More with Less

Offering a consistent look and feel on the Web at a big university is a challenge. When implementing a content management system across hundreds of units or departments isn’t an option – for budget reason, some institutions have to adopt a different approach.

At the University of Alabama, the central web communications team includes only 4 people. That’s why Andy Rainey, director of Web Communications, is a big proponent of the “teach-them-how-to-fish” approach. His team has always designed and published web resources to help the larger university community get up to speed with their web presence, using more recently WordPress as their web platform of choice.

Last April they launched 3 branded WordPress themes to create the winning combo of ease of use with WordPress and consistency with a unique web template. With the release earlier this summer of WP 3.0, UA Web Communication Team was able to merge the 3 themes into a single one including some very powerful customization options to accommodate the special needs of different units on campus.

Here’s a regular second-level page, the Admissions web page on the main website:

And, here are a few screenshots of the WP 3.0 template:

I asked Andy Rainey, director of Web Communications at the University of Alabama, to answer a few questions about this project.

1) Did you develop the WP theme in-house? Who did it?

The theme was developed in-house by our Web Communications team, led by developer Matthew Muro. Matthew previously built and released our first UA-branded WordPress themes earlier this spring, but as the new WP 3.0 version emerged, he took the opportunity to significantly improve the functionality and flexibility of the themes. The 3.0 theme utilizes a custom admin panel that provides control of major design aspects of a site without requiring customization of the code itself. He was also able to create a single, united theme based on our UA Web Templates that provided a number of different layout and configuration options, instead of requiring users to choose which theme they wanted up front. In this way, we hope the theme becomes more fluid and flexible to current and future needs.

2) How did your campus community react to the launch of the WP themes?

The feedback we have received has been very positive. In fact, the provision of this theme is in large part the result of listening to much discussion among campus webmasters and functional users. The need for a “plug-and-play” solution for campus web sites has been the most significant need we’ve heard in the past few years, and while any solution requires some degree of effort and customization to be successful, we feel the theme is a great resource for units lacking full-time web expertise or resources to obtain that expertise to be able to easily build an accessible, usable, effective and institutionally-branded web site. The theme is provided as a true open-source resource, with no stipulations other than it must be used for an official or unofficial University of Alabama web site only, and that its usage must not violate general UA web policies. Significant time and energy has gone into creating tutorials and resources on our Web Guide site that make customizing the theme to meet specific needs a simpler process.

3) Do you provide hosting for their WP install? Do you offer to run their website from your own WP 3.0 install?

Hosting for WordPress web sites is available through the campus’s office of information technology, and they’re working to further streamline the process to improve how these sites are deployed and managed. As WP 3.0′s code base is now merged with WordPress MU, it should become easier and more efficient to roll out new WordPress web sites in a more scalable and repeatable manner going forward.

4) Any good examples of implemented WP UA websites to share?

This theme was just released a few weeks ago, so really it’s just getting started. But we have seen great results with using WordPress for institutional web sites, which informed our decision to offer WordPress themes. Our news center suite (UA news , Dialog – our faculty and staff newsletter and and our magazine Research) are custom WordPress sites, and by using WordPress we’ve been able to empower content providers to manage these sites almost exclusively. And we previously tested the first version of our UA WordPress themes with our own Editorial Style Manual as a proof-of-concept.
There are many campus web sites already using WordPress, so this new theme provides additional options for those sites to utilize institutional resources and offers others the ability to have that institutional brand. We’re treating this theme as one of our primary offerings to campus at large and we will continue to invest our time and resources to improving the themes and the resources available to those who wish to use them, with the goal of significantly improving the performance, consistency and effectiveness of our overall campus web presence through the most efficient means possible.

Have you heard about the news yet?

The Higher Ed Analytics Revolution has officially started! In the session I presented today at the eduWeb conference, I’ve finally got a chance to explain my plans for this revolution.

I want to help you change the way marketing decisions are made at your institution – most of the time they are based on hunches, guesses or opinions while it’s now possible to adopt a more data-driven approach with the help of Online Analytics.

Earlier today I shared my 7-step plan to develop a web analytics process. Technology wasn’t very cooperative this afternoon in Chicago as the AV guy had some trouble connecting my laptop to the projector and then forgot to plug back in my laptop with a dying battery, but I think I managed to get my message across.

I’ve uploaded my slide deck to Slideshare, so you can have a look at it.

In this presentation, I explain that we are going to start to collect data about 12 basic metrics along with some info about the size and type of your institution every month.

Our goal is to create and share some useful benchmarking data to help you inform your marketing decisions and develop a data-driven culture in your web, marketing or communication office.

If you’re interested and want to join the revolution, just register to receive updates and invitations to fill out the monthly benchmarking survey at www.higheredanalytics.com.

We will start on August 11, 2010 and you will have to submit your data to receive the monthly benchmarking report.

We want to start now and fine tune the segmentation options as we go, so your feedback, comments and suggestions are more than welcome at that stage.

We know it’s not going to be the perfect at the beginning but revolution aren’t done overnight, so let’s start now and aim for good enough, shall we?

Southeast Missouri State University launched its mobile website in January this year. When I heard the news I was very pleased because a team from SEMO had attended the Going Mobile Webinar Series in October 2009.

A few months ago Thomas Marrone, Web Design & Support Manager at SEMO Marketing & University Relations emailed me to share the news (and say thanks). At that time, I asked him a few questions about the whole project. Things have been so busy for those past few months that this email interview got stuck in my “draft post” pile.

With the next Going Mobile Webinar Series scheduled on August 4, it makes sense to publish this interview now as it might give you an idea of how the higher ed Mobile Web Open Source Platform developed and maintained by our presenter, Dave Olsen, can help you (whether you attend the webinar or not).

Southeast Mobile Web Site, Southeast Missouri State University

1) How long did it take to develop the mobile version of your website? How big was the team working on this project?

The project was completed on Jan. 19 and we launched it on the 21st. We had been working on it off and on since October 2009, so about three months.

Brian Holdman, Technology Specialist for University Advancement, took the lead on this project and figured out the nuts and bolts. I handled the interface design. We had networking support from Tom Westbrook and Tre Wallhausen and application support from Dan Koeppel, all in Information Technology. One of our student workers, Daniel Johnson, also provided usability input and a lot of work on the database that drives the campus map.

So the site was done with the involvement of 5 full time staff and one student worker, though we all chipped in with bits and pieces and developed the mobile site on the top of our other responsibilities.

2) How did the webinar series “Going Mobile” help you with the development of this website?

The Webinar was crucial in introducing us to the MIT Mobile framework and the work that Dave Olsen did adapting the Framework for use at other campuses. We also got in touch with Dave directly and he was very gracious in answering our questions once we really dug into the project.

3) What did you learn during the process that might help your colleagues at other institutions?

Don’t be afraid to mess around and see how far you can take a side project. We started messing around with the Mobile Framework to see what was possible, and as we began working with it, it became clear that we really could build a product for the campus using the resources we had.

Because the MIT people and Dave were willing to share their work with the Higher Ed community we could take that and create a mobile site with extremely limited resources. The only thing we “paid” for the mobile site was the HigherEdExperts Webinar fee; everything else was institutional labor cost the University was going to be paying anyway. When you compare that to some Universities that have paid $40,000 for a vendor to build them an iPhone application I think we made out pretty well. So, the lesson from all that is to keep an eye on what’s out there and always take up on someone’s offer to share what they’re doing with you.

I started to write about the mobile web in higher education about a year ago (The ABC of Mobile Marketing for my University Business column), but I know I’ll be writing more and more about it in the coming months (and not because of the August 4 “Going Mobile” webinar series by Higher Ed Experts).

You might have noticed yourself that several sessions and workshops about the topic have been popping up this year at higher ed conferences. So, it sounds like we have finally passed the very-early-adopter phase with more and more institutions starting to cater to their mobile web users.

If you still need to sell the mobile web to your boss, I’ve gathered some fresh data from two different surveys to help you build your case.

I’ve already shared some of the data included in the E-Expectations Report published last week, but I’d like to bring to your attention a single data point from this survey:

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a report about Mobile Access two weeks ago (July 7, 2010) with really up-to-date results as the survey was done by phone (landlines and cell phones) between April 29 and May 30, 2010.

You can download the 25-page PDF report for free, but here are the most useful data points for marketers and web professionals in higher education.

• 9 in 10 young adults aged 18-29 own a cell phone (compared to 82% for all adults)
• 19% use a cell phone only to go mobile, 84% use a laptop AND a cell phone
• 55% of all cell phone owners go online at least every day
• 52% of 18-29 year olds and 52% of college grads of any age go online with their phone several times a day
• 65% of 18-29 year old cell phone owners access the internet with their phone
• 19% of 18-29 year old cell phone owners have made a charitable donation by text (compared to 10% for 30-49 year old users) – Could it be the solution to get young alums in the habit of giving to their alma mater?
• Young adults are more likely than older users to engage in mobile data applications as shown in the chart from the Pew Internet and American Life Project below.

As you can see, the mobile web channel is definitely getting a fair share of attention and action from students and young alums.

While several institutions have chosen to outsource the development of their mobile websites, you don’t have to go this route thank to the higher ed open source platform based on MIT Mobile and further developed by Dave Olsen from West Virginia University.

If you want to get started more smoothly, you should definitely register for Going Mobile: How to develop the mobile website of your institution with Mobile OSP.

In my previous post, Chris Garcia from BYU Library Multimedia Team answered a few questions about the YouTube hit his team created, but if you want to see how they did this million-view video (1,357,775 at the time of this writing including 126,150 on mobile devices), just watch this short making of:

You can also learn more about the team on the blog they created:

New Spice

Mike Richwalksy from HighEdWebTech has been keeping track of interesting videos produced by institutions for some time now. So, when I saw he posted about a higher ed parody of the big social media hit video campaign, Old Spice, I checked out the video right away.

Believe it or not, but I had been so busy those past few days with work, danah boyd’s master class and a zillion other things that I hadn’t had chance yet to watch the Old Spice video before this morning. I knew it was a hit because of all the chatter on Twitter, but I didn’t feel compel to watch it until this morning.

In case you’ve been living on an island located in an ocean of work and were not in the know, here’s the original:

And, here’s the parody the Harold B. Lee Library Multimedia Team created.

Wow. Very nice job and an instant success with more than 169, 000 views at the time of this writing.

I knew you would all want to know more about how a higher ed team managed to produce and promote this viral success, so I interviewed via email Chris Garcia, HBL Library Multimedia Project Manager.

1) First, can you tell us a bit more about the team behind this video?
We are the Harold B. Lee Library’s Multimedia Production Unit. We handle all the video and media needs of the library. We record lectures, make video materials for exhibits, promote the library (exhibits, general promos, collections, services), and occasionally branch out to do something for other BYU entities. We consist of 2 full-time employees (Mike Hill, unit manager, and me, project manager) and 10-12 awesomely talented student employees, depending on the time of year. We also get a lot of support from the library itself.

2) How did you come up with the idea of this parody? What were your goals for this video?
As our job is to promote the library in anyway we had a break in between projects and we thought we’d make another “fun” promo video (some of our other ones are on youtube.com/hbllproduction). We sat down as a unit and talked about possible ideas. Our meetings and projects, for that matter, are very student driven. We wanted something that would catch on and be seen. As far as our specific goals once the project was decided upon, we really wanted to do the whole thing as smooth as possible by making sure to give our pre-production the time it needed (which really wasn’t all that much time but it worked).

3) How did you manage to write, shoot and produce this video so quickly?
We had that initial meeting on May 27th and then we were shooting it on June 12th. We worked completely as a team to write the script and even had Stephen Jones, the actor, come in and contribute to the script. We were two full-timers and 10 students. Our team is a smorgasbord of talent. Mike and I have backgrounds in media and film and we have students in BYU’s film program, electrical engineering, chemical engineering, animation, IT. We did the whole thing under $500, however, we have all our own equipment so that was not a cost specific to this project. We have really tried to setup a mentored environment here with most if not all aspects of projects being done by students. For the shoot we also called on a lot of friends to assist with the stunts on the day of the shoot as well as a lot of BYU volunteers to be extras at the three different locations. We spent hours trying to get the shirt rip-off and the backpack drop just right. We even had a practice shoot two days before the real one to make sure we knew what we were doing.

4) The video has gone viral with more than 50,000 views this morning (when I asked the questions – about 6 hours before writing this post). How did you promote it?
We started by just showing it to full-time library employees at a meeting and then two days later it went up on the web. Promotion was a library effort I think and a real example of the power of social networking. I posted the video on YouTube yesterday (July 15th) at about 11:30am. A few of us here in the unit posted it on Facebook. I send out a library wide e-mail with a link to the video and from there it exploded. After 3 hours of being up we were getting e-mails from Canada, New York, and even Sweden about the video. YouTube stops instantly updating views after about 300 (which we hit after about 45 minutes) so we were unsure of the growth after that. We had to wait until this morning to see the real response to the video.

5) Can you share a few examples of the feedback you got on campus and elsewhere?
Some of the funniest responses we’ve gotten have been our personal friends, who didn’t know we made this, sending links to us to watch it. We’ve gotten e-mails from New York Public library, the University of Alberta (who told us that some friends in the UK were all a buzz over the video), the University of Rochester, an advertising blog in Sweden (at least the person who contacted us had a Swedish phone number), and several other libraries all over the country. The comments on YouTube have been a real joy to read as well. I’ve been checking our actor’s, Stephen Jones, Facebook page and he even got a wall post from someone studying in Egypt.

The good folks of Noel-Levitz have just released their E-Expectations 2010 Report presenting the results of their latest survey of 1,005 college-bound high school students.

This 12-page report is full of really great findings that should help you fine tune your student recruitment strategy. So, make sure you download the PDF file who is made available to the public for free.

Here are a few things of interest (there are more, so make sure you read the report):

• While many (including yours truly) have been announcing the death of print marketing, this report seems to indicate that paper isn’t dead for high school students: 89% indicate that the information received in the mail is one of the ways they learn about schools.
• Email is more alive than ever and used by 79% to learn more about schools. 91% say they will give their email address (70% will even give their primary email address) to colleges to receive more relevant information.
• 75% look for the school’s website and 65% enroll search engines to help them.
• However, only 35% learn about schools via TV or Radio advertising. Time to say bye, bye to the costly traditional media advertising campaigns?
• Facebook is used by 76% of high school students and 80% of them welcome both official and unofficial information about colleges on social media websites.
• Twitter – used by only 8% of students – is definitely not the tool to reach the masses. I think it should only be used as a “customer relations” tool by admissions offices (news and institutional Twitter accounts have different goals and target audiences).

E-Expectations 2010 (PDF file)

I know this is a very long title for a short post, but what I can say…

Last week Fortune released its list of the smartest people in tech in several categories.

Dr danah boyd, who will present an online master class about the social media practices of young adults this Thursday for Higher Ed Experts, was nominated the smartest academic in Tech.

The smartest people in tech – Smartest Academic: danah boyd – FORTUNE

So, this online master class is your chance to listen to the smartest academic in tech this week.
Registration are open until tomorrow (July 13) end of the day at www.higheredexperts.com/socialmedia

What’s great about flying across the country to attend a conference is the quality time I can get with my laptop.

I meant to post about this great initiative for more than a month now, but I couldn’t find enough quiet time to write it. My apologies.

Back in April, Nicole Sweeney Etter from Marquette University’s magazine brought to my attention a great online video that had been produced by a group of current students. Marquette Magazine published an article about this group, The Spanish O’Donnells, as it had “developed quite a campus following for their pop parodies and YouTube music videos.”

When he read this magazine profile, Dave Murphy, senior director of brand marketing at Marquette University contacted the students and asked them to create a music video for scholarship aid. The Spanish O’Donnells were given a fact sheet about financial aid as a starting point and just ran with it. “The guys were jotting down lyrics before they even left the office. At the guys’ request, we also provided some historical photos and video footage to mix with their own footage,” wrote Etter in her email.

The students recorded the music in a mini-recording booth set up in a dorm room closet. It took them about a month to write, record and edit.

The resulting video has been very successful. At the time of this writing, it has been viewed 9184 times.

Because it includes a very clear and specific call to action – i.e. donate money to support student scholarships, it was possible to measure its results.

The video was promoted to Marquette’s Alums via the university Facebook page and Twitter account as well as on the Give Marquette website. It was also used for an email campaign delivered to close to 38,000 alums and individuals including all donors and non-donors. The email signed by the University President, Father Wild, was sent on March 25 and invited alums to watch the video. The subject line of the email was “A clever video from our students.”

Thanks to Sara Harvey from University Advancement I can actually share with you some very interesting data about the results of this campaign:

• Email open rate: 31%
• Click-trough rate: 18.4% (only 6% in March 2009)
• Open to click-through rate: 59% (only 17% in March 2009)
• Unsubscribe rate: less than 1%
• 34 donations* for a total of $7615 three weeks after delivery (15 donations for a total of $3,832 in March 2009)

* The donations were determined by counting those constituents who clicked on a link to view the video and who also made a gift via the on-line giving form through 4/14/2010.

Sara Harvey also shared with me many replies made via Twitter, Facebook and email. I’m just including a couple below to give you an idea of the feedback the video and the email got from Marquette University alums:

I just wanted you to know that although I had stopped donating a few years ago (putting my own kids through college took most of the discretionary spending), a friend forwarded a link to the Spanish Odonnells’ video. I was immediately moved to donate. I’m happy to help support the education of such clever and talented students. I don’t know how you plan to disseminate this video, but I hope you will do so. This was so much more effective than the telephone call in the middle of “Grey’s Anatomy.”

If this is the kind of energy, communication creativity, and innovation that MU is developing in its students, and if this is how MU students are making efforts to understand generational differences connect with them in a diverse and inclusive message, and if is how they are astute enough to recognize past tradition and memories to connect with alumni to make a meaningful appeal for finanical aid… Then as an former MU student, I need to step up and match the that MU student enthusiasm, their skill,and demonstrate my support this kind of fantastic “reach-out” attitude at Marquette. I will be donating to the scholarship fund for the second time in five days, following an excellent call from an MU student on Sunday who also demonstrated that attitude through her telephone manner. We certainly need more of this “MU Creative Connectivity” in our business environments.

Marquette University also posted another video on YouTube including some of the comments made by alums about the song.

Wow. Amazing how a student-produced video can reach the hearts (and pockets ;-) of alums.

Has your institution used online videos in an original way? Let me know at karine@collegewebeditor.com or by posting a comment below.

As you’ve probably noticed, online videos are used more and more by universities and colleges trying to reach (and entertain) prospective students and their parents.
According to a report released last Thursday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, The State of Online Video, 69% of online adults now watch videos online.

The use of musical videos is more recent and seems to have been inspired by a few very successful lipdubs as well as the phenomenal success of the TV show Glee. Yale’s video comes to mind, but it hasn’t been the only one.

I posted about Delaware, The Musical when it was still a project. Since my last post the video has been produced, published and very well received.
Delaware: The MUSICAL

Karlyn Morrissette gave more details on Eduguru about the video as she worked on the larger project with her company, Fire Engine RED.

A few weeks ago I interviewed via email Avi Amon, an admissions counselor at UD and the producer of the video about the kind of return the video had for the University of Delaware. His boss, Amy Greenwald-Foley, also helped address some of my questions. Since this interview was done, Avi published another video, the Making of Delaware, the Musical, that gives an idea of what happened behind the scene.

1) According to YouTube Insights for this video, it is more with young and less young female viewers? Do you know why?

My guess is simply because of the genre, and at the risk of sounding vain, the fact that Drew and I are younger, male professionals. I mean, look at his smile! Those stats also only cover registered YouTube visitors, so it doesn’t paint a complete picture.

2) Why have you close the comments?

I turned off the comments for a number of reasons. First, our Inbox was flooded and we simply could handle the load. The second reason (and this is something I picked up from Yale’s video) is to avoid abuse by Internet “trolls” just looking to be negative without a purpose. Yes, that’s a risk you take by putting something on the Internet, but we didn’t want this project, something that so many students/etc worked on for so long, to be tainted with that negative energy. We tracked “comments” through other venues, such as Facebook and Twitter. The response from students, alumni, etc, has been overwhelmingly positive.

3) In the first phase of this project, prospective students were asked to tell you what they wanted to see in this video? Can you give us a few examples of their suggestions that ended up in the video?

We were thrilled by the response from HS sophomores & juniors in our search tapes. Since no one had done this sort of thing before, we weren’t quite sure if anyone would respond and, if so, what they might suggest. Most wanted to see or hear something about traditions. Since so many of UD’s revolve around The Green, we knew that’s where the story would need finish. We also answered questions about the names of our colleges and the number of majors offered. Of course, every student who submitted a photograph of him- or herself, got a screen credit at the end of the video. And we have plans to produce a summer short on discovering UD, with Drew and myself answering many of the questions submitted by our search respondents. We won’t be able to show all requests — such as a man on the moon with a monkey — but we’ll try to honor many.

4) Now that this is done, do you have an idea of the return on investment of this video? Are the results worth the time and budget spent on this project?

Since we produced the entire video in-house, we were able to work with a more modest budget. It’s great when you have so much talent at your disposal! It’s simply not possible to quantify an exact return on investment but I can say this:

• We garnered press in the The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Philadelphia NPR station, WHY, and several other news outlets and have surpassed 35,000 hits (Note from Karine: 41 029 at the time of this writing) on YouTube, so our circulation has been tremendous.
• We purchased 50,000 fewer search names this year but have the same number of search respondents as last year.
• Our visit numbers among prospective students and their families are now at a record high.
• We brought together an entire University community — current students, administrators, faculty, alumni, and prospective students — in a way that has never been done before.
• And, we learned many things producing this video. Lessons that we hope to carry forward with more videos and experiments in social media.

“Delaware the Musical” was absolutely worth our time and money.

The only things we had to pay for was camera and studio time with our own University Media Services — run by many of our own Alumni.

All the students (graphic design, actors, musicians, dancers, camera crews, etc), the choreographer (an alumna), my own orchestration and planning, the physical spaces we filmed in, were all volunteered or donated. If you include the time outside of work that was needed, the “cost” would be much higher, but this is something we wanted to do so I’m discounting it.