Guest-blogging – Page 2 – Andrew Careaga

Guest post: Stefany Wilson on strategic planning (part 1 of 2)

Today’s guest blogger, Stefany Wilson (@stefanyw), has written not one but two entries on strategic planning for communications, and I’m happy to lend her this spot twice. Stefany is the director of communications for the Georgia Tech College of Computing (@gtcomputing on Twitter) and authors BOOM! the blog, where she offers her “perspectives from the person who has to run the circus that is the higher ed communications office.” Stefany’s second post will run in this spot on Wednesday.

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Communications is a Big Word – Developing Your Strategic Plan

There sure are some smart people sharing useful information out here, but as a communications director I am not only concerned about best practices for email marketing or interpreting analytics for proper web content development (not to mention a strategy for Twitter), I am also worried about all of that and more, like whose outreach programs get cut in the next budget crunch and what will our back-to-school media plan look like. I have staff responsible for advising me on specifics and I have to decide what and how much to pull together at any given time depending on the shifting communications landscape. I know I can find all the answers, my constant worry is keeping it all together so I (sort of) stay sane, and so do my people.

Do I have a mentor to help guide me? Nope. Do I have a lengthy enough background in the field that I just know everything I have to do and when? No, and I never will. Do I have time to “think strategically” in the thick of spring semester? Definitely not.

You do the best you can, and you ALWAYS have a plan to which to refer. You create this plan in the summer when you have a wee bit more free time than during the year. You revisit the plan half way through (during the holidays) to see how on track you are and where you need to redouble your efforts, call something dead in the water, or congratulate everyone for completing.

You don’t need consultants for this stuff. It’s nice if you have the money to do that and they are often worth it, but you might as well know how to do it on your own. Here are the basic steps for planning, plus snapshots of my own office’s plan from last year.

Contents

This is an example of the basic structure of a strategic communications plan.

1. Executive Summary
2. Methodology
3. Situation Analysis (Communications Landscape)

1. External Environment
2. Internal Environment

4. Audiences
5. Key Messages
6. Communications Goals & Objectives
7. Strategies & Tactics (The Work Plan)

1. External Communications
2. Internal Communications

8. Evaluation Methods (The Measurement Dashboard)
9. Appendices

An executive summary comes first in a plan, but it’s the last thing you write. It covers the biggest opportunities and challenges of the landscape and the highlights of the plan. It’s also a chance for you to send a personalized message about the work of your department. I write my summary as if it were a letter in an attempt to engage whoever actually takes the time to read such a document.

A methodology section describes how you approached this whole business. You discuss the research you did and how you did it, optionally explaining both the advantages and limitations of your choices. You do not put lists of interviews or articles here – those go in the appendix.

Research – The Most Important Thing You Do

You must tie what you do back to something important to the organization, or else why even be there? Start with your school’s strategic plan – that tells you something about what takes precedence. If they don’t have a clear plan, talk to your boss about how to go about prioritizing objectives and audiences. Without these basic directives, you will flounder with what to do first.

Primary research is research you conduct yourself. How on earth is one little resource-constrained communications group going to deal with the sheer amount of work this could grow to be? Well, you can’t and you’re won’t. What you’re going to do is a few simple surveys (use SurveyMonkey), maybe a focus group or series of interviews with a few priority audience representatives set by you and your boss (or other high level decision maker who truly has effective communications at heart). Even just a few phone calls to get the gist of something are better than winging it.

My office divided and conquered this part between two people, completing 25 interviews, two focus groups and distributing four surveys (we were unable to distribute seven others due to time constraints). All this took about two months.

Secondary research will be your best friend. It’s research or information by other people from which you can draw conclusions. There is an abundance of it within your own institution (admissions, alumni association, student services, etc.). But don’t forget sources like the research publications of your area or the trade associations of your field. Both often contain data you can use to back up what you decide to do. Here’s a selection of our secondary sources:

1. The College of Computing Strategic Plan
2. Georgia Tech Strategic Plan
3. Georgia Tech Brand Image Study
4. Georgia Tech Federal Relations Strategic Initiative Report
5. Annual Computing Research Association Taulbee Survey
6. Be Careful What You Promise Regarding Your USNWR Ranking, Joe Brennan, Ph.D., APR, Associate VP for University Communications SUNY, PRSA 2008 Monograph Series
7. iCompute Campaign Executive Summary, Jill Ross, Director CRA Image of Computing Task Force
8. Competitiveness Index: Where America Stands, 2007 Report, Council on Competitiveness
9. Curb Appeal: Designing Websites for Prospective Students, Michael Stoner, President and Principal mStoner Inc., PRSA 2008 Monograph Series
10. Is the Thrill Gone?, Viewpoint, ACM 2005, Sanjeev Arora, Bernard Chazelle
11. Who Are We?, The Profession of IT, ACM year, Peter J. Denning
12. Student Perceptions of CS: A Retention Study Comparing Graduating Seniors vs. CS Leavers, Maureen Biggers, Diversity Lab Director, Georgia Tech College of Computing
13. Perceptions Of College Characteristics And College Images, Data From The Office Of Student Affairs

There is also plenty of Google research at your fingertips. There’s generational research on millennials going to school and their search habits, or their “helicopter” parents and the influence they wield. Philanthropy Quarterly might cover high worth donors and alumni and what inspires them to give, or not. There’s really just no excuse for not tying your efforts to real data when it’s this easy to find. The real time drain is in the analysis.

Situation Analysis – A Snapshot of the Landscape

No doubt you are inundated with information and don’t know where to start. You must piece it together into a coherent situation analysis, which includes what you’ve got going on inside your institution, what your external publics are thinking about you, and in many cases what’s going on in your field. For example, my area is computing, which has gone through a massive image crisis since the bubble burst and subsequent media feeding frenzy around outsourcing. I have to worry about that as much as about program image. You may be in a similar boat.

A situation analysis covers the state of your internal and external communications landscape in an informal SWOT format (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats). Every bit of it is based on your primary research findings and the added texture gleaned from your secondary research.

Coming on Wednesday: The heart of the plan

Guest post: Georgy Cohen’s favorite things

The guest blogging continues today with a post from Georgiana Cohen, managing editor of web communications at Tufts University. Catch up with her on Twitter (@radiofreegeorgy) or check out her own blog, Safe Digression.

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Everyone always talks about how great it is to have rich photo and video content on your site. Better yet, how about user-generated rich photo and video content? Sounds good, right? But with everything else you have to do, how can you find time to shoot and edit your own multimedia content, much less run a contest or solicit content from the community?

The good news is, students are producing this content anyway, and there’s a relatively easy way to catch a lot of it, thanks to the ability to “favorite” selected content.

When users upload photos or video to Flickr and YouTube, they have the option or adding tags to their content. Some people do, some people don’t; some people may use the name of your institution, or some may use its unsightly nickname. But a lot of folks are tagging content properly. So, as long as your school has a relatively distinctive name (sorry, Brown and Temple), you stand a good chance of finding photo and video content from your community.

Instead of going to these pages all the time, I import the feeds for each tag (YouTube; Flickr) into my RSS reader. I created free Flickr and YouTube accounts (which also serves the purpose of reserving my institution’s name so an imposter doesn’t settle in), and I am always logged into these accounts when I peruse this content. When I see a photo or video I like, I favorite it. Just like that, I am reaching out into the content stratosphere and creating collections of user-created, institution-approved rich content.

Now what?

Now the challenge is, what do I do with them? Ideally, I don’t want to have to rely on people stumbling across the favorites page on my institution’s YouTube or Flickr account. Luckily, there are ways to bring that content onto your own website. Flickr makes it easy by providing an RSS feed of your favorite. With YouTube, it’s a little harder since all they offer is a page and not a feed, but there are some ways to pull that content. (Metafilter has some guidance.)

If you have a talented developer at your disposal, he or she can probably work with those feeds to whip up a nifty presentation of that content on your site. If you don’t, never fear. Many of the YouTube and Flickr apps that you can install on your Facebook page have options that enable you to pull your favorites. To highlight this content on your own site, Yahoo Pipes has some quick and dirty solutions for embedding your Flickr and YouTube favorites. They may not be pretty, but they’ll get the job done. (This is how we do it at Tufts.)

Is this ideal? No. Aside from being at the mercy of externally created content and third-party formatting, there are arguments about whether it is proper to highlight other people’s content on your own site. That is a question you will have to resolve within your own institution. But at the very least, nothing prevents you from aggregating your favorites and linking to them, so long as you don’t present the content as your own. And if you are hopeful of gaining the capacity to create your own media-rich content in the future, you can take away some lessons from the authentic, organic content you peruse on these sites, maybe even make contacts with some of the more compelling content creators. Those relationships could prove fruitful in the future.

People are talking about “listening” a lot nowadays with regard to brand and reputation management, particularly in the context of Twitter. But by extending your listening to media-rich services like Flickr and YouTube, you can not only see what media people are creating in relation to your institution, but use some of it to enhance your own web presence and maybe create a community in the process.

Guest post: Liz Allen on unofficial Facebook groups: ‘Don’t panic, participate.’

Today’s guest post is courtesy of Elizabeth Allen, associate director of alumni relations at the Caltech Alumni Association. Liz discusses higher ed, alumni relations, communications, baseball and other passions on Twitter @lizallen.

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You are not alone.

Not on Facebook, anyway.

At this point, your institution probably has an “official” group on Facebook. You carefully selected the main photo to reflect the personality of your campus, you slavishly posted upcoming events, and you promoted it through your newsletter and with an email campaign. That’s great!

But did you search Facebook for other groups branded with your institution’s name? Chances are there’s a group (or many groups) for alumni, students, or prospective students of your campus. They have lots of group members, active conversations and upcoming events.

Now what? You start to panic. What if someone says something bad about your institution? The administration has no control over the content! You want to notify general counsel. You want to call the president. You want to shut these “unofficial” groups down!

Stop. Take a breath.

Don’t panic. Participate.*

Web 2.0 and social media is all about user generated content. Expressing ideas and opinions. It’s a conversation. It’s not your job to stymie that conversation. Your job is to help manage and observe. Here are some approaches to interacting with “unofficial” groups:

Join the group. It may seem obvious, but join your “unofficial” university groups on Facebook. If the group has open membership, just click and join. If you need to request membership, this is a good opportunity to introduce yourself to the group manager. Once you’re in, you can take a look at what’s been posted by the group members. You don’t have to join all of the groups – use your best judgment.

Form a partnership. Send a message to the group’s administrator letting them know that you’re available as a campus connection and resource. Establishing a good rapport from the beginning will help you in the long run.

Don’t Crash the Party. The group is already an established community. Don’t try to insert yourself; you’ll stick out like a sore thumb. It’s like showing up at a cocktail party and shouting “Hi everyone! I’m here! The party can start!” You will come across as completely inauthentic – or worse. To start, just sit back and observe. If someone posts a question you can answer, (What are the bookstore’s hours? When is commencement this year?) respond and contribute. Developing “street cred” takes time.

Keep Up. New groups are created on Facebook all the time. Run a search at least once a week to check and see if a new group has popped up. Additionally, try to keep up with references to your institution on LinkedIn, Twitter, and other websites. Create a Google Alert to help you keep tabs on things.

Simply ignoring the groups or hoping they go away isn’t the best approach. Joining the community and becoming a “digital native” will keep you in the conversation.

*If you’re headed to this year’s CASE Summit in San Francisco, register for the preconference workshop, “Don’t Panic, Participate: A Common Sense Guide to Social Media for Advancement Officers” presented by Michael Stoner, President of mStoner, and me.

Guest post: Andrea Michnik on developing effective higher education taglines

Today’s guest post comes from Andrea Genevieve Michnik, director of marketing and enrollment with the Semester in Washington Journalism Program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Follow her on Twitter at @AndreaGenevieve or @SIWjournalism, and look for her at the upcoming EduWeb and EduComm conferences this summer.

Developing effective higher education taglines

Some would argue that taglines are among the most important parts of a higher education brand identity. Combined with logo identity, tone and theme, taglines are important. But, are they successful at representing the college experience?

Consider higher education taglines. Do you remember the tagline of your alma mater? Does it accurately portray the environment and experience of going to school at that institution? If you can’t remember, that should tell you something about its effectiveness.

Accuracy is relative; dependent upon the opinion of those involved at all institutional levels. Higher education marketers, potential students, current students, parents, alumni, administration, governing boards and additional important stakeholders all become potential focus groups. Representatives from each constituency should have a say in the keywords of a tagline. Not sure if a current tagline is yielding desired results? Consider conducting a survey or poll. It’s a simple and easy method to gauge effectiveness.

Take a look at the issues in building an identity campaign for the Semester in Washington Journalism Program at George Washington University. Since it is branding a part of an institution, this project is a challenge. It’s important to maintain certain elements of GWU’s identity, but at the same time differentiate the program from the competition.

Check out this great collection of 3,500 higher education taglines put together by the Indiana creative marketing firm Richard Harrison Bailey/The Agency, where you can search by keyword or institution. Take a minute and perhaps look at the taglines of your competition.

Should an institution look to update its identity or tagline? How would you decide if a tagline resonates with target markets? What factors should be considered? Share your thoughts, examples and ideas here. Look for an update in a week on the progress of creating a tagline for the Semester in Washington Journalism Program.

Guest post: Paul Redfern’s five principles for social media strategy

I’m pleased to kick off this week with the first guest post on this blog. It comes from Paul Redfern, director of web communications and electronic media at Gettysburg College. Thanks, Paul, for responding to my call for guest bloggers.

If you do a Google search for “social media and higher education” it returns over 23 million webpages. My copy of University Business magazine arrived today and there was an article on 10 Twitter Tips for Higher Education and Five Steps to Developing a Powerful Social Networking Strategy. Put in a conference presentation on social networking and it’s accepted (and you get a big crowd). If you keep your eyes open you can find a webinar almost once a month on the topic. Follow a few higher ed people on twitter and more often than not it’s the topic of conversation. Higher ed to our credit is trying to figure it out. Some have. Some have not. Some never will.

In the last year I have participated, commented, created, and tried to understand social media for my institution. I came up with the following five guiding principles for our strategy in the next year. Some of of our plans will create lots of engagement with our audiences. Some of them will flop miserably. If you are afraid to fail social media may not be for you.

Here are my five principles. What can you add?

Each piece to the social media puzzle may be small but collectively they add up
Social Media needs to be integrated into our traditional approach to communications and marketing
Social Media is word of mouth marketing for prospective and current students as well as recent graduates
We do not have control of the message and we can take advantage of that fact – we need to listen
Social Media will play a critical role in the future of brand, marketing, and institutional visibility