Digital Leadership in Higher Education

I’ve just returned back from HighEdWeb 2019, another week in Milwaukee with the most inspiring friends, peers, and colleagues. As always, this conference is an amazing experience to reconnect, refocus and start re-imagining my approach to my work. Often times, after coming back from the conference, I’m thinking about new things to try to advance our digital strategy on campus. This year however, I am filled with thoughts on how to be a better digital leader.

We have all heard that everyone can be a leader. I know that all of us don’t have the opportunity to lead large teams or even have a cabinet-level role in our organization. But all of us can use our influence to make our digital spaces better.  After thinking about the sessions I listened to, I was struck with the fact that leadership is a choice we make every day, not just titles and awards (although don’t get me wrong, those are fun too!)

Some of the top lessons/reminders that I’ve taken from this week:

• Listen to hear instead of respond. This happens so often to me, especially when I’m feeling challenged. I want to refocus on finding the mutual successes we can celebrate together for our school.
• Remember that while I have the expertise in my field, who I’m talking to has as much expertise in their field. How do we successfully merge the two to create a winning situation for all of us?
• Learn the lessons of no.  There’s so much increasing pressure to do all the things. We need to remember that we have to be able to understand that sometimes we just don’t have the bandwidth. But we need to say it in the right way and really think about if it’s the correct decision without making a snap decision in the moment.
• No one has it all figured out. If they tell you they do, they’re telling you a story.
• Meet people where they are. It might seem like we are getting a ridiculous request, but we need to connect with our colleagues coming to us and really understand what they’re looking for. Guide the conversation to get everyone to the best digital place.
• Eric Qualman introduced the idea of being flawsome to me this week. While we’ve all heard the concept of failing fast and failing forward, what we need to remember is to really evaluate that failure and see what we learn from it. Otherwise, we’re not growing and advancing.

And one of my favorite lines from the Erik Qualman keynote: “if you aren’t getting pushback, you aren’t pioneering.” It’s easy to keep the wheels turning doing what’s comfortable and expected.  I need to continue to push myself to try new things, build new campaigns, and step outside the box. I know I’m not alone when I receive challenges to what I’m doing, I can react defensively. But that’s a sign that I’m shaking things up and need to show why I’m doing things and bring data in to show why it’s right for us.

So these are my golden nuggets from Milwaukee. I’m looking forward to putting them into practice on my campus and beyond grateful for the opportunity to be reminded of what it takes to be a leader.

 

August

The month of  August saw us traveling to Mobile, Alabama as my son’s team headed to the 16-18 year old Babe Ruth World Series. And what an unbelievable experience for all of us. Obviously there was the chance to see the boys represent their area and play at the highest level of baseball (making it all the way to the quarterfinals, or as they called it, becoming one of the top 5 teams in the country). But the trip was so much more. We were totally welcomed into our Mobile family with more hospitality that we ever could have imagined. From spending nights together 30 to 40 strong to the genuine love and support we all felt.  I have a feeling we’ll all be connected for a very long time. We also did completely touristy things like go on a dolphin cruise (where we saw many) to a gator tour (where we managed to see not a single alligator) to walking the white sandy beaches to enjoying some of the best barbecue I’ve ever eaten.

Beyond that, there were local highlights as well.

• Senior Pictures – hard to believe that my son is beginning his senior year of high school. There’s no better punch in the gut than watching the senior picture photo shoot and really understanding how fast the time has gone.
• Soccer – after missing last season to rehab from an injury, my son was back on the pitch patrolling the goal. I’d honestly forgotten how much fun it is to be with these parents and think we’ll have a great season to enjoy.
• State Fair – well of course, in this area, August means the State Fair and we made our annual visit to do all things fair: eat unhealthy food, walk miles, check out animals and exhibits and just watch the people (which for me is worth the price of admission). We have a somewhat different perspective since my husband worked there so many years and that’s actually where we first met many years ago.
• Found a gem of a local watering hole in the Eagle Tavern, just a nice, small, neighborhood place with amazing food.

So the only thing missing was any time to read or enjoy a movie, but overall, I’ll take that.  Colder, rainier days are coming so there will be plenty of time for that!

July

Well a little late, but next month you will see why! July was a wonderfully fun sumner month filled with all kinds of activity, excitement, and good friends!

• Discovered Heritage Hill Brewhouse, where we spent an afternoon watching storms roll in over the hills while enjoying some amazing food and craft brews.
• Of course there was plenty of baseball where we watched our son’s all star team fight their way through the loser’s bracker to capture the Mid-Atlantic Regional championship and advance to the Babe Ruth World Series.
• Last round of graduation parties gave us the chance to catch up with old, dear friends.
• Since it was the hottest days of summer, our air conditioning quit in time for the Fourth of July which messed up our plans, but gave us plenty of time to celebrate with the Boston Pops.
• Watched The Incredibles 2, which I enjoyed as much as the original.
• Binge-watched Stranger Things which is not a show I would typically be into, but was completely hooked from the first episode.
• Hosted an intern from our Upward Bound program. I continue to be completely blown away by how bright and motivated these students are. And better yet, it took her only a day to feel comfortable joking around in my office.

As we got busier and busier, I found so much enjoyment on nights where we could sit on the deck grilling and enjoying a glass of wine. It centered me and reminded me to enjoy the simple moments.

June

Summertime and the living is….well, it’s busy!

• Graduation season – in addition to taking in the ceremony itself, the month has been filled with parties to celebrate these wonderful young people who are ready to begin the next chapter in their lives.
• Summer baseball – once the school ball season ended, we took a couple days off before shifting full on into summer baseball. And new this year, a stint on the 18U Babe Ruth All Star team.
• Father’s Day – we took time to celebrate Father’s Day with a quick trip down to Rutgers University for some (you guessed it) baseball. But it was a perfect way to celebrate his day.
• Honors & Moving Up – we went to our first end of year honors ceremony at our son’s school.  In addition to watching him receive a pretty hefty scholarship, we got to watch him take his place with the (gulp) senior class. One of my friends warned me that I’d start getting emotional at the moving up ceremony and that would last for a year until graduation. I’m pretty sure she was spot on.
• St. Patrick’s Day in June – yes it’s true, we went to our first St. Patrick’s Day celebration held in June to accommodate travelers and get as far away from snow as we could.
• Woofstock – one of the Finger Lakes wineries hosts an annual event to support animal rescue organizations. So we packed up the doggo on a picture-perfect day and enjoyed an amazing day of music, fun and wine.
• The Last Five Years – We’re so lucky to have a great theater scene and that Jason Alexander came to town to direct this performance.

So all and all, a month of great weather surrounded by family and friends. There’s really not much more I could have asked for.

A Year of Campaign Data. Now What?

About a year ago, I set out on a journey to be able to put some good data behind what social media posts were actually driving traffic to our website. I wanted to get past the “I think we need to post more things about xxxx topic” or “if we post this, it will go viral” with real data. I had a ton of information scattered in various locations, but what I was lacking was the ability to pull everything together in an authoritative way.

So I began using UTM tracking to look at every link I shared. It’s been a labor of love, but I’m where I wanted to be – I can now show what campaigns and posts actually are our best performers.

If you might be struggling with where to begin, here are some things that worked for me:

• Track Everything
  That was the biggest shift for me, moving from randomly assigning tracking to URL’s to building a spreadsheet where every thing was tracked.
• Be Consistent
  The first month, I discovered that I was using slightly different variations of our campaign names, which was going to lead to a ton of manual clean up when I wanted to generate a report of what’s working and what’s not.
• Keep Track of Campaign Names & Sources
  Since I committed to building a spreadsheet where everything was tracked, it was easy to add dropdown choices to make sure everything was consistent.  When I started, I was so grateful that Erin Supinka shared her template to adapt.
• Head on over to Google Analytics
  Once you’ve been collecting data, go to the campaign options under the Acquisition menu.  I was only interested in our non-paid performance, so I weeded out the paid campaigns we were running in the period I was looking at.
• Look Beyond Vanity Metrics
  It can be helpful to look at users and sessions, but for us, it was goal completion that was the most helpful to analyze our campaigns.

OK, we’ve got a large amount of information that we’ve collected. Now what? This is where the fun really begins.

• Develop Content Themes
  Once I knew what campaigns were performing well, I looked at landing pages to see if I could gather broad themes that were successful.   So looking at one of our most successful campaigns, I could see that admission information and deadlines, area information, unique student opportunities, student-generated content, and our top stories all saw excellent engagement and drove quality traffic to our site.
• Think About What Didn’t Work
  Unfortunately, every campaign isn’t going to deliver the results that we’d hoped. Now we can take a look at what didn’t work and think about why. Do we need better content on the page we’re driving them to? Do we need better messaging in our social posts? Are we not motivating our visitors with our next steps? Or was it just an experiment that just will not deliver success and isn’t worth pursuing?
• Share What You Found
  You know those people I mentioned at the beginning that offer hunches and guesses about what to post? Now I’ve got really good information to share. We can collect all the data we want, but it’s up to us to share the results and invite conversation. What is even better if your dean, provost, or vice president is interested in what you’ve put together and will be an advocate.

When I began this exercise, I really didn’t know what kind of information I was going to end up with, but it turned out to be a goldmine of strategic context that is helping my content strategy and planning.  Now I just need to decide where to take it next!

 

 

May

Well May proved to be a very busy and celebratory month for us despite it raining just about every day of the month! We did end up with a bunch of highlights though to add to our roundup of the quest to find and document the fun in each month:

• Our (*gulp) 26th wedding anniversary.  It occurred to me this year that anniversarys are an amazing reminder to take a step back and remember why we fell in love and how lucky we are to have kept that going through the years.
• Mothers’ Day Celebrations.
• High School Baseball. Not only to my son’s team put together an amazing winning streak during the month of May, he returned to his old, confident, dominant form.
• Rain meant movies including Mary Poppins Returns; Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil & Vile (which actually exceeded my expectations), Wine Country (which did not), and Undrafted.
• Rain also meant time to read Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell.
• Joined a group of our friends to check out the new Syracuse Mets experience.
• The rain held off to have a cookout for Memorial Day and to break out the fire pit for the first time of the summer.
• Discovered the trails of the Three Rivers Wildlife Management Area, so close to our home that we never knew existed.
• Took in some live college playoff action for the first time.
• While we spend a lot of time celebrating athletic accomplishments, we got together with our friends to celebrate academic achievements on National Honor Society induction day and, as a bonus, artistic accomplishments at the spring celebration of the arts.
• Our son went to his first prom which was a wonderful night for him and an entertaining night for us as none of our children believed we were all going out for the evening while they were there!
• College Commencement. It’s a bittersweet day because I’ll miss these students like crazy, but so excited to see where they make their marks in the world.

 

Distributed Doesn’t Mean Abandoned

There’s always a debate on what kind of content management is best for our campuses.  On the one hand, having everything handled centrally ensures that there’s a consistent voice to our web content. But if you’re on a small team, this can certainly be daunting.  The other option is to open the flood gates and allow authors around campus to maintain their sections of the web.  This model of distributed content management can be helpful to maintaining current information and letting the subject matter experts share knowledge, but it doesn’t mean we get sit back and never help these folks out.

If you’re working with a distributed model, here are a few key ways we can support our content authors:

• Create clear and active calls to action
  One of our content managers was recently lamenting that no one was filling out the inquiry form on their page. I took a look at the page and noticed that they’d removed any call to action to encourage people to complete the form.  Instead, it was placed in the navigation using a jargony title so it wasn’t clear what the point of the link was. Without specific calls to action, we’re expecting our visitors to be willing to dig for information instead of giving it to them while they’re hopefully excited about what they’ve seen and ready to take the next step.
• Understand how people search for our programs
  This one can be tricky because how search works can be a difficult thing to explain. I think the key here is not to overload content editors with information on search algorithms and search engine optimization. Instead, show how people are getting to the page, what terms they’re using, and how to incorporated those terms into the page content.
• Look at content using a forward-looking lens
  If you have a great image of students engaging in research or participating in a unique immersion experience, use it. Remember that we’re painting a visual picture of our campus experience and that our audience has no idea when a student in the picture attended our school.  I often talk to content managers who are worried that they have an image of someone who recently graduated.  A gentle reminder that we’re the only one who knows this usually helps get people thinking forward.
• Embrace a conversational tone
  I think one thing we sometimes struggle with in higher education is the tone of our web content. There can be a tension between presenting information clearly and in a way our audience expects versus the feeling that because it’s a college site that information needs to be presented in a more formal tone.  Be able to share with content authors best practices on usability – clear language, easily scanned content, bullet points, headings.
• Understand the available resources
  We’ve all been there – talking to the office that wants to use a blurry image that’s snapped from someone’s phone. I’ve found that many times, they know it’s not the best image to use, but don’t know where to find something better.  It’s important to communicate where to find images, press releases, calendar events, and stories about our school to help create vibrant pages.

My boss is fond of saying “people don’t know what they don’t know”. This is a good mantra to remember while supporting our content managers.  If you’re using a distributed model, what are some of your favorite tips to support your editors?

April

April proved to be more challenging as a long-awaited family vacation for the April break saw me staying behind to deal with a family emergency. It was hard to send my boys off to warmer weather as we slogged through days of cold rain, but I tried to make the best of it. Despite the disappointment, I found some fun throughout the month:

• Read Unsheltered by Barbara Kingsolver and Swimming at Suppertime by Carol Wasserman
• Enjoyed the end of March Madness, including winning the bracket challenge.
• Took in the annual baseball pancake breakfast fundraiser. Having your offspring serve you for a change never gets old.
• Watched Fyre, The Greatest Party that Never Happened and binged All American
• Caught a home improvement bug and re-did my kitchen backsplash
• Watched a lot of baseball – both high school and the Major Leagues.  Words can’t express how emotional it was to see my son on the mound in a game for the first time.
• Celebrated Easter with family (even got the teenager to color some eggs – old traditions die hard – or dye as the case may be)
• Worked to get our track for HighEdWeb 2019 set and ready to rock, working with the most amazing group of friends & colleagues
• Treated myself to the best pedicure that I’ve ever had
• Explored the neighborhood with our beloved dog at my side, running up quite a streak of meeting my daily step goal
• Spent an evening at our school’s annual dinner & auction with an amazing group of friends
• Spent an afternoon watching my son play on the field at our minor league park, which included the bonus of catching up with so many old friends that were there waiting the start of the next game
• Enjoyed nights at our favorite local eateries

At the end of the month, that time alone proved to me that it was time to accept the things I cannot change and make the best of what’s happening in the present. There were certainly some sad moments as my family relayed what they were doing, but in the end, I was at peace with myself.

March

March was a bit of a challenging month at a number of levels, so it took some serious reflection to find the “fun” things that happened during the month.  But I thought it was important to think about those moments that showed me that there is good in each day and not focus so much on the things I couldn’t control. So for March, we have:

• Finally saw Bohemian Rhapsody and was completely amazed by the performances (in other news, not sure why we waited so long).
• Saw Les Misérables, which no matter how many times I see it, I am blown away by the power of the show.
• The return of high school baseball, which meant not only watching my son play, but enjoying the company of our baseball family while we hung out at games and went out while the boys were hard at work practicing.
• The celebration of St. Patrick’s Day at our favorite neighborhood pub.
• We found a new diner, which included a half-frittata that I ended up enjoying for days.
• March Madness meant hours of watching college basketball.
• Gathered with family and friends to celebrate a baby shower as my cousin and her husband get ready to welcome their first child.
• The chance to watch my son be commissioned as a Eucharistic Minister, surrounded by some of the most wonderful people.
• Getting out in the neighborhood again as the temperatures periodically returned to normal (trying to ignore the snow that arrived in between).
• Breaking out the grill and making some of our favorite recipes, teasing the eventual return of summer.

“Every day may not be good, but there is something good in every day”

February

I found it a wonderful reflective exercise last month to take that moment or two and look back on the “fun” things that happened during the month.  In addition to creating an archive to look back on, it’s helping me appreciate the beauty in the every day as well.  So for February we have (in no particular order):

• Took the month to celebrate my birthday and my son’s birthday surrounded by family, friends, food, and the appropriate adult beverages!
• High school basketball season wound down and moved to the playoff season, so we spent many a night in a packed gym with friends.
• Went to watch the local minor league hockey team. We go so infrequently, we’d forgotten what a great vibe that is. (Until I was mistakenly identified after the game as trying to get into the team locker room, which led for some entertaining conversations for the rest of the weekend.)
• Began my capstone project for my certificate in Digital Content Strategy from Northwestern, which is an overwhelming feeling.
• Spent time volunteering at one of the inner city schools reading with first and second graders. It’s probably the most rewarding experience I’ve had to work with these adorable tiny humans.
• Enjoyed a day at the inaugural The Winter Fair – an indoor mini edition of the New York State Fair.
• Spent a day in a leadership retreat on the peaceful shores of Cazenovia Lake, reminding me of how blessed I am to work with such smart, talented colleagues and how much I’ve grown professionally over the years.

On a final exciting note, we also went through a whirlwind stretch where my son decided to verbally commit to playing college baseball. His excitement (and relief) to start thinking about the next chapter as he gets ready to begin his second to last high school season brings a smile to my face every time I think about it.