Insights

Do you want to know the secret messaging strategy of one the most recognized non-profit online schools in the country? It isn’t confidential. It isn’t stolen. It’s right out in the open – on YouTube:

Senior year of high school is marked with a lot of really exciting moments -- homecoming, prom, graduation, and of course, deciding which college to attend in the Fall. And to make sure the excitement doesn’t waver during the time in between getting the acceptance letter and making a decision, schools put a lot of effort into creating a bond with accepted students with websites designed just for them.

If you’re still thinking about how to make your website more mobile-friendly, you better stop thinking and start doing because you’re about to get left behind. In case you missed it, Google modified its search algorithms yesterday, resulting in a major change to the way the search engine ranks websites.

“Fifteen years from now more than half of the universities [in America] will be in bankruptcy,” predicts Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen. He’s not alone. Financial services firm TIAA CREF anticipates closures among the “1,600 schools in the U.S.

You may think you know exactly what a style guide is, but depending on who you’re talking to, you could be completely wrong. Most of us, particularly those of us who have anything to do with maintaining brand identity, assume a style guide refers to a collection of guidelines that govern usage of creative elements and details in digital, print, and media vehicles. And while we’re right about that, there are other types of style guides that are just as important to keeping a consistent brand look and feel.

For years, the U.S. government has provided billions in grants and loans to the higher education system while leaving questions of its quality to others. Private publications like U.S. News & World Report’s annual college rankings focus largely on factors like faculty quality, acceptance rates, and test scores of incoming students, but do not assess how much students learn and how they thrive financially after they leave a college or university.

Baby Boomers make up more than a quarter of the population of the United States. That’s 77 million people who, as they reach retirement age, are seeking information and answers to questions about Medicare insurance plans. The door is wide open for healthcare marketers to capitalize on an incredible growth opportunity. But before they can start marketing to Baby Boomers, healthcare marketers need to understand how this group likes getting information about health-related matters, their online usage behaviors, and how they envision themselves.

A redesign project is so much more than churning out a digital product that meets some set of specifications. It’s often a radical re-envisioning of how an organization represents itself on a global medium. Kind of a big deal.

And in any organization, of course, you have people. Could be 5, 50, or 5000. No matter how many there are, they all have a vested interest in that digital representation of themselves. How is it changing? Why is it changing? What about my feelings?

Zero.

That’s the number of revenue-producing business metrics most college and university web marketing teams use to prove their impact to the school’s bottom-line. Zero. Zilch.

It’s not that they don’t want to prove value. It’s just that colleges’ data systems are byzantine, isolated, and hard to connect. Plus, there aren’t universally accepted goals for a college website. Showing impact is hard.