Last week, a bunch of smart higher education content professionals landed in Atlanta for the second annual Confab Higher Ed cake party. Er, rather, the second annual Confab Higher Ed conference. More than just a project show-and-tell, the conference presenters used their accomplishments and experiences to touch on some of the pervasive themes that inform all of our work. These include trust, internal communication and collaboration, and how to … [Read more...]
Power to the Humans: HighEdWeb 2014
October 27, 2014 by
The dream of higher ed is alive in Portland. That’s what we learned at the 2014 HighEdWeb conference, which made its first stop in the Pacific Northwest. As always, the conference was a great opportunity to learn, reflect, connect, and refresh our perspective for the challenges waiting back at home. A theme that pervaded many of the sessions at HighEdWeb was the idea of being human. The work we do as web content professionals is not about … [Read more...]
Managing the Copycat Content Request
September 30, 2014 by
You may have gotten the request. It could come via email, in a meeting, or during a chance encounter in the staff kitchen. “Say,” begins Steve the PR guy (or Jen the photographer, or Marie your vice president), “have you seen the social media hub (or the slider widget, or the faculty profile database) on Competitor U’s website? It’s pretty great. Can we do something like that?” And… that’s it. A thing. Maybe they saw it on a blog, or at a … [Read more...]
Planning Content Goals With Web Stakeholder Interviews
July 30, 2014 by
In an earlier post, we talked about using focus groups to better understand your web users' needs. But external web users are not the only type of users we need to understand in order to create valuable and purposeful content. To create web content that works, we must also understand our internal web content stakeholders. These are all the people planning for, creating, curating, editing, approving, publishing and maintaining content, among … [Read more...]
Best Practices for Email Newsletter Content Planning
March 30, 2014 by
Everyone loves to prognosticate about the future of email, including whether or not anyone still reads it or if we’ll soon be able to check it via our refrigerators. For better or for worse, email remains a ubiquitous form of communication today. According to a July 2012 report by the McKinsey Global Institute, we spend 13 hours per week dealing with email. Thirteen hours! That’s a whole season of “House of Cards,” you know. Not surprisingly, … [Read more...]