How do we educate campus on best practices for e-communications

When it comes to marketing one of my favorite lines is when someone says “lets get an email blast out!” How do we as web professionals educate, collaborate, and assist the rest of the institution with best practices in e-communications?

Over the last four years I have found this to be a difficult question because there are so many components to an e-communication:

• delivery system
• body content
• subject line
• photo or banner
• call to action
• unsubscribe

Each of these of course has their own intricacies as well, which professional marketers spend time perfecting. In tough economic times not only is there not an opportunity to expand staff but in most cases web offices are being asked to cut or at least hold the line on resources. But web offices are not the only opportunity for institutional savings and we are seeing an increased interest in utilizing web based technologies including e-communications to communicate across our campus which results in an increased “email blast” effect.

I think there are a number of things you can do to help your community understand that you need to integrate e-communications into an overall strategy and plan in advance.

System
You need a good email system. We have used in-house systems, quasi in house systems, and now a vendor supported solution. Without a doubt the vendor solution has been a savior and allowed us to focus on best practices more instead of making sure the right lists load quickly.

Partner
Find your largest users and partner with them. In higher ed chances are good that your highest volume users are in development/alumni relations or admissions. Spend some time understanding their sequence and their needs. Having a partner early on helps when you want to work with other segments of campus.

Resources
Chances are resources at your institution are tight and you might not be able to get money to help you outsource your e-communications efforts. Set up a meeting with your IT staff who are in charge of institutional email. Share with them some of the best practices that you are trying to communicate with campus and see if they have anything additional to add. These members of your community spend a lot of time trying to block spam and you can probably use this free in-house resource to help you “beat” the spam filters.

Collaborate
Bring the major players together once a semester and host an e-communications summit. Share best practices and have your users talk about what works and what they are struggling with. This will help you set priorities and allow for free knowledge transfer across departmental lines.

 

Gettysburg College launches iphone app

At Gettysburg College today we were pleased to announce the launch of a free iPhone application for the  iPhone or iPod Touch. The app can be downloaded at www.gettysburg.edu/app and is part of a broader mobile strategy for the college

The project started in May and was coordinated by web communications. We worked collaboratively with admissions, public relations, and IT and used a vendor GeoNova Publishing, they are historically a mapping company but are branching out into mobile devices.

We targeted the iphone/itouch for a number of reasons. We saw it as an opportunity to start working in the mobile world and thought that there was a good base of apps already for the iphone. In the future we may have to develop across several devices but we will wait and see if one emerges as most popular.

The app was designed specifically for the external audiences of the College including prospective students and their families, alumni and parents. It provides mobile access to an interactive campus map, information, photos, videos, and campus directories

Twitter success story

Last week I wrote about a new school year equaling new opportunities. In the post one of the things I encouraged web professionals to do was tweet convocation. Susan Evans from William & Mary commented on the post,

“Guess what? We tweeted our convocation today. It was fun and successful. You can read our stream for this afternoon at http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23wrenyard”

At Gettysburg we did as well and saw some good results. Move-in day and convocation were Wednesday with Field day and our traditional first-year walk on Thursday.

We used the twitter search widget to pull the hashcode #gbc2013 onto our site and as of Sunday evening 88 posts used the hashtag. 31 of those were not using the college account but rather, students, alumni, parents, and staff who were excited about the events and used the hashcode. The live pull to our site also gave our orientation coverage an up to the minute feel. I got numerous comments during the end of last week about how great it was to see everything up to date so quickly.

Reflecting on the experience there are a couple of thoughts I had:

• collaboration was important (we had numerous people from web communications, public relations, and the admissions office helping with the effort
• information needed to be relevant to mater to our audience
• despite many people not having a twitter account we made the best use of the technology by using the pull to our site
• it was fun and I would do it again!

5 things to tweet about this year

As our social media strategy at Gettysburg has unfolded over the last year twitter has taken on a larger and larger role. The institutional twitter account @gettysburg has over 900 followers ranging from alumni, to staff, to news agencies. I have found twitter as an excellent free way to engage people about Gettysburg College. If your institution is struggling with how to use twitter here are 5 fairly simple ideas for twitter projects over the next year that stretch across various higher ed audiences.

Follow
Follow all of your alumni, employees, and friends of the college with accounts or at the very least who are following you. As the social media voice of your institution you can now listen to the conversation about your school in this space and maybe even pick up some good retweet opportunities.

Admissions
Ask you admissions director to answer questions on the main institutional account for 2 hours one night close to the deadline to submit an application.

Campus Events
Pick a campus event, lecture, or speaker and have 2 or 3 students “live tweet” the event. Make sure they all use a hashtag so in your post event coverage you can pull a twitter search on that hashtag.

Vote
Ask your followers to vote for their favorite campus tradition. Make sure to publish the results not only on twitter but on the web, other social media sites, and your alumni magazine.

Annual Fund
Work with your development office to use twitter for a solicitation once during the year. Maybe your Senior Class gift campaign is the best place to try this approach. Make sure that you can track how many gifts and how much total money was raised from the twitter solicitation.

Interested in marketing academic departments

In Febuary on this blog I wrote a post about what makes a good academic department website. In that post I argued that

“Academics is one of the largest and most critical components of a college website. The department websites are at the center of that but it’s one of the sections that is hardest to manage at least at my institution.”

If you are interested in the topic Cognitive Marketing (@cogmark) a brand development marketing firm from Rochester NY presented on the topic at the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) Workshop for Department and Division Chairs: Creative Leadership with Limited Resources in Pittsburgh, PA.

The session Attracting Entry-Level Students to the Major: The Role and Responsibility of the Department Chair, covered the recruitment marketing process, the effect of the Internet on the relationship with prospective students, the identity of the academic department, and the creation of a marketing plan for the department.

Session materials including the session handout including worksheets, and the video about the Millennial Generation’s use of Web 2.0 are available on the Cognitive blog.