Naked & Friendly

“What do you like about your job?” It’s the kind of question I often use to torment faculty, staff and alumni during intake meetings and profile interviews, so it’s fair to ask it of myself.

So what do I like about my job?

I like drinking the Kool-Aid. I like walking onto a campus and getting a contact buzz from . . . wherever it comes from. The provost who wants a few more students with green hair. The professor who refuses to publish without a student co-author. The freshman who translated the Latin in all of the college and university seals she looked at. Wherever the enthusiasm comes from, I want to catch it and bring it back to the writers and designers who make up mStoner’s idea factory.

The College of William & Mary is an easy place to get enthusiastic about. Tons of history. Gorgeous campus. Weirdly smart/smartly weird students. A faculty of warm-hearted curmudgeons who actually like to teach. And best of all, an admission staff that understands that the best way to reach the typical William & Mary students lurking in the general population is through a bold expression of the College’s scholarly/service-y/off-kilter personality.

Oh, and their viewbook was from, like, 2004. People didn’t even have iPhones back then.

So they asked us to help them make a new viewbook. A viewbook that would jump out of the mailbox, include a distinctive web component, and, specific to WIlliam & Mary’s enrollment challenges, highlight fun to in-state students and top-tier liberal arts experience to out-of-state students.

A dozen meetings, two online surveys, five focus groups and a tick bite later, we developed “The Ampersandbox,” the stories of William & Mary told through a colloquial word pair joined by the William & Mary ampersandand juxtaposed with candid photos from William & Mary’s Flickr feed. In print, the Ampersandbox was quite literally a box of ampersand cards, each tailored to a different aspect of the William & Mary experience—Fire & Ice (the arts), Bread & Butter (the library), Near & Far (study abroad), Ashford & Simpson (just checking). Online, the Ampersandbox was a microsite where current and prospective students and alumni can create and share their own Ampersand word pairs and stories. We developed the wireframes for the site and W&M built it in-house.

The results so far have been Love & Happiness. Current students and alums who have seen the piece rave about it, saying that it perfectly captures the William & Mary they know and love, and does it in a uniquely William & Mary way. They immediately began posting their own word pairs and photos to the Ampersandbox website. Admission counselors have been taking stacks of cards on the road and tell us that prospective students have been really engaged.

The most popular card? Naked & Friendly. It’s about William & Mary’s mascot, the Griffin. It seems to have no pants.

Posted by Mark Sheehy
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Trying something new. (The benefits of phoning it in.)

At mStoner, we always—well, maybe not always, but often—try to find new and better ways to do what we do every day. Sometimes that means forming discrete project teams (um, Voltron and Tweamus) rather than playing endless rounds of “who’s available to work on this project?” Sometimes it means developing a new product or service, such as the free mobile webinars we’ve been running. Lately, we’ve been looking at new ways to do intake.

Intake is the process by which mStoner gets to know a new client, suss out their strategic goals and cultural attributes, and establish the needs and specifications of the project at hand, whether it’s a branding refinement, a social media strategy, a new website, or a suite of enrollment publications. Usually, that intake involves several members of the mStoner team spending two to three days on campus talking to students, faculty, admission and alumni relations staff, the marketing and communication team, the president and provost, the deans of the professional schools, the IT staff, the dean of student life, the head of the library, the assistant vice president for the first-year experience . . . you see where this is going. Some of the meetings are necessary to doing the work. Some of the meetings are necessary to building and maintaining institutional trust and support for the work. Some of them—and this is totally fine and legitimate—are simply to grease the client’s squeakiest wheels. We like it. Getting to know an institution and bonding with a new client are truly one of the most fun parts of the job, but during the 25th meeting of a three-day intake . . . let’s just say one’s ability to form complete, coherent sentences declines.

So the question becomes, how do we do our intake more efficiently so a) we’re doing better work for the client, and b) leaving some mini-bottles of scotch for the other passengers on the flight home?

We’re finishing up a branding project for Swarthmore College in which we did all the administrative intake—the president, the provost, the head of admission, etc.—via conference call, so we could focus our time on campus talking almost exclusively with current and prospective students, faculty, and alumni. That process gave us a depth of understanding of Swarthmore that we crave with all clients, but don’t always satisfy. Now we’re using the same process with the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. With Ross, we conducted one-on-one phone interviews with the heads of admission for each of their degree programs in advance of our on-campus intake. Each of them got more attention than the on-campus process would likely have allowed, and we got to break that intake into more digestible chunks. And the biggest surprise to this former English and Philosophy major was that I had a blast talking to the head of the Master of Accounting program. We got off on this entertaining, not-quite-tangent about accounting as storytelling (notice the smartass in me resisted saying “fiction writing”) and how accountants were more like lawyers constructing a case from evidence or doctors producing a diagnosis from a collection of signs and symptoms than the visored bean counters they often are in the public imagination. (Hmmm. How do we pitch a “rebranding the accounting profession” project?)

So anyway, that’s one of the many things news this month at mStoner. More news about new stuff as we, well, find time to blog about it.

Posted by Mark Sheehy
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Make it more Brown, but not too Brown.

Sometimes your biggest strength is your biggest weakness. When Brown University—in partnership with a prestigious NY design firm—launched their last website, it immediately spawned a slew of imitators. I’m sure you’ve seen them—those sites with layered shutters that open to reveal feature content when you roll your mouse over them. And the design had a lot going for it. It looked smart and sophisticated in a doing-our-own-thing-and-letting-the-world-follow-us way that was very, well, Brown. It was also a great platform for pushing feature content. But trying to use those shutters to navigate the rest of the site made many of Brown’s visitors want to smash things, and the A-to-Z Index quickly became the most popular page on the site because it was the only way many users could find anything.

Brown was wrestling with another strength-as-a-weakness issue with their brand. Thanks to the freedom and flexibility of their undergraduate curriculum and the boldly creative and curious kind of students it attracted, Brown has one of the most distinctive brand personalities of any of the Ivies. But to those not willing to look more closely, that personality made Brown seem a less rigorous place than its peers, and the undergraduate experience obscured the very serious research being done across the university. Even on the undergraduate level, people didn’t necessarily get how intellectual—and intellectually productive—Brown’s culture really was.

So our mission: create a new website that was as functional as it was distinctive and that presented the depth and impact—as well as the freedom—of Brown’s intellectual life, particularly as it related to research. Our first step was to streamline the information architecture and separate the navigation from the feature content. The next step was to challenge our designers to come up with ideas that were as bold and distinctive as Brown itself. It being Brown, every strategic and creative idea was talked through, tested, ripped down and built back up. The process was very heady, very challenging, and very, very collaborative. And the entire Brown community was able to weigh in on design ideas via online surveys and on-campus focus groups.

Brown’s new site went live on September 7. Since then, Brown has had more than 1.5 million page views—a 20% increase from the same period last year. Time on site has increased by 30%, and their bounce rate has dropped from 70% to 11%. Internal users—students, faculty, etc.—are largely abandoning the A to Z index in favor of the audience-specific gateways the new site provides, and a brand-new page listing degree-granting programs is already the 7th most visited page on the site.

The new site also brought about an unanticipated benefit. When student groups, academic departments, and the centers and institutes Brown sponsors saw how prominently the new site displays video and other kinds of feature content, they began creating new content and sharing work they already had, so the feature sections of the site are now being sustained by the entire Brown community.

The site has gotten tons of great feedback from students and alums and was awarded a score of 97 by EDU Checkup, but my favorite comment comes from the Brown Daily Herald. The paper awards diamonds or coal (mostly coal) to things they like or don’t (mostly don’t.) They gave, “a jealous diamond to Brown and its new website, courtesy of the firm mStoner. We tried to redo our site after a trip across the street to Spats, but it just looked mDrunker.”

Posted by Mark Sheehy
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Two Very Different, but Very Successful Projects: Congratulations!

We’d like to congratulate the Fashion Institute of Technology and Northfield Mount Hermon on their success in the recent CASE Circle of Excellence Awards. As we posted yesterday, FIT took home the gold for best website. NMH took home the silver. These were the top awards in the category.

NMH also won a silver for best use of social media in student recruitment and marketing. [In the Best Use of Social Media category, the judges awarded two golds, two silvers.]

Both institutions were great clients and we’re proud to have contributed in some small way to their success.

Fashion Institute of Technology is an very urban, very industry-connected and career-focused school of fashion design and related fields in the heart of Manhattan. Northfield Mount Hermon is a boarding school in western Massachusetts that couples a rigorous education to a living experience that defies the New England boarding school stereotype. (Among other things, they have a farm.) (And for the love of God, please don’t make “Green Acres” references in front of Voltaire.) As different as FIT and NMH are, they came to mStoner with a similar challenge: to create a website that highlights culture and mission as a means of defining the institution’s brand and distinguishing it from its competitors.

For Fashion Institute of Technology, we achieved this website-as-brand-platform goal in a number of way, from subtle ideas like creating an “FIT & New York” page to highlight the important connections between the school in the city tactics as bold as “FIT is . . .,” a slideshow of striking duo-tone images that highlight the creativity and focus of FIT students and faculty. And a special “Fit for You” feature allows prospective students to see how their interests align with FIT programs and how those programs align with some of the most exciting careers in the fashion industry.

We began the Northfield Mount Hermon project just as the school was refining their mission statement, and we distilled the new mission into a branding theme—“Intelligence. Compassion. Purpose.”—that drove the development of a new identity system, website and enrollment publications. The new NMH site is anchored by a Flash feature that introduces students who embody the values of intelligence, compassion and purpose. The feature takes visitors to a branding page that develops the theme and links to more stories that support each of its pillars. A social media aggregator called “NMHbook” and a robust blog platform drive the branding theme home further—and earned the silver for social media.

Both the FIT and NMH sites have received great reviews from internal constituents and seen significant increases in page views and time-on-site.

But as happy as we are with the success FIT and NMH have had with their sites, we are equally pleased with the productive partnerships we were able to forge with both clients. Both projects were truly collaborative efforts, and we look forward to more great work with both institutions in the future.

Posted by Mark Sheehy
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How to Win a CASE Gold

People often ask me, “Mark, how do I win a CASE Gold medal?” And I say, “Hoss, (I address everyone as ‘Hoss,’ including my mother) here’s whatcha gotta do . . ” And then I wake up.

Back in my waking life, two mStoner-designed sites were honored last week. A site we did for the George School won a CASE Gold Medal, and a site we did for the College of William & Mary was one of three nominees for best overall web site on EduStyle.net. We are very pleased for both clients and defer much of the credit to them as these were very collaborative-and very rewarding-projects.

They were also very different projects. George School is a small Quaker boarding school. William & Mary is a public university with the nation’s second oldest college at its core. And the nature of those places required very different sites, and, to a certain extent, different processes. But both projects shared certain attributes that helped make them successful. Those attributes add up to something of a formula for giving any marketing or communications project a school undertake with consultant the best chance of being extra special.

Do lots of intake, most of it with students and faculty. Obviously we need to know the president or headmaster’s vision for the the school. And we’ll need to talk to the Admissions, Development and Alumni Relations staffs to get sense of the school’s competitive situation and how it is currently perceived by its various audiences. But if we’re going to make a website or a suite of enrollment pubs that represents the school in an accurate and compelling way, we have to talk to the students who choose to go there and the faculty who choose to teach them. We need to know what they like about the place and how it fits their own sense of themselves. We have to absorb as much of their enthusiasm for the place as possible. Put another way, our job is to drink the Kool-Ade. The client’s job is to serve it to us. (And just to belabor the point, Kool-Ade is made from students and faculty who love the school and are enthusiastic about its mission.)

Test thoroughly. Use the results thoughtfully. One of the things mStoner does with its intake is develop a message platform—basically a short list of things a website or viewbook should be saying to anyone who reads it. Then we give that message platform and a creative brief full of insights about a school’s students and competitive situation to teams of writers and designers and ask them to develop two or three (sometimes four) very different-yet-audience-appropriate ways of expressing that message platform. Then we test those ideas with current and prospective students to see which ideas convey our key messages most compellingly. We always do an online survey. George School, like many of our clients, chose to supplement the surveys with on-campus focus groups, which are great because in addition to letting us probe for more detailed feedback, it gives us a chance to see body language and other kinds of response that surveys don’t capture. Getting a chance to see kids ooh and ah over the winning concept made George School much more comfortable moving forward with a challenging concept. After much consultation, Ball State, which won the EduStyle “Best Overall Site” award a year ago, deliberately chose a design the came in a close second in testing because they felt it better reflected the school they wanted to become. William & Mary was faced with a similar choice and decided to go with the winner.

Trust your institution. This is probably the toughest one, particularly now when prospective students and their families are particularly price sensitive and feel obliged to go where they’re getting the best deal. But to get a student to apply in the first place, they have to want to go to your school. And that means you need to be as appealing as possible to the students who are the best fit. Both George School and WIlliam & Mary knew they weren’t for everybody. George School wanted to highlight their International Baccalaureate program. William & Mary wanted to remind people that their sometimes-overly-studious student body knew how to have a good time (guerilla a capella, anyone?) But both schools were otherwise comfortable in their own skins and willing to let go of those prospects who were not likely to be a good fit anyway. And it’s much easier to come up with an engaging, meaningful creative idea when you’re trying to say one clear thing to a particular audience than trying to be everything to everyone.

Trust your consultant. Okay, this one is as much on us as on you. We-or whoever your communications consultant might behave to earn your trust. With George School and William & Mary we did our bestas we always try to-to make the process as collaborative as possible and to listen to the client’s needs and the reasons behind changes when they requested changes. In return, they listened to us when we occasionally pushed back on changes. In addition to making us all feel good about the process, that respectful back and forth made the designs better.

So there you have it, Hoss—a four-stop process to getting a website or a viewbook that says something authentic and compelling about your school. We can’t guarantee that it will win you an award, but we feel reasonably confident that it will win you enthusiastic students who fit your institution.

Posted by Mark Sheehy
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Categories: Content and writing / Design and usability / Marketing and branding / Strategy

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What are you looking at?

The concept presentation took place in a windowless computer lab painted in a carefully chosen variant of one of the school colors. The president and her VPs-six of them-sat staring at the screen behind me as I talked and in the back of my mind I was screaming, “what are they thinking? What are they thinking?” And it wasn’t like they weren’t engaged. They had polite smiles on their faces and were nodding attentively, and I had, in fact, asked them to hold their feedback until we’d looked at all the concepts, but still, I wanted to know what they were thinking. Or more to the point, I wanted to know what they were seeing.

Reflecting on the meeting later it started thinking about what I see when I look at a website and realized I was still pretty much using a mutated-into-a-form-of-intuition version of a critique method I’d picked up in undergraduate photography class I’d taken to distract myself from writing papers about Restoration Literature. In evaluating the home page of an academic website, it works kind of like this:

1) What’s the first thing I notice about this homepage? Where does my eye go first? The logo? A tagline? Some feature or photo? Is it the use/overuse of a certain color?

2) What are the next two things I notice? I figure that’s by far the most new visitors are likely to notice before they find whatever they came to your site for in the first place—a degree program, tuition information, the “give now” button. (If they notice more than that before they find what they’re looking for, you’ve got an information architecture/navigation problem.)

Another way to think of this is what path does my eye take through the page, and if the first few things my eye lands on were addends in an equation, what would the sum be?

3) What does the design tell me about the school? Can I immediately tell what kind of institution it is without looking at the name? Is it big research institution? A small liberal arts college? Urban? Rural? Is it serious, fun, hipster, unpretentious, granola, traditional, innovative, arty, careerist? I should be able to accurately draw at least some of these conclusions in a second or two.

4) Then I usually start looking for stuff. I look for my first major when I was an undergraduate (physics). I look for admission requirements. I try to figure out what I’m going to do that night on campus.

Of course, while all this is going on, I’m also asking myself whether I like the site, and if I do, what I like about it, or what I don’t like about it if I don’t. How does the site make me feel? Welcomed? Impressed? Intimidated? Bored? The response to those questions are all valid and valuable, but, because I am not the market for most academic websites, they also need to be more carefully measured than the first questions I asked myself.

In case you’re wondering, the president’s response, once we got to the slide that said “feedback” was, “like that one, LOVE that one, don’t get that one at all.” And so I asked her all kinds of questions about what she loved.

Posted by Mark Sheehy
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