On a scale of 1 - 10, how are we doing? Seriously.

The first time I officially supervised another person was 26 years ago. (It’s true I’m the oldest of five children and hours of “babysitting” my siblings was a fine training ground for management.) Yep, I’ve had plenty of time to develop my own philosophy about performance management. And, I’ve experimented extensively with how to offer exceptional feedback to the individuals on the teams I’ve led.

But despite this HR foundation, for the very first time, I am checking in with individuals external to mStoner as preparation for our 2011 performance reviews. It feels right to me that the mStoner performance evaluation process includes contacting clients. Who else could give a more accurate assessment of our team members? Yes, it takes extra time—time for individuals to suggest names of people I should call, time for me to schedule these calls, and most encouraging, the precious time clients spend on the phone talking about one individual’s work on a project that is probably over or nearly over.

Turns out, I’m working with a crew of three humble individuals. Until I talked to the clients:

• I didn’t know that one person made himself available 24/7 during the three weeks prior to a website launch by sharing his home and mobile phone numbers. And, as the client reported, “He always took our calls.”


• I wasn’t aware that another client never heard this mStoner team member say no. Even though the client described the ideas they came up with as wild and wacky, and with some high expectations for the technology.


• I hadn’t realized that another is trusted by the client because, in additional to his exceptional creativity, he is “completely unflappable” and adept at simultaneous right- and left-brain thinking.

In my opinion, this commitment to individual development is key to organizational excellence. mStoner is successful when our team does exceptional work for the educational institutions that engage us. I think it takes courage to circle back and ask a client how someone did. I’m proud to be part of a group that values, and seeks out, the opinions and impressions of people external to our company.

Inspired to talk to us about someone on our team? I’m sure Voltaire would like to hear from you. Contact him and let us know how we’re doing. Improvement is something we take seriously, any time of year.

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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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Social Media & Advancement Survey 2011: Changes, but not Big Ones

While advancement offices at many institutions are engaged in using some social media platforms (especially Facebook, which 96 percent of institutions utilize), institutions are still struggling with how to manage social media. And there weren’t significant shifts in usage, management, or other trends since our first survey was conducted in April and May, 2010.

These are key findings from the 2011 survey of social media in advancement, which we conducted in February and March in partnership with Slover Linett Strategies and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE). The first survey was released in July 2010 (more information here).

I’ll report briefly on some of the findings in this post. You can review the topline findings and a presentation about them that Cheryl Slover-Linett and I did at CASE’s Social Media and Community Conference last week. We’re working on a white paper further analyzing the data, which we’ll release at the CASE Summit in July.

What institutions do

Institutions utilize an array of the most popular social media platforms: 75 percent use Twitter, 66 percent use LinkedIn or YouTube, 40 percent have blogs, use Flickr, or offer a social community developed by an outside vendor. Only 4 percent don’t use social media at all.

Top goals for social media remain alumni engagement (at 84 percent of institutions responding) and strengthening brand image (75 percent); also engaging prospective students (68% of respondents), admitted students (63%), increasing awareness and rankings (61%). But only 38% of development offices use it for fundraising.

Staffing for social media varies across institutions. At the institutional level, 25% of institutions have at least one person working full-time on social media. It’s far more common for staff to have social media responsibilities incorporated into their jobs, along with other other responsibilities: at the department level, roughly .5 FTE focuses on social media.

There were some changes since 2010:

• The use of Twitter has increased.


• While institutions struggle with social media, they believe that it has value and that it’s here to stay.


• More institutions have the IT and content management resources they need to augment their social media activities.


• More institutions have policies on legal and privacy issues and negative postings.

Success with social media

Again this year, we asked institutions to report how successful they are with social media and 62% reported that they are moderately successful with their social media initiatives, measuring success by the number of touches (friends, fans, comments, likes, etc.) they receive. Facebook is viewed as the most successful social media platform (by a large majority, 87% of institutions). They’re still challenged by staffing, lack of full support and buy-in from senior staff, lack of readily available expertise, and funding.

Institutions that are successful report a number of characteristics: they have specific goals for their social media; they are less spontaneous and plan more; they have institutional buy-in and support for their social media activities; they control social media content and staff with their own department; they use multiple social media platforms and target multiple audiences; and they are more likely to have policies. And they are more likely to evaluate their success in multiple ways.

Looking ahead to 2011, we’ll see institutions creating social media plans (51%), expanding their activities to new audiences (46%), adding new social media tools to current programs (44%), and developing formal policies (37%).

Here’s a pdf of the presentation slides from the CASE Social Media and Community conference and a topline report of the raw data. We’ll release the White Paper in July.

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Back Burner Analytics

Lately, we’ve been hearing a lot more from our clients (and prospective clients) about website analytics. Everybody’s thinking about pageviews, hits, time on site, landing pages, internal and external visitors, and they should be: analytics is a critical part of not only proving the value of the investment an institution makes in its website, but also continually improving that site based on user feedback.

Unfortunately, a lot of what we hear is “we have Google Analytics installed, but no one is using it for much of anything.” It’s one of many things that gets pushed to the back burner when we’re focused on social media, mobile sites, implementing content management systems, producing videos and writing great content. The good news is that even if you don’t have time to focus on analytics this week or this month, there’s a lot you can do right now to be sure that you’ll have something to work with when you move analytics to the front burner and turn up the heat.

Get tracking.
An awful lot of folks are using Google Analytics. It’s free, it’s easy to implement on a site, and it provides some good functionality. If you don’t already have an analytics tool, keep it simple and install Google Analytics. But in higher education, be sure to think about more than just the main .edu site—consider tracking on microsites, blogs, athletics, and departmental servers as well. The Google Analytics tracking code is easy to install, and ensures that you have a way to record the traffic to the sites you would care most about, even if you won’t use it right away. Once you’re ready to consider your metrics more closely, you’ll already have a baseline set.

Be sure you are collecting data. For those of you who already have GA installed, you want to be sure that you’re actually gathering the information you want. The little piece of Google Analytics javascript tracking code needs to be installed on every page on your site. It’s easier said than done on sites that don’t use a content management system or are scattered groups of pages with different authors using different tools. Try this:

• Log into the Google Analytics site and click “view report” from the landing page showing your domains/profiles to view your data.


• Check to see that you have positive numbers that continue up to the present. You can also change the date parameters (in the top right of reports) to look back and check the data that you’ve been gathering. You can’t change the past, but you can be informed about what data you have collected. In higher education it is particularly useful to have a full year of consistent data, because year-over-year comparisons help to compare admissions cycles, the ebb and flow of semesters, and the other cycles that impact your audiences.
• Make sure the number of pageviews passes the “sniff test”—are the numbers in a reasonable ballpark for the content? It’s usually an issue of there being none or only a handful of pageviews which could indicate a problem. Click “Content” in the left navigation and check the “Top Content” report and make sure that pages you expect to be the most visited have lots of visits.
• Verify that there are pageviews across a variety of pages. If you aren’t sure whether tracking code is installed on certain pages, look for those pages in the “Top Content” report. Analytics are only gathered for pages with the tracking code, so in cases where the code isn’t easily added universally on the site, check specific pages to see that data is recorded for them.

Remember, you can’t recreate data that was never captured, so don’t make assumptions about what Google Analytics is gathering for you now. Be sure you’re getting what you need. Even if you aren’t doing much (or anything) with the analytics now, collecting good data will serve you well whenever you do train your focus on the analytics.

Own the account that collects your analytics. Some institutions have analytics accounts set up by a vendor and installed on a website for them. They have access to the data, but the account is not controlled by the institution itself, which means all data collected in the account is not controlled by the institution. Historical data can’t be moved from one account to another, so it’s important to “own your data”. Google stores the data, but the account owner controls access to it.

Higher education institutions should control their own free Google Analytics account and not be under the umbrella of another entity. If you have data going to an account that you don’t own, consider setting up your own account and swapping the existing tracking code for your new version. There won’t be continuity in the “old” vs. “new” account data since it will be in two places, but the sooner you control your data the better. You can still compare data between the two accounts and over time the data collected in the new account will be all you need.

Track site search. One of the simplest customizations you can make to Google Analytics is to enable search tracking, but Google Analytics does not do this by default. After viewing your reports in Google Analytics, click on the “Content” reports in the left navigation, and click on “Site Search”. Google will tell you right away if it is tracking search or not and provides instructions if you aren’t. Gathering data about what visitors are searching for on your site can be extremely valuable. Start collecting the data, even if you don’t know when you’ll get around to doing anything with it.

Get in a proactive frame of mind. When you do start to think about how website analytics can help you, stay away from getting overly excited about how many people are looking at content on your site. Higher ed sites get a lot of traffic—there are built-in audiences seeking you out! Instead, consider a more nuanced approach. Think about what how understanding visitor behavior on your site can help you do your job better—producing more useful content, improving information architecture, directing people to things they’re really looking for, giving key audiences reasons to take the next step with you, promoting events, ideas, people or programs that showcase your best assets.

Websites analytics are a great tool, and even more valuable when you’ve got a strong history to look back on. Do yourself a favor and take a few minutes to be sure your analytics data will be there when you need it—it will repay you in kind when you’re ready to move ahead.

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You’re Invited to Complete CASE/mStoner/Slover Linett Social Media Survey!

We need your input! Please take a few minutes to fill out the CASE/mStoner/Slover Linett Survey on Social Media in Advancement.

This survey is designed to help us learn how schools, colleges, and universities are using social media to engage constituents. If you remember, we did the first survey last year. I’m so curious to know what we’ll learn this year and what trends we’ll identify now that we have that baseline data. And I’m really hoping that you’ll share what’s happening at your institution!

While you should have basic familiarity with social media initiatives in your office or at your institution, you do not have to be an expert of active participant in social media yourself to participate in the survey. The survey should take about 20 minutes to complete, and your responses will be treated confidentially.

Please take the Survey on Social Media in Advancement now!

As a reminder, this is our second survey on the use of social media in alumni relations, communications, fundraising and marketing at schools, colleges and universities. The survey will lead to improved understanding of social media efforts at education institutions and help you benchmark your own social media initiatives. To find out what respondents said last year, read the 2010 report and/or white paper.

If you can’t complete the survey today (or, better yet, right now!), please complete it by Monday, 7 March.

This survey is being conducted by mStoner, Slover Linett Strategies and CASE. Initial results will be presented at the CASE Conference on Social Media and Community in April. Participants who provide their e-mail addresses at the conclusion of the survey will receive a personal copy of the results; the e-mail addresses will be used only for this purpose.

If you have technical questions about this survey or questions in the survey, please contact Bill Hayward at Slover Linett Strategies (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)). Please contact Rae Goldsmith of CASE (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) with questions about the survey project.

Thank you for contributing to our understanding of the use of social media at educational institutions.

And please remember to take the survey by Monday, 7 March.

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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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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.

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CASE Awards of Excellence 2010: Report for Category 12, Best in Social Media

This year, CASE created a new category, Best in Social Media, in its Awards of Excellence Program. I led the judging for social media, which was held in conjunction with the judging for websites at George School in Newtown, PA, in early April. [Here’s a blog post containing results, comments, and a downloadable version of the Judges’ Report for Category 11, Websites.]

Eight of us judged the social media category. Judges represented American colleges, schools, and universities, both public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, social media, web technology, and marketing. Some members of the panel have considerable exposure on social media, including significant number of Twitter followers.

According to CASE,

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 2009 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.

So there may be awards for social media coming from entries in these other categories: stay tuned.

Results

Here are the number of entries in each subcategory and the awards given:

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

12b. Best Uses of Social Media in Fundraising: 5 entries, one award
Silver: Children’s Hospital Trust Boston Social Media Portfolio: Facebook (English); Facebook (Spanish)]; YouTube (English); YouTube (Spanish); Twitter: @helpkids

12c. Best Uses of Social Media in Student Recruitment and Marketing: 19 entries, 2 awards
Silver: Northfield Mount Hermon School NMHBook
Bronze: Brock University Both Sides of the Brain [url=http://apps.facebook.com/
bothsidesofthebrain]Facebook Application[/url]

12d. Other Uses of Social Media: 25 entries, 3 awards
Gold: College of William and Mary Mascot Search
Gold: Oregon State University, Powered by Orange: Facebook page; Twitter: @poweredbyorange; YouTube; LinkedIn; Flickr.
Bronze: Tufts University, The Beelzebubs on NBC’s The Sing Off: news package and chat.

Comments and Trends

Social media is new enough that there aren’t a whole lot of precedents for great uses of social media. But there are some. Last year, for example, several initiatives that used social media won in various categories, including Flight of the Flyers from Nazareth College and Emory University’s Blue Pig campaign, both of which won awards. [I wrote blog posts about Flight of the Flyers and the Blue Pig.]

So before we began viewing the entries, we agreed that just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account—or even both of them along with a LinkedIn presence—wasn’t enough for an entry to qualify for an award. We wanted to see strategic goals set—and accomplished through the use of social media along with, perhaps, other channels. We wanted to see some evidence of engagement on the part of a target audience—blog comments, retweets, wall posts. And we wanted to see something that was new or different, not something that every other college or university was doing.

Honestly, we didn’t know what to expect and in general, we were relatively disappointed in the submissions. We did see a number of institutions that thought having a Facebook page or a Twitter presence was significant. It isn’t, not today.

From the award-winners, we gain an emerging sense that “best practices” in social media do involve multiple channels. Sometimes these are multiple social media or online channels. Northfield Mount Hermon’s NMHBook mashup is an example of this approach: it aggregates social media feeds into the school’s website. Powered By Orange, OSU’s impressive awareness campaign, mashes up social media with many other channels, including banners, signage, and face-to-face events. [Powered By Orange is an awesome campaign; here’s a blog post I wrote about it last year.] The College of William & Mary used multiple online channels in its search for a new mascot and did it brilliantly.

These are great examples of the kinds of social media-focused programs that institutions should emulate.

In judging social media, as in judging websites, written submissions are essential. Comments in the submissions help us to put what we’re seeing on-screen in context. A well-articulated strategy, supported by results, helps us to understand that social media can achieve institutional objectives. We’re keenly aware that these award winners will serve as models for other institutions and can help to convince reluctant administrators that social media is a safe channel to advance institutional goals. In this context, results are essential.

Here’s a copy of the complete judge’s report for this category, with comments about each of the award winners.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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CASE Awards of Excellence 2010: Winners, Comments, Judges’ Report for Category 11, Websites

The best professional development event I attend every year is the judging for the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for websites, which I’ve led since the 1990s. At this year’s judging, held in early April at George School, we judged Category 11: Websites and Category 12: Best Use of Social Media. [There are comments and a downloadable Judge’s Report from the social media category here.]

What this means is locking oneself in a room for two days with more than a dozen smart, informed, opinionated people; looking at more than two hundred websites and social media sites; and arguing about which sites are good enough to get a award. It’s incredibly stimulating—and sometimes frustrating—to have strongly held opinions strongly challenged. No one knows where we’ll end up when we compile the final list of award winners.

For the record, as you scan the lists below, there are several sites that would never appear on my own list. And it’s safe to say that each of the other judges this year, as in years past, would say the same thing. But we all stand by the final list of award winners.

This year, the judges represented American and Canadian schools, colleges, and universities, both public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, fundraising, student recruitment, social media, web technology, and marketing. Several of the judges work for institutions that have won national CASE Awards of Excellence for their websites. Two representatives from CASE attended the judging.

Results: Category 11

There were 54 complete institutional sites entered in Category 11A [Complete Institutional Websites] and 106 sites entered in Category 11B [Individual Sub-Websites]. Here are the winners:

Category 11a: Complete Institutional Websites
Gold: Fashion Institute of Technology
Silver: Northfield Mount Hermon School
Bronze:: Duke University; University of Puget Sound

Category 11b: Individual Sub-websites
Gold:: King’s College London, Online Prospectus; University of Michigan, University Housing
Silver: University of Toronto, U of T Magazine
Bronze:: Boston University, 2009 Annual Report; Columbia College Chicago, This is Columbia’s Moment Media Production Center; Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 3-D Web site; University of Iowa, Annual Report
Honorable Mention: University of Missouri-Columbia, Illumination

Observations and Trends

Each year, we begin this judging with a discussion of what makes an award-winning institutional website. Here were some of the important elements we identified this year:

• a sound strategy;


• sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search;


• valid, accurate, timely, and relevant content, effectively deployed across the site, including both text and images;


• the quality of resources-content assets, staff, and budgets-and how they were used on the site;


• a clear identity that is appropriate to the organization;


• an appropriate level of innovation—in other words, we want designers to push the envelope but we still expect information to be findable, content to be readable (or viewable), and the site to be well-designed. Cutting edge for the sake of being cutting edge didn’t persuade the judges to award anything.


• standardization of interface across the site;


• accessibility of the code; appropriate use of technology and adherence to standards (We awarded extra points for sites that had considered how they would display on a mobile device.);


• metrics; evaluation plans; results;


• and, new this year, a connection to the ecosystem of the web, which is particularly significant as the social web assumes a greater importance.

We asked ourselves repeatedly what each site does that’s unusual or innovative. Though we are tasked with judging the sites that are entered in this category and, to some extent, we must compare them with each other, we can’t ignore other sites we’ve seen. For example, we considered it legitimate to reject a site that was a collection of student blogs designed to recruit students. While it was well-designed, there was nothing about it that distinguished it from many similar sites nor did it do anything different than Ball State University’s student blog site has been doing for five years.

We were underwhelmed at what we saw this year. Sites entered for an award were missing basic elements like a sense of where an institution was located. And there were a lot of bland sites.

Some trends we noticed this year:

• People are trying to break out of the mold of what a traditional site looks like and are trying some radically different things that don’t seem to work or are very hard to understand from a user’s point of view. If they’ve tested these innovations and found that they are working, they haven’t shared any usability testing results or data that backs up the success of their risk taking.


• Perhaps because of a desire to be “different,” 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 differentiated from its competitors—and, therefore, why anyone would want to go there. The winners all did this well.


• It’s still hard to find calls to action on many websites. One judge recounted the difficulty of finding information about how to apply, much less an “apply now” button on a website he viewed.


• We saw many attempts to connect a website to the larger web through Facebook and Twitter badges and other devices, but often saw “share this” buttons in unexpected places where they appear 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 very confusing to navigate. This is particularly challenging on sites that don’t have a clear design hierarchy for pages or where choices are clearly dictated by internal politics rather than a sense of what a visitor to the site might want to do.


• On many sites, the space is just not well used. For example, pages about curriculum choices carried a big header and large images. What value does that have to a visitor to these pages? And related to this, while a big, splashy something may be suitable for a first-time visitor, what happens when repeated visitors tire of it and just want to reach the information they’re seeking?


• While we did see good content on some sites, some of it was buried on the site and hard to find. And some was good, but overused—like a site that featured profiles of six people that showed up everywhere. Another point that is often overlooked is that 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 and even links. I can’t stress too much how important the written submission for this category is—and how crucial it is to provide data about how effective the site is.

A last word about how important the written submissions for this category are. 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.”

In terms of context, we paid a lot of attention to the organizational work and cross-campus cooperation that went into building the backbone of some of these sites.

Finally, knowing that sites were created in-house or with in-house solutions was also a plus.

Here’s a copy of the complete judge’s report for this category, with more details about the judging and comments about each of the award winners.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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