise as well). This means that how and where people access the internet is changing. As the way people access content changes, colleges, universities, and schools need to be prepared to address strategic goals and visitor needs on smartphones.

A vast majority of smartphone users use their smartphones to access the web.
Source: Pew Internet
84% of people who own a smartphone in the US use it to access the web. I included this statistic to add some context to the previous one, since some people might wonder if smartphones are primarily being used for verbal communication and apps.

There is a “mobile-only internet” contingent on the rise.
Source: ondeviceresearch.com
There is a growing population of people who only browse the internet on mobile devices. This seems to be truest in developing countries in Africa and Asia, but many colleges and universities are looking to build a global brand. By implementing a site that looks great on mobile devices you are decreasing the chances you will alienate people who never browse the web on a desktop machine.

Mobile access to the internet will eclipse desktop internet access as soon as 2015.
Source: idc.com
While some of the other statistics in this post hint this is where we are headed, the data here is pretty explicit: we will soon be living in an age where more people are accessing the internet via mobile than on desktop computers. Now is the time to deploy a first-generation mobile solution, start measuring how people are using it, and iterate the site effectively over time.

The innovators are now developing for mobile experiences even before they touch the web site.
Source: daringfireball.net
It’s not to say this should be a primary consideration, but many companies outside of higher ed are now developing for smartphones or iOs first, and then developing for a desktop website experience. The demands of code and site development are starting to follow the conventions of devices sold to access the internet. For a more expansive version of this philosophy, check out the book Mobile First by Luke Wreblonski.

Lastly, I’ll round these facts with something that is not a statistic, but rather a tactical consideration when building a case for a mobile site: cost. It costs a fraction of a full site relaunch to do a mobile site, usually because the information provided is more transactional and self-contained in a mobile environment than it is in a sprawling college or university site. If you’re thinking about how to prioritize web or marketing budgets, consider that mobile is both future-friendly and comparatively affordable.

Posted by Doug Gapinski
Additional Posts (38)
Categories: Mobile and responsive design / Strategy

Discuss this article (0)

Getting to know you. Getting to know all about you.

I’m proud of the small amount of paper I brought into my new home office. I used my recent job change as an opportunity to slim down “files” and inch toward paperless status. The truth is I did bring a handful of manila folders that I’ve been periodically sifting through. Flipping through the paper has offered a few trips down memory lane. I found a cocktail napkin where I’d scratched a tag line we later used to market a campus notebook program. Yes, something great first written on the back of a napkin actually happens.

More relevant to my work at mStoner, I stumbled on the list of questions I used in 2007 for hiring an external partner for a university-wide web redesign project.That was four years ago, but I submit that this list is still a pretty good way to get to know a consulting firm.

You know the drill. It typically goes like this: you issue an RFP, you get a healthy stack of proposals, you narrow down, you invite a few to campus. That campus visit is critical but maybe not for the reason you think. Yes, the firm you are considering should be able to give a credible and compelling presentation. Still, before you hire a firm, you really should get to know the people you’ll be working with. And, yes, some of what you need to know can come from a presentation in a window-less conference room filled with your RFP committee. But really, you should prepare a list of questions to guide your thinking. Sharpen your interviewing skills and ask away.

At the end of the day, you’re going to need to know the answers to these questions. Having a list will keep you focused on what you decided was important. Second, you’ll gain from hearing how the various firms respond. Are there inconsistencies? Does the answer given by one person from a firm conflict with an answer you hear later from somebody else? Do they seem to value what you do?

If you’re reading this blog, you might be planning to engage a partner for a web redesign. If so, use this question list for your own. No matter who you hire, take seriously the chance to get to know the teams you’re considering. After all, your institution’s website is the cornerstone of its brand and the foundation of its communication strategy. There’s a lot at stake.

Download the questions as a PDF.

General
How long have you been in business?
How many employees do you have?
What are your areas of expertise?
Have you worked for education clients before? If so, does your approach to the project differ from when you work with non-education clients?
Do you employ subcontractors and if so are you willing to take responsibility for their work? Will we be notified when subcontracted individuals are working on our project?

Work Style
How do you communicate with your clients; by phone, email, meetings, etc? Are you willing to adapt your communication style to a project?
Do you expect a a project manager on the client side?
Do you offer alternatives, or single solutions?
How do you propose to deal with possible changes in scope or direction of a project as it progresses?

Project Management
How much time do you expect your project manager to spend on the project? ?How experienced is your project manager with enterprise-level websites?? What kind of reporting, issue tracking and financial statements will you provide and how often?

Consultation
Do you have a standard consulting/discovery process?
Do you have standard documentation (i.e., functional specifications, project plan, timelines, etc.) and are you willing to provide samples?
Are you able to conduct focus groups and usability studies?
Where are the focus groups/usability studies conducted?

Design and Programming
What is your process for design approval (i.e., alternative designs, means of and cycles of review, etc. and how long does it take?
Can you provide illustration and photography?
How much experience you have doing animations or video for the web?
Do you do your own video/audio recording?? Are you aware of and do you comply with Section 508 Accessibility guidelines?
Do you use CSS for layout?
Have you used XSLT? RSS? HTML 5?
Do your programmers/designers follow set coding standards? Are these standards available for us to see?
Are you familiar with a range of content management systems and are your designs able to translate well to CMS templates?
What is your experience with integrating social media platforms?
Have you done any mobile web development? How about responsive design or apps?

Content
Can you offer help with content development and editing/proofing?
Are you knowledgeable about writing for the web and web content strategy?

Testing and QA
What sort of quality assurance do you offer for page elements, multimedia, links, etc.?
Is your work tested in-house by someone other than the person who developed it?
At what point can a client inspect and review your work as it is being built?
Which browsers do you test with and are you able to create a consistent look in multiple browsers?

Training and Documentation
Do you offer training when relevant? ?Is your work documented such that it can be maintained by another group?

Posted by Susan Evans
Additional Posts (16)
Categories: Strategy

Discuss this article (0)

Starting a web redesign project. (See, there’s just dust under that carpet.)

Four years ago, I led a major web redesign project at William & Mary. I remember that I couldn’t wait to begin – I had executive support, a budget, and three incredible firms coming to campus to present proposals. Let’s get going, right?

Hold on. I also vividly remember that getting started with the William & Mary relaunch required project planning and superhuman commitment to a myriad of details. Things can get particularly consuming during the RFP phase. How in the world would we relaunch the university web presence with no extra staff? What if we picked the wrong partner? What if everyone hated the new CMS?

I’ve been thinking about that time a lot in recent days. Earlier this week, along with Doug, I visited a college that is looking for an external partner for their web redesign. As we prepared for our presentation, I was able to rely on my own years of experience leading a web redesign on a college campus. Seriously, I know exactly how this RFP committee feels.

The day before the “pitch,” Doug and I were talking about how overwhelming starting a web redesign can appear. Especially since the typical web and communications teams on a campus are taking on the project work in addition to their day jobs. The decision about engaging the right partner is key. Faced with the same decision back in 2007, I recall a renewed sense of enthusiasm once Voltaire started to explain the mStoner process for web redesigns. It was comprehensive, simple, and made sense. I also remember being impressed that the mStoner team had worked with many, many other colleges and universities. It mattered to me that the four phases of the project – strategy, creative, technology, and training – led to successful websites plenty of other times.

Back to the present. During our trip from the airport, Doug described what we were about to present to the RFP committee as a way to take away the mystique. He said the presentation allows us to “lift up the corner of the carpet and say, ‘See, there’s just dust under there. We’re just going to be sweeping up the dust.’”

It was fun to be the one to talk about the web redesign process with those who attended our presentation. As I described each phase, I explained the activities and results that would occur. As I looked out at the audience, I could see the head-nodding begin. Let’s get started on your project!

Posted by Susan Evans
Additional Posts (16)
Categories: Strategy

Discuss this article (2)

Personal Reactions to Confab: Relief, Challenges, and a Content Strategy Manifesto for .Edu

Passionate. Engaged. Daring. Friendly. Supportive. Funny. Motivated. Optimistic. Oh, and cake-loving.

That’s a very short (and highly curated) list of adjectives that describes the folks who attended Confab last week. Some could legitimately claim to be content strategists, and a few could boast that they were doing content strategy before the term was invented. Others were seeking to learn what content strategy is all about … and how it could be applied in their organizations.

As for me, I left the conference relieved. Relieved because I believe that mStoner stumbled into “content strategy” some time ago and has been practicing the discipline for awhile. But I also feel challenged because I recognize how much those of us in .edu have to do to get institutions and their leaders to care about content and content strategy.

Confab
Don’t know about Confab? Here’s the short version: it was the creation of Kristina Halvorson (@halvorson), the author of a key work, Content Strategy for the Web. There were a lot of speakers with amazing insights to share. If you want to learn about some of them, here are links to 50+ conference resources:blog posts about the conference, slides, and other goodies, courtesy of Firehead. I’d also recommend the post by Meet Content, “Higher Ed Takeaways from Confab 2011: The Content Strategy Conference.”

Attendees ranged from the head of Hilton Hotels’ content strategy team to Facebook’s content strategy lead,who did a fascinating presentation about content strategy at Facebook. About four dozen people from higher ed attended.

Relief
I remember reading about Confab and thinking, “Sounds interesting: I should learn more about this.”

As a concept, “Content strategy” made intuitive sense to me. Kristina’s book is one of the few I’ve read lately that I wish I had written. And as a business owner who is (really) passionate about doing the absolute best work that we can for our clients, I was curious to know what mStoner could learn at Confab about content strategy and how it could benefit our clients.

When we launched mStoner in 2001, we didn’t want to focus just on the way our sites looked. We wanted to focus on content and how it was organized and sustained. And that approach became one of our strong differentiators (and it still is). But, I wondered, would I learn at Confab that our approach to content strategy sucked?

Imagine my relief when I discovered that mStoner has done pretty well. Because we recognized how desperately our clients needed tools, processes, and tactics to make sense out of and manage their content, our team incorporated elements of content strategy into our client engagements from the very first:

• We baked into our process an exploration of what content our clients produced—and how they used it and sustained it on their websites.


• We advocated hiring and supporting staff who could develop effective content.


• We focused on process.


• We encouraged clients to curate content on their websites.


• We became experts in the tools needed to manage and deploy content.


• We train our clients on how to do all these things with the tools we installed.


• And, since 2009, we’ve incorporated content from the social web on our sites.

This process didn’t result from following a playbook (we didn’t have one!). And we didn’t call it “content strategy.” As a small team, we had to be pragmatic generalists rather than focused practitioners of a single element of content strategy.We’re in a good place as a company: we’re refining our practice of content strategy—primarily by focusing on methodology and process—not starting from scratch.

Challenges for .Edu

But we’re not only practitioners, we’re educators and thought leaders. In that capacity, there’s a lot more that we can do to help .edu understand the importance and value of content strategy.

During her keynote at Confab, Ann Handley (@MarketingProfs and coauthor of the must-read Content Rules), urged us all to “embrace the fact that you—the brand—are a publisher.” And, in fact, “today, all brands are publishers” was simply accepted as truth at Confab.

The right content helps to deliver value, create trust, and build relationships with people who can be motivated to take actions—apply, join, friend, comment, give—that benefit themselves and the organization.

Our clients—schools, colleges, and universities—don’t recognize this fundamental truth. Plenty of content is being created on any campus, but few institutions think strategically about managing and deploying it, much less measuring its value. They must begin to think and act as if content matters. Because it does.

Without the realization that content is a strategic asset, staff members end up in the position of Michael Fienen, who presented about implementing a stealth content strategy. At Pittsburg State University, Michael works largely by himself to guide development of the university’s website, using persuasion and kindness (and coffee!) to help his colleagues improve their areas of the site. He has a tiny budget and limited resources. And the sad fact is that Michael isn’t alone: many institutions have someone in exactly the same position, if a lot less talented.

One clear message from Confab was that many organizations don’t understand content strategy, so we who work in education are not alone. But few industries are under as much pressure these days as are colleges and universities. I can’t foresee many colleges adding chief content officers to their leadership teams anytime soon.

So here’s the challenge for us and for everyone who works in .edu and understands the value of content: how can we help to build a persuasive case for the strategic importance of content in education marketing?

As consultants, we can play an important role in educating our clients about these and related issues. But how can we do more? Since its founding, mStoner has worked hard not just to serve our clients well but also to identify, pioneer, and share best practices.

There was a palpable sense at Confab that we were all part of a somewhat historic moment. Content strategy is poised to take off as a discipline. And a discipline needs tools: methodology, models, case studies, approaches, best practices … all to be shared, debated, iterated, debated, refined. Rinse and repeat.

So we are mStoner are going to be much more active about advocating the value of content strategy. And we intend to do what we can to contribute to formalizing the emerging discipline called “content strategy” and communicating to education how essential is. We hope you’ll join us.

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (322)
Categories: Change management / Content and writing / Design and usability / Marketing and branding / Strategy

Discuss this article (1)

A White Paper About What We Learned from Our Research on Social Media in Advancement

All institutions are struggling to engage with their constituents using social media tools. But how are they doing?

With plenty of help from CASE, we set out with our research partners, Slover Linett Strategies to learn how institutions are using social media in advancement and answer some basic questions:

Are constituents commenting, liking, and otherwise interacting with the Facebook pages sponsored by institutions to engage alumni, influence parents, encourage donors, and build awareness of institutional messages and brands? What are barriers to use of social media in institutional advancement? How do we measure success? What does an effective social media program look like?

For the last couple of months, we’ve been working on a white paper summarizing what we learned from that research with CASE. It’s finally finished: here’s a PDF of the report.

The white paper offers a look at the data we gathered and offers some of our insights on what we learned—with comments from Andrew Gossen, Charlie Melichar, and Andy Shaindlin, who were instrumental in leading the CASE task force on social media and helped to inspire and shape this research, along with Rae Goldsmith from CASE. It also includes an appendix on how admissions offices are using social media and four case studies illustrating particular effective institutional uses of social media.

If you’d like to take a look at the raw data, you can find it here: Topline Results from the CASE/mStoner/Slover Linett Social Media Survey.

And you can read “Social Experiments,” [note: login required] the article Cheryl Slover-Linett and I wrote about this research for CASE Currents, November/December 2010.

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (322)
Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Articles, handouts, downloads / Fundraising / Social media / Strategy

Discuss this article (3)

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
Additional Posts (322)
Categories: Articles, handouts, downloads / Marketing and branding / Strategy

Discuss this article (0)

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
Additional Posts (322)
Categories: Strategy

Discuss this article (0)

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.”

Posted by Laurel Hechanova
Additional Posts (11)
Categories: Design and usability / Marketing and branding / Strategy

Discuss this article (0)

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:

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (322)
Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Alumni / Design and usability / Marketing and branding / Strategy

Discuss this article (5)

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
Additional Posts (322)
Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Alumni / Strategy

Discuss this article (1)