Last week, I posted about a survey report released by College Parents of America, a national “association dedicated to advocating and to serving on behalf of current and future college parents.” At that time, I noticed on the homepage of the association website a link to its blog: “Hoverings, A Blog for College Parents.”
Launched in September 2006, this blog is written by the president of the association, James A. Boyle, a veteran marketing and communication executive.
While “Hoverings” isn’t the blog of a higher ed professional per se, I thought you’d be interested in finding out how College Parents of America use this new communication channel. So, I asked James Boyle to answer the following 3 questions.
1) You started to blog last September. Why did you choose to start a blog in the first place?
We wanted to create opportunities for current and future college parents to learn from each other’s experiences, and to gather some informal feedback on the issues and topics that we are reporting on for families. We were also noticing the growth of blogs and wanted to keep our site as current as possible by adopting this new practice. Finally, we were a bit concerned that our site came off as somber and self-important, and that is not the personality of those of us who are working to build College Parents of America. So when we chose to pull the trigger on our blog, we purposefully chose a fun name – “Hoverings” – to play off the widespread and growing usage of the term “helicopter” parent. In retrospect, we were probably a bit late to the blogging party, but we are pleased to join.
2) Some of the posts on your blog gathered lots of comments, while others didn’t. In your opinion, what did make the difference?
This is something that we expected to happen, though we also hoped that the blog would become much more viral and expose us to tens of thousands of new parents who might like to participate in the blog and to benefit from our group. So far, it seems that the participants are pretty much part of our existing community. As for the varying comment rates, I think the biggest difference-maker is the topic. Most posts having to do with college costs seem to do well, especially our call to hear “college cost priorities for the new Congress.” Another post that drew many very touching posts was our call for parents to “share their empty(ing) nest stories.” Many moms of college freshman are going through a period of withdrawal, and it seems that they really appreciate knowing that they are not alone.
3) As the president of CPA, do you think universities and colleges should also use blogs to communicate with parents?
I think that colleges and universities should use every communication tool at their disposal to communicate with parents, and that blogs should play a supportive role. Since blogs by nature appeal to a sub-section of parents, I think blogs are still a “nice to have” item and not a “must have” for either current or prospective parents. As a result, blogs are still second fiddle to bread-and-butter tools such as parent web site, opt-in e-newsletters. real person to answer questions during business hours, well-organized and content-rich parent orientations, and a nice magazine with four to six issues a year. Over time, blogs will become more mainstream and more critical.
