Hard as it is to believe, first-year students are moving on to campus today. In the blink of an eye, summer is drawing to a close. The day following graduation, I came up with my summer in higher ed list. Today, I’m looking at how I made out and what the new academic year may hold.
Summer has been a time to recharge and refocus at a personal level. Perhaps most importantly, it has also been a time to reinforce the importance of measurement, assessing why we’re doing what we are doing and asking if it’s the best use of our resources. Of the five directions I started with when the summer began, this focus brought all of those together. We can’t simply build new things without understanding why they’re important and how we’re going to define success. We can’t improve our existing content and structure without first using data to define where the issues are. And no development is possible without constantly learning and growing instead of becoming entrenched in the mindset of “we have always done it this way.”
It was a series of events this week that made this clear to me. I was having a casual conversation with someone who was explaining that they needed to put more content on their web page. As we talked about why, it became pretty clear that the reason was simply because they felt they had to. I suggested we look at a heatmap of the page. As we looked at the heatmap, it was easy to see what content wasn’t engaging (because it didn’t fit or compliment the goal of the page). The content that was most often engaged with was at the bottom of the page. I took that data and started making recommendations on how to trim, how to optimize, how to meet their objectives. The changes to the pages has already resulted in reducing the bounce rate by 35 percentage points. I can’t understate the importance of using data to make decisions.
But it’s admittedly more quiet in the summer which lends itself to these conversations. How can I keep this moving forward as things get more chaotic? As part of our department retreat this summer, we had to read Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Actually, I don’t think it matters what book or blog you read about the topic, any is a great reminder that to do impactful things, we have to be able to say no to the things that take time away from our highest priorities. That’s hard. I’m not sure how well I will do when things are back in full swing. But I’ll try. I will make sure I apply the same commitment to measurement and assessment to myself as I do to whatever I am working on.
So let’s get this academic year started.
View from the Trenches 