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When you think about digital brand storytelling at a college or university, you may initially think about stories of outstanding individual achievement: faculty conducting groundbreaking research, students having enriching learning experiences, or alumni making a meaningful impact on the world.

But beyond the incredible individuals who comprise your incredible institution, there is a different story lurking — in the aggregate.

Whatever you’re searching for in a conference, you can find it at HighEdWeb. Opportunities to connect with old friends, lively after-hours events (#karaokeplane), and innumerable sessions that cover every aspect of higher education digital marketing. But throughout the conference, HEWeb organizers remind attendees to keep their eye out for the golden nugget — a highly coveted, inspiring piece of information that you can take home.

In Gold Rush California, there were more than one.

Diverse. Connected. Early-adopters. Image-driven. Fiscally conservative.

Numerous lists across the internet simplify prospective Gen Z undergraduates into pithy attributes. Identifying these qualities might be helpful when thinking about how to shape messages for this audience, but they do little to help understand what Gen Z wants and expects from their online interactions.

We need to dig beyond the monikers to understand their desires.

Planning a website redesign can be daunting. There’s a lot to consider.

The more clear-eyed you can be heading into the redesign effort, the more focused it will be and the more likely you will be to achieve success. One of the best ways to gain this clarity is by prioritizing content strategy ahead of the redesign itself.

While content strategy should be a core thread running through any website redesign project, there’s a lot of content work you can do well before a redesign gets underway to more fully inform what that effort should look like.

When I talk to higher ed marketing communications professionals about how to create a content strategy, it sometimes seems like we’re talking about Excalibur — some exalted, unattainable relic that, if retrieved, could at last bring peace to the kingdom.

Developing and implementing a content strategy can feel overwhelming to many for a wide range of reasons, be they related to budget, time, staffing, executive buy-in, campus politics, or a perceived lack of knowledge.

“Where do I start?” I’ve heard people ask more than once.

Today, organic search is the no. 1 driver of website traffic, particularly in higher education (and healthcare.) Google dominates all search engines, and search is now a critical element of your visitors’ journeys.

Every organization must invest in ways to improve in their organic search health to not only stay competitive, but to ensure that their audiences can access the web content most relevant to them and when they need it most.

At this very moment, thousands of Webmasters around the world are microwaving sad, lonely Hot-Pockets for lunch.

They deserve better.

This year, you could win a chance to celebrate International Take Your Webmaster to Lunch Day in style with a $100 Visa Gift Card courtesy of OHO Interactive.

Don’t have a Webmaster? You can use your prize to treat your whole team to lunch, or perhaps even to post a LinkedIn ad to hire a Webmaster to celebrate with in 2019.

Google recently announced a new feature that will significantly impact the user journeys of your website visitors. And with 49% of higher education website traffic coming from organic search this new feature may disrupt what we know to be our prospective student journeys.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will go into effect on May 25, 2018.

Back in November, Forrester Research predicted that 80% of firms that are impacted by GDPR will not be ready to comply by May 2018. And as of February, only 26% of firms based in Europe said they were compliant.

For many web teams — regardless of the industry — site accessibility remains a reactive issue. Too often, the drive to adjust site content to make it more accessible comes on the heels of ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) complaints filed against the organization.

While that approach does ensure that the web continues to evolve toward a more accessible space for all users, it also ensures that process will be a slow, uphill battle for both users and content creators.

The ideal approach is to evaluate and adjust your own content proactively.