SCVNGR Treks Augment Admission Events & Tours

Soon, prospective students staring at their mobile phones on your campus may not be texting their BFFs, but participating in a game that’s designed to introduce them to the college—and increase their interest in applying to and attending your institution.

Early adopters in admission offices across the country are experimenting with using SCVNGR, a mobile gaming platform, for a variety of admissions-related purposes. Their experience suggest that teens—and their parents—can enjoy a good challenge while they’re visiting campus and participating in other activities.

SCVNGR is used by more than 400 colleges and universities around the country—and museums like the Smithsonian, art galleries, and businesses like Dunkin’ Donuts. Participants in a SCVNGR trek participate in challenges (“Take a picture of the library clock and upload the image”), earning points. And SCVNGR can be played on any mobile device via text message or by using a free iPhone or Android app.

A “trek” consists of a number of linked challenges. Participants can play casually by doing a couple of challenges. Or they can play more seriously, competing with each other to accumulate points, often in order to win prizes.

Colleges and universities develop SCVNGR treks for many purposes, including alumni engagement. But, given the teen penchant for video games, it’s unsurprising that admissions offices are looking closely at it. Here are some ways in which admission offices are using SCVNGR.

Complementing In-Person Events
Both Clarkson University and Penn State University created SCVNGR treks to give attendees at admission events something to do that’s less structured than the typical agenda.

“At Clarkson our goal was to teach participants things that they wouldn’t hear on a campus tour or learn throughout the rest of the day.” said Jessica McPherson, a staff member in Marketing & External Relations, “We had approximately 600 students and their families on campus for a jam-packed day of events. Knowing the schedule, we decided that if we were going to have a SCVNGR trek on such a busy day, it would have to coincide with event locations and stay quite simple.” The trek had five challenges in three different buildings.”

At Clarkson, at least 60 people participated, McPherson said. “We thought that was great! We even had parents playing. We were surprised that so many participants played via text message instead of with the app.” She added, “People loved the prizes and the idea that they learned something that others might not know.”

[Learn more about SCVNGR Treks at Clarkson and see SCVNGR’s case study about the Clarkson trek.]

Penn State developed a series of treks to supplement its summer visit event. Jenna Spinelle, an admission counselor, explained, “Penn State Undergraduate Admissions used SCVNGR for Spend a Summer Day. We bring almost 10,000 students and families to our University Park campus over six days in July and August to learn more about what Penn State has to offer. Our trek included challenges at some of our landmark locations around campus (the Nittany Lion Shrine, University Creamery) and other areas that we wanted to highlight (campus computer store, information fair with student organizations, etc.). Several hundred people participated over the course of six days, representing about 10 percent of total attendees.”

[Spinelle wrote about the university’s experience in “Spending a Summer Day with SCVNGR.”]

Augmenting (or Replacing) In-Person Tours
At Dartmouth College, SCVNGR treks are being used to augment in-person campus tours. The admissions office at Dartmouth created seven SCVNGR treks highlighting different aspects of campus life and learning so that visitors have something to do when campus tours aren’t operating.

In a post on the Wired Campus blog, Josh Keller observed that Dartmouth tours simply can’t accommodate the more than 20,000 visitors to campus every year. Using SCVNGR, Dartmouth can develop treks around special-interests like sustainability in addition to highlighting campus landmarks like the library.

John Beck Jr., senior assistant director of admissions, at Dartmouth noted, “Many low-income teens are more likely to access the internet over their phone than high-income teens, so we’re not shutting out a part of our population by socioeconomic means.”

Other institutions, like the University of California Santa Barbara, offer links to SCVNGR right from their Campus Tours website.

Keys to Success: Swag, Marketing & Mobile Access
Both McPherson and Spinelle commented on the importance of awarding prizes for playing SCVNGR. Clarkson erected a booth in the Student Center to distribute prizes to players, handing out a variety of Clarkson items, such as Frisbees, coffee mugs, bumper stickers, and pen sets. Penn State gave a small prize to anyone who stopped by their social media table and showed that they had completed at least one challenge. Each day, they picked one person from those who had competed to receive a gift bag of Penn State and SCVNGR t-shirts, water bottles, sunglasses, and other swag.

Advance publicity and on-site help with using SCVNGR will boost participation rates. Penn State started promoting its trek a few weeks before the actual visit day, using Facebook, Twitter and in an e-mail reminder that went to students who’d registered. Both Penn State and Clarkson produced small flyers explaining the trek and how to participate.

But on-site, in-person promotion, can help, too. McPherson notes, “We missed an opportunity to educate potential participants on SCVNGR. The accepted students had between one and two hours of downtime depending on when they arrived and registered on campus. Having a table set up next to the registration table would have been ideal to fill that void in activities and to teach students/families about SCVNGR.”

Both Penn State and Clarkson plan on expanding their use of SCVNGR next year. For those who are thinking about initiating a SCVNGR trek, McPherson advises, “Have some goals in mind, both for the outcome of the trek (were people glad they played?) and for the trek itself (what should a participant get out of playing?). Starting out, qualitative goals are equally as important as quantitative. We tried to get a lot of feedback so that we can continue to improve our treks and challenges.”

She also noted that one particular issue her rural campus faces: not all mobile phones work in Potsdam, NY. “We did not anticipate that we would have a lot of students with T-Mobile as their wireless provider and that they would not be able to use their phones at all.” Some resourceful Clarkson students saved the day for T-Mobile users who wanted to play SCVNGR, writing the challenges down and posting the answers for them. “The people they helped were especially grateful and we learned a valuable lesson. Next time we will print out a few challenge sheets in case this happens again.”

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CASE Circle of Excellence Awards 2011: Best in Social Media

And … it’s a wrap. The judges’ report for the 2011 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for Best in Social Media is finished. This year’s entries were generally uninspired, but we had two excellent entries that earned Golds: one of them was from William & Mary, which entered its blogs (hence the image above); the second from the University of Nottingham, which achieved amazing results from a smart campaign focused on achieving exposure for faculty experts blogging about last year’s election in the UK.

Judging for the 2011 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards, Category 12: Best in Social Media, was held at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, for two days in April, in conjunction with the judging for Category 11: Websites.

This year, the panel of judges included representatives of American and Canadian colleges, schools, and universities, both public and private. Half of the judges had never participated in one of these panels before. Three work for institutions that won national CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for their websites—and headed the teams that built the award-winning sites. Several are well known in the .edu blogosphere. One judge has earned a gold for social media. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, social media, web technology, and marketing.

According to CASE’s website:

Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards may be given in each subcategory to recognize best practices using social media within new and established programming. One overall category Grand Gold award may also be awarded for superior work. Eligible programs may come from any area of institutional advancement. Programs may be on-going or new in 2010 but must have been in place long enough to have produced well documented results. You may also enter best uses of social media in the following categories: Alumni Relations Programs: Creative Use of Technology and New Media and Fundraising Programs: Technology Applications and Creative Use of New Media.

There are four subcategories in “Best in Social Media.” Here they are, with the number of entries in each subcategory and the number of awards given:

• 12a. Best Uses of Social Media in Alumni Programming: 13 entries, no awards


• 12b. Best Uses of Social Media in Fundraising: 1 entry, no awards


• 12c. Best Uses of Social Media in Student Recruitment and Marketing: 7 entries, 1 award


• 12d. Other Uses of Social Media: 32 entries, 3 awards

Award Winning Social Media in 2011
In the second year for CASE’s “Best in Social Media” Category, it seemed that the entries were either very good or pretty bad, with not much in between. This is one indication of how institutions are struggling to make sense of social media and to use it effectively. In general, we observed that when institutions clearly defined the problems they wanted social media to solve, they were able to develop innovative solutions.

As judges, we were looking for the following attributes from award winners:

• Strategy: What’s the overall goal? How will social media be used to achieve it? What channels are appropriate? How are they used?


• Integration of tools/channels
  
• Clear objectives across channels and a clear strategy in place to measure results

One positive development this year was that there were more entries from institutions that had clearly thought about integrating their social media across channels into a type of “campaign,” taking advantage of different social media platforms. Consider, for example, the University of Nottingham’s award-winning effort to cover the 2010 election in the UK, which combined traditional media relations with a 24/7 blogging/Twitter effort.

This integration of communications channels is a positive movement away from what we observed last year, when many institutions indicated that having a Facebook page or a Twitter feed in and of itself was a social media strategy worthy of an award. And it’s also a clear indication of growing sophistication about social media as a key channel that must be managed appropriately. Institutions are learning that Twitter is different from Facebook and the rules of engagement are different. Pumping tweets onto a Facebook wall is a fan-losing proposition. So is a one-way communications model that emulates broadcast.

And, as one judge pointed out, “While we can appreciate that at your institution the fact that you have a pretty well-run Facebook community is impressive and it took a lot to get there internally, it’s not innovative.” We want to know what institutions are doing with Facebook and other social media channels, and how they are leveraging their social media community to accomplish their communications goals.

We were hoping to see more collaboration across communications, web, alumni, and admissions teams than we did, with more integration. And we’re still not seeing clear goals behind institutions’ adoption of various social media channels, much less metrics that would let them know if their social media efforts had been successful. And we’re not seeing great examples of engagement, especially on Twitter (which happens to be the preferred social network of many of the judges).

Awards
category 12c: best uses of social media in student recruitment & marketing
gold: The College of William and Mary: William and Mary Blogs: Bloggers; Admissions Blogs; Law School Admissions Blog

category 12d: other uses of social media
gold: University of Nottingham: Election 2010: Social Media Impact for Politics at the University of Nottingham: Election Blog; Politics in 60 Seconds YouTube Channel; Ballots & Bullets Politics Blog

bronze: Columbia College Chicago: Manifest Urban Arts Festival Schedule Builder; St. Edwards’ University: Give it a Whrrl: St. Edward’s Graduation gets Socially Connected; Whrrl Blog: St’ Andrews University Makes History

There’s more detail in the complete Judges’ Report, which contains further comments about process and comments about each of the award winners.

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CASE Award Winners 2011: Websites

In case you’re wondering, that’s a screenshot of a CASE Gold award winner this year: the Online Viewbook from Arizona State University.

We’ve just completed the Judges’ Report for the 2011 CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for Category 11, Websites. Read on for some thoughts about what we saw this year and follow the link below to download a copy of the entire judges’ report.

The judging this year was held in early April at Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec. We’re grateful to the university for hosting this year’s judging—and especially to Shelagh Pedeen and Laurie Zack for their excellent hospitality. Laurie has served as a judge for these awards for nearly a decade. This was his last judging: he retired in May. I will miss his insights and his contributions to future discussions about the websites we’ve viewed.

Category 11 includes complete institutional websites (35 entries; we awarded a silver and two bronzes) and individual sub-websites (89 entries; we awarded 2 golds, 3 silvers, 4 bronzes, and an honorable mention). We did see some good, even ingenious, sites this year. But our overall impression was that quality of sites was down and that there were many, many missed opportunities.

Perhaps it’s time to acknowledge that there is a certain sameness that’s the state of the art for school, college, and university websites. It’s not that sites can’t be striking in their own right: it’s possible to create a beautiful, functional website that reflects well on an institution, attracts prospective students, and engages alumni. But now that many of the standards have been set, innovation occurs within a much narrower range than it did a decade ago. Maybe we can expect to see fewer sites that elicit a “wow” at first sight—but we see many more that we will appreciate the more we use them because their designers have attended to the many important usability details and populated the site with compelling stories, powerful images, and amazing video.

The most innovative sites we saw this year—those for Biola and ASU—were designed for prospective students. One could argue that sites focused on particular audience segments (prospective students, alumni, and others) can take more risks. If the sites are compelling enough—and their audience dedicated enough—they can use nonstandard navigation, offer up interactive Easter eggs, and break other rules. An institutional website has too many demands on it in terms of making its information findable to serve the needs of many different audiences to break too many rules or push too many boundaries.

Trends
Some trends we noticed this year:

• If you ever needed evidence of the international nature of CASE, take a look at this year’s entries. Among the award winners are three institutions in the UK.


• Whatever happened to editing? We saw many instances of sites trying to do way too much and not succeeding at much of anything. And we gave awards to sites that were powerful precisely because they represented a compelling concept, simply implemented. Take a look at the University of Toronto’s alumni reunion sign-up: the designers of this site edited it down into a clean, simple interface that made it extremely easy to sign up for a very complex series of events.


• Perhaps it’s a sign of the economic times, but most of the sites we saw were homegrown and few were produced by external agencies. Some of this homegrown work was excellent and innovative—the sites by Biola and ASU, for example, arose out of a desire to be “different,” but the sites are easy to use and navigate nonetheless.


• Many sites had identity issues and did not provide us with a strong sense of what the institution was, what it stood for, or how it was truly different from its competitors. Take a look at the ASU site or Biola’s site to see examples of a strong brand, one that couldn’t easily transfer to another institution.


• It’s still hard to find calls to action on many websites. One judge recounted difficulty finding information about how to apply—much less an “apply now” button— a website he viewed. We consider calls to action to be a basic feature of a .edu website.


• We saw many attempts to connect a website to the social web through Facebook and Twitter badges and other devices, but often saw “share this” buttons in unexpected places where they appeared to have been added as a afterthought, not baked into the design of the site.


• While .edu websites are much better organized and easier to navigate than they used to be, we still saw sites with “layers and layers of navigation all over the place,” which made them confusing to navigate. This is particularly challenging on sites that don’t have a clear design hierarchy for pages or where choices appear to have been dictated by internal politics rather than respect for what a visitor to the site might want to do. In contrast, the best sites represent a lot of thinking and hard work about their target audiences before design begins. King’s College is a great example of this. Their innovative nav bar was only possible because they had streamlined and cleaned up their site first.


• Sad to say, we still see plenty of evidence that institutions still don’t appear to start projects by thinking about how they’re going to measure outcomes and determine how they will know if their site is successful. They may have some general goals in mind, but they aren’t doing the hard work necessary to close the loop. We observed few examples of institutions using web dashboards or metrics to iterate and change based on traffic patterns or user behavior. It’s difficult to tweak a site after launch without clear metrics. One of the judges observed, “One of the reasons we see this disconnect is that communications/marketing leaders aren’t at the table when strategic decisions are made and, hence, communication and marketing teams are not feeling accountable to those conversations.”


• On many sites, screen space is not well used. For example, we saw pages about curriculum choices that carried a big header and large images. What value does that have to a visitor looking for the content below? And while a big, splashy homepage may impress a first-time visitor, what happens when repeat visitors tire of it and just want to reach the information they’re seeking? Does the great moving image on your homepage load so slowly that visitors leave before they see it?


• While we did see good content on some sites, some of it was buried on the site and hard to find. And some good content was overused—a in a site that featured profiles of the same six people everywhere. Images, too, need to be refreshed and updated, especially when they depict events that happened some time ago.


• Some of the special-purpose sites, especially annual reports and some of the magazines, were totally devoid of interactivity, including basic links.

A word about the importance of written submissions. Comments in the submissions that outlined how much testing had been done or how successful the sites were convinced us to give awards to several sites that we might otherwise have passed over.
Likewise, some sites might have fared better if they had demonstrated that the unorthodox choices made by their designers were supported by usability testing rather than whim. One of the judges remarked: “It’s not just about the numbers, even if you have them. It’s about providing context for your content and trying to serve your customers. Posting content is no longer enough—you have to think about providing a service and include a task-based perspective; that’s where analytics shine.”
To understand that context, we paid attention to the organizational work and cross-campus cooperation that went into building the backbone of some of these sites.

And the winners are…

Category 11a (complete institutional websites)
According to the description on CASE.org, in this category, “Grand Gold, Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards may be given for innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use . . . Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.”

• SIlver: University of California, Riverside: Riverside Extension


• Bronze: Guildhall School of Music and Drama; King’s College London

Category 11b (individual sub-websites)
In this category, institutions can enter ”...innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use . . . Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.” This includes sites created for a special purpose (such as annual reports, fundraising, or news) or directed toward a well-defined audience (alumni, prospective students, current students, parents).

• Gold: Arizona State University: Online Viewbook; Boston University: International Programs Site


• Silver: Biola University: Undergrad Site; Roosevelt University: Online Housewarming: Furniture & Fixtures Registry for New Building (use the “gift registry” text); University of Toronto: Spring Reunion


• Bronze: Cornell University: CALS Green (reporting tool: CALSGreenGuest/Corn3ll0); Cornell University: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Denison University: TheDEN; University of Rochester: Memorial Art Gallery website


• Honorable Mention: Stanford University School of Medicine: Employee Recognition

Here is a copy of the complete Judges’ Report, which contains further comments about process and extensive notes and comments about each of the award winners.

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What Do You Want to Know About How Institutions are Using Social Media in Advancement?

If you have thoughts about what you’d like to know about how schools, colleges, and universities are using social media in their advancement activities, now’s the time to let us know.

That’s because we’re designing the questionnaire for the 2011 CASE/mStoner/Slover Linett survey of social media in advancement. We’ll review the first draft this week and launch the survey in early February. Share your thoughts as a comment below, or send an email to me (Michael.Stoner(at)mStoner.com).

Last year’s survey results provided a benchmark for how schools, colleges, and universities were using social media in marketing, fundraising, alumni relations and other advancement activities—essentially those that involve interactions with external constituents. We’ll survey the same group this year.

While we want to see what’s changed since 2010, we also wanted to fine-tune some of the questions we asked. We fine-tuned “current position” titles and categories (e.g. added titles like “coordinator”), revisited the list of “motivators” and “barriers” to implementing social media, and tried to provide more fine-grained explanation of how the survey categorizes divisions and departments (for example, a communications unit within an alumni office).

We also will explore how (or whether) respondents are using social media to conduct research on their audiences and how they are marketing social media activities.

We weren’t very happy with the data we collected about staffing last year; this year, we revised questions on staffing committed to social media to capture both “dedicated” staff and staff who have multiple responsibilities but who spend at least one-quarter of their time on social media.

Finally, this year we’re planning to contact enrollment management/admission staff and invite them to respond to the survey. They were underrepresented in last year’s survey. See this post for a sense of what we learned about how social media was used by admission/enrollment offices last year.

But what did we miss that you want to know? Again, Share your thoughts as a comment, or send me an email (Michael.Stoner(at)mStoner.com).

We’re planning to unveil the results of the survey at the CASE Social Media & Community conference, to be held in San Francisco on 13-15 April.

And in case you missed them, here are the topline results from last year’s survey and a white paper discussing the implications of the survey.

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Using Mobile to Share Content en Route to Social Media Metrics & Privacy

In writing about key trends for 2011, I realized that I could jam many of the keywords for this post into its headline. So you won’t be surprised when you learn that I’m paying attention to mobile, content strategy, social media, metrics, and privacy.

I believe these issues have the potential to stir up a lot of discussion in education this year—at very least, among those of us who focus on marketing, branding, and online experience.

The economy isn’t on my list. It’s a huge issue for everyone—a constant reality of life these days that factors into every decision everyone is making. I don’t expect things to get better soon, given what’s happening in states like Texas. The economy is all the more reason to be clear and careful about how your institution approaches the important issues of the day.

1. The mobile web

OK, I know: some early adopters (@markgr and @dmolsen, I’m thinking of you here) will probably say that mobile was SO last year. I’ll agree, to the extent that there was a lot of buzz about mobile, especially apps, in 2010.

But an app is a niche strategy. You build an app to allow people who’ve already invested in you in some way (alumni, students, prospects) to do something that’s cool. But why would someone who doesn’t have a relationship with you download and install an app to use features on your website? And why would someone who has a relationship with you continue to use an app that doesn’t make their life easier in some way?

No, building an app isn’t the same as turning your attention to building a mobile website that really works. That’s not an easy thing to do, which is why it hasn’t happened to any large extent in education. It requires a website that’s already functioning well, not to mention vision, strategy, and budget to realize a highly functional mobile site.

I think that 2011 is the year when institutions will begin to take mobile sites seriously—and start to do something about them. [And, apparently, so does the Chronicle.]

2. Content is king, but won’t reign without strategy

I’ve always been proud of the fact that since our earliest days, mStoner has advocated (and practiced) strong web content embedded in an IA that makes it findable and with a backend that makes it easy to manage. Here’s one example of what I mean, from a blog post by my partner Voltaire Santos Miran from June 2003. Entitled “A different approach to content,” Voltaire wrote:

“During a project evaluation meeting, one of our clients commented that the most significant benefit of our engagement was not so much the new site—with its clean interface and fresh content—but the process and workflow that we enabled them to put in place.”

As early advocates of developing strong content, we’re gratified to see the “content strategy” meme developing in .edu. Is it too early to proclaim 2011 the year of content strategy in .edu? Maybe.

But I do believe we’ll see institutions focus on developing and sharing great content as never before. Which means that they’re going to have to take content strategy, information architecture, and content management seriously: that means planning for it, funding it, and developing processes that enable staff members to sustain it.

3. Social media, meet reality

Is it just me, or are you already sick of social spam—being asked to “like” this or that by your friends, not to mention being targeted by brands you care about only marginally to accept their crappy content in your Facebook stream? I wonder if this isn’t the year that consumers generally will start to get tired of all that friending, sharing, and (especially) liking, because they’re going to see a whole lot more of it as marketers jump on the social media bandwagon. [Read this post to see what teens think about being asked to “like” everything. And it’s only starting to happen!]

This is weirdly reminiscent of the days after everyone (finally) had email. And everyone tired of getting emails with earnest warnings about fake computer viruses. Now, maybe we’ll see consumers—regular users—start to exhibit engagement fatigue as social spam becomes as annoying and as easy to ignore as an email funds appeal is now.

A change in consumer perception and/or behavior will mean changes in the way that institutions engage constituents through social media. Many of a college’s constituents already have an emotional connection to their institution. Therefore, because they feel closer, connecting on Facebook may seem more comfortable than “liking” a brand like PriceChopper or Walmart.

Still, it’s time for institutions to take their friends and followers seriously and nurture them. That means focus, relevant content, and more staff attention. In this context, the approach that the Emory Alumni Association is taking to social media makes so much sense: they’re training staff to weave social channels into alumni outreach broadly and making sure that the content they offer alumni is something they really want.

And social media advocates: I’m a huge fan of SM (especially Twitter: you are following @mstonerblog, aren’t you????) but it’s time to be advocates for real, measurable outcomes for social media. It’s quality, not quantity, that should matter. And that’s a general theme anyway because in 2011:

4. Outcomes become really important. Really.

Why are we doing all the stuff we’re doing? Building websites, redeploying content, implementing content management systems, paying attention to Facebook pages, tweeting about the chancellor’s speech? Because we expect our efforts to contribute to some kind of outcome.

Well, it’s (past) time to be clear about the outcomes we’re working toward and then to focus our tactics and everything else we’re doing on making them reality. Maybe during a time of relative affluence, clear goals aren’t important. Maybe at one time it was acceptable not to develop success metrics and analytics programs to track them. That’s all changed. While I don’t buy into (all) the hype about edupocalypse, there isn’t an institution I know of that isn’t looking at cost cutting and saving money. So every initiative should have goals and measurable outcomes.

5. Real people start paying attention to privacy

Last year we witnessed a number of privacy gaffes widely covered by the tech press and blogged about by privacy nerds. And just last week, Facebook announced its decision to share phone numbers & home addresses of members with third-party app developers. And then rescinded it until it can be “better communicated.”

It’s not a question of whether Zuck & crew will ever learn. They’ve shown themselves to be extremely smart businesspeople who continually push members as far as they possibly can in pursuit of profits. The question is whether Facebook’s members are willing to accept this continuing abuse of their trust.

More and more people I know have stopped accepting “friend” requests from people they know only vaguely, have tinkered with their privacy settings to restrict access to their content and profiles, and, even then, still carefully consider what they share. Let’s see if this becomes a trend; I’m betting (make that: hoping) that it will.

And in case you’re wondering what Facebook’s reputed “power users”—teens and young adults—are doing, danah boyd speaks and writes about the ways in which teens manage their privacy on social sites like Facebook. Check out this blog post in which she describes innovative strategies that teens use to game Facebook’s (lack of) privacy controls. Let’s hope that more and more adults follow that lead.

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Social Media and the Admission/Enrollment Office

We know a lot about teens and their adoption of technology from Pew Internet and elsewhere. And we know a lot about how teens use technology in selecting a college. [Start with Lougan Bishop’s post on Eduguru and explore two of his sources: “E-Expectations 2010 – Focusing You E-Recruitment Efforts to Meet the Expectations of College-Bound Students by Noel-Levitz and “Stamats – TeensTalk 2010”].

Getting a glimpse of how admission and enrollment offices use social media is easy, but getting a comprehensive view is much harder. This blog post shares some insights on what I learned while doing some research on this topic for our white paper, “Succeeding with Social Media.”

Some general perspectives

According to NACAC’s “State of College Admissions 2010” report, the use of social media tools continues to grow:

In 2009, 73 percent of respondents reported that they provide links to their colleges’ social networking sites (up from 39 percent in 2008), and 61 percent reported offering blogs by current students (up from 51 percent in 2008 and 42 percent in 2007). Some colleges and universities also have blogs by admission officers (31 percent), podcasts (31 percent) and online message boards …

NACAC also reported that 36 percent of colleges allowed applicants to check their status on the institution’s website. NACAC did not capture data (or did not report data) about the use of Facebook or other social networking sites in college admission.

Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson claim that higher ed lapped commercial entities in the adoption of social media tools. They found that 51% of colleges and universities have an admission blog and noted that “familiarity with social networking has jumped from 55% reporting they were very familiar with it in 2007, to 63% in 2008 and now to 83%. Admission officers have clearly embraced Facebook and other social networking sites as viable forms of communication with their constituency.” They report that 50% of respondents believe that social media is “very important” to their future strategy (interestingly, a 5% decline since the question was asked in 2008).

BlueFuego staff visited 1,387 colleges and university websites repeatedly over the past two years. They viewed institutional home pages and the opening pages of admission and alumni sites, and recorded when the institutions linked to social media sites from these key pages.

In March 2009, 8.2% of institutions displayed “social web callouts” (BlueFuego’s term for icons or specific links to destinations on the social web such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.). Of the 113 institutions that used these links on their admission sites, 64.6% linked to Facebook, 24.8% linked to YouTube (with 18.6% embedding a YouTube video), 14.2% linked to Twitter, and 11.5% linked to MySpace.

Fast-forward to July 2010, when 53% of admission websites included social web callouts (links) on their main pages.

BlueFuego observes, “Admission continues to lag behind in promoting their presences via SWCs directly on their site. Our supplementary research with prospective students has shown that they are more likely to visit and join presences that are officially promoted by the institution.” When the research was done (June 2010), 93.6% of institutions linked to Facebook; 67.2% to Twitter; and 53.3% to YouTube.

A more nuanced view

Abe Gruber’s master’s thesis, “Social Media in Undergraduate University Admissions,” provides the most nuanced view of the range of social media used in admission offices and provides a perspective of how admission office use of social media compares to what prospective students want. Completed in late 2009 the thesis relies upon a sample of 200 prospective students and 70 admission offices. His admission office respondents indicated that Facebook was the most popular social medium used to communicate with prospective students (67% used it); 40% used blogs:

Here is what Gruber’s respondents in admission offices reported about the social media they were currently using, as opposed to what they intended to implement in the next 6-12 months:

Gruber learned that 78.3% of admission offices did not have a strategy regarding the use of social media technologies and that 96.7% of them did not have specific recruitment goals for their social media activities. One of Gruber’s key recommendations for admission/enrollment offices was adoption of a social media strategy:

Since 78.3% of admission offices don’t have an official strategy for their usage of social media, it is evident that not enough time and attention is being devoted to social media as a recruitment tool. As admission offices report that it is “difficult to find the time” for social media, it is common to find situations where there is only one or two people in an entire admission office working with Facebook and blogs. If more effort was devoted to social media in an official capacity, admission offices would become more aware of their own disconnects, and they could do a much better job of actually incorporating social media into their recruitment plans and objectives.

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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
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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:

Posted by Michael Stoner
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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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Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Alumni / Strategy

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

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

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

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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

Posted by Michael Stoner
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