I spend a lot of time in my work cleaning up jargon on college websites, which is why it pains me when I find myself using jargony content strategy terms. Yet, like other specialty web disciplines, content strategy has a number of specific guides, tools and processes to help us get our work done. Designers, developers, UX-ers, we all have them — and we need to be able to communicate the purpose and value of these concepts to other people on our … [Read more...]
Considerations for Special Higher Ed Content Types
August 24, 2015 by
We know many of the ways that higher ed communications is unique in practice from other industries—the quirks of the academic calendar, the diverse range of audiences, the intense politics, working under a knowledge-centric mission, and so on. But another way in which higher ed stands out are the content types that only we get to wrangle—catalogs, handbooks, policies, program pages, and so, so much more. Just because they are native to … [Read more...]
Talking Silos and More with Amanda Costello
July 28, 2015 by
The Mississippi River begins in Minnesota and snakes its away down to through Louisiana bayou and into the Gulf of Mexico. While it remains to be seen if she will take a riverboat, University of Minnesota content strategist Amanda Costello will make her way to New Orleans as one of the keynotes for Confab Higher Ed this November. Costello, who works at the University of Minnesota's College of Education and Human Development, will speak about … [Read more...]
Meghan Casey’s Tips For Time-Stretched Content Managers
June 29, 2015 by
Don’t look now, but there’s a great new content strategy guide for content professionals in higher ed. Meghan Casey, lead content strategist at Brain Traffic, authored a practical guide for getting on track with content strategy: “The Content Strategy Toolkit: Methods, Guidelines, and Templates for Getting Content Right.” As her book just hit bookstores, we asked Meghan if she’d share some of her content strategy tips for our higher ed friends … [Read more...]
Storytelling with On-Brand News Content
November 24, 2014 by
News content plays a big role in higher ed marketing and communications. It takes center stage on our website homepages and many top landing pages — not to mention our email newsletters, alumni magazines, Twitter, Facebook and other social channels. We rely on it to maintain a timely, engaging web presence. Above all, we rely on news content to help tell our story. Yet how often do we consider what messages our news content is communicating and … [Read more...]