Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Hope you are enjoying food, friends, and family this holiday season. Here is a short video we put together with one of our flip video cameras and some quick editing that highlights a thanksgiving tradition at Gettysburg – Turkey night at servo.

Thanksgiving video at servo

Back and ready to blog – collaboration

After about a two week hiatus  I have a ton of ideas to write about and  some free time tonight. In mid summer my associate director had to resign due to some family circumstances and my new staff member starts on Monday so the start of the school year has been really  busy and the blog suffered in order to try to meet the needs of my campus.

I think the start of the year gives us a unique opportunity in higher education. It’s new, fresh, and everyone is energized on campus. There is something about walking across a campus on a fall day when classes have started that reminds me why I work at Gettysburg.

The budget process is beginning on our campus and it has made me pause and truly start to evaluate what we need in the web area. I have found that collaboration has been a really powerful tool in the last year and has helped me develop strong relationships with colleagues which has enabled us to do some really interesting and outstanding projects this past year. It has also helped shape what we will ask for in the budget process since these collaborations are helping to fill a void.

Orientation and opening day is a big deal on our campus and we have a captive web audience (the first-year parents) after they drop their children off.  With the help of 3 areas on campus all contributing various skill sets and talents we were able to develop a robust photo and video gallery of move-in day and orientation. I was proud that we as a web team stepped outside the box and used some tools including a flip video camera which if you don’t have one for your office is worth the investment.

I started to realize during this experience that we don’t have to do it all alone but we can count on our colleagues across campus to work together to produce something great.

What is your video strategy?

Video has exploded. No that’s not a news flash for anyone paying attention in higher ed marketing but how many schools have a strategy around video? Does your institution have a strategy? If so can you define it, assess it, and tell if it’s having a positive impact on your marketing efforts?

Each year we gather members of the admissions team, communications staff, and web communications staff and brainstorm around video. Some of the questions that we ask ourselves that help to assess our previous year and help set our strategy for the coming year are as follows:

• What went well?
• What can we improve?
• What were our most popular videos?
• Did people watch all of the video or just a few minutes?

At Gettysburg we try to tie our video efforts to larger enrollment and marketing goals. As an example one of the projects we took on last year was to create a video for each of our athletic programs that highlights our coaches. These videos were aimed at suspects and prospects and we thought might be able to help us recruit talented student athletes from a diversity of geographic territories. Increasing geographic diversity is one of our enrollment goals.

Not all of them are posted yet but if you visit any of our fall sport pages you can see examples of the videos. Early indicators have told us that the videos are having a positive effect. One of our coaches even reported that he had 3 students from California visit specifically because of the coaches video.

With limited marketing and video resources we must be strategic and look for high impact projects like this one as part of our video strategy.

Web Cam; friend or foe?

At Gettysburg we are about to break ground for a new athletic and recreation complex. As part of the website for the project we are getting ready to launch a web cam. It was fairly easy to execute and the IT staff at Gettysburg was very supportive and will give visitors to the site something interactive to look at along with the photo galleries and updates that will be planned.

My question today is are you a fan or not of the web cam? Is it 1998 and past it’s time? Or is it still cool and gives a very authentic feel to your project?

Life after college

I have long admired the work of Tim O’Keeffe and the Colgate University Communications Office. They have done a really nice job over the last few years of being creative in a display of where their graduates are going after they leave Colgate. Here is a link to their site where they use video and Google maps – enjoy

http://www.colgate.edu/DesktopDefault1.aspx?tabid=2386

you can also see an archieve of past years displays