Using video to highlight campus construction

For those of you lucky enough to still have campus construction projects going on this year how do you plan on highlighting the new building. Video gives you a great opportunity to both show off and get people excited about the new project.

We have done 2 of these types of videos with the new Center for Athletics, Recreation, and Fitness at Gettysburg. Our Athletic Director takes viewers on a tour of the construction site. We did the first one in Feb, 2009 with an update in June. We will film another one in September as we prepare to open the building. Each video has over 1,000 views on YouTube.

The other day I was on the Calvin College website and noticed they had done something similar with The Fine Arts Center construction which has been underway since June 2009. They are promoting a video that goes inside the construction fences on a tour narrated by the director of Calvin’s physical plant.

Athletic websites how do you take advantage?

One of the trends in higher education web management is to outsource your athletic website to a Content Management System that is built to specifically to handle your athletic department. Athletic sites are very individualized and sometimes it is tough to meet the demands of your sports information office well. When you host these sites off campus you don’t have to worry about tailoring your content management system to meet your athletic department’s needs.

The positive impacts  far outweigh the negative ones on your website and broader marketing efforts. They include:

• increased efficiencies for an already overworked sports information staff
• less to maintain for the marketing/web staff
• the opportunity to use technology built specifically for athletics

There are two key negative impacts; the first being the increased cost and the second the loss of the ability to share content across the same technical platform. However there are ways to take advantage of the robust content engine that your athletic department provides with the use of RSS technology.

As a higher ed web manager if you can afford to I would outsource your athletics website. For a small cost you can take advantage of lots of tools and capabilities that these athletic specific CMS vendors have to offer