With “Seeds of Change” as the conference theme, PSEWeb 2024 focused on innovation and progress. A perfect venue to learn more about how those pushing digital forward in higher education are thinking differently.
The event was held in Olds, Alberta (<1 hour from Calgary) and brought together digital communicators and marketers in particular from Canada. The program was well curated and avoided the current trap of only talking AI, but rather packed with sessions covering most of the moving parts at the moment, including sessions on social media, internal communications, digital marketing, journey mapping and reducing your university’s digital carbon footprint.
I gave a presentation on how we might make digital smarter, safer and more sustainable based on insights from our peer group meetings in both North America and Europe.
Before moving onto my talk (see further down for recording and slides), let me share a few other highlights from my conference experience.
Read moreThere's a new book on email coming and it’s written by two of our friends who really believe in good emails:
Ashley Budd, Director of Advancement Marketing at Cornell University and also a speaker at last year's HE Connect 22
Dayana Kibilds, Strategist at Ologie
They have seen what a good email program can do. But, unfortunately, they are also reminded daily what a terrible experience combing through your email inbox can be.
Powerful email programs can get people to do stuff–for better or worse. And lucky for them, they get to see email do good every day.
In a member's call back in the summer, we heard more about the emerging book, while the authors shared some of their key insights. We also looked at bad emails and most importantly, supported them on their new writing journey.
Read moreEmpowering editors to design their best content is difficult. Content design may be at the bottom of their to-do list. The CMS is just another system they have to learn how to use. Published outputs are the end goal. When they can’t publish content the way they want, they settle for less or they go outside the platform.
But what if editors were involved in continually shaping the CMS? What if their natural workflows informed the set-up? What if instead of hacking features to fix content issues, there was a way to develop something more intuitive to their needs?
In a recent member's call we were joined by Emma Horrell, User Experience Manager at the University of Edinburgh who shared how UX work with editors helped the evolution of content design.
Read moreDeveloping and running one of higher education's first Marketing Operations teams is something special.
That’s what Eric Greenberg has done in Philadelphia at The Wharton School since around 2013, when he began championing the growth of inbound marketing in the MarComm office after having spent several years in the department of web development.
Today, Eric runs a team of nine people at The Wharton School that covers a wide variety of scenarios. They run the Wharton content management system which has 130 websites on it, they are responsible for marketing automation and the graduate admissions Salesforce instance, as well as a school-wide email marketing platform.
Eric believes in “servant leadership”, mentoring, sharing knowledge, and creating a healthy workplace culture and a team that respects diverse opinions and works together to achieve amazing things. Eric is also our expert of the month.
Read moreIt’s quite unusual for a CMS selection process to take 5 years, but as the digital platform keeps growing in importance, year long evaluations are likely to get more common in the future.
In particular for large, complex and international organisations, where the task of migrating thousands of pages and custom-built development is a long, time-consuming and expensive one.
I recently spoke to Johannes Nygaard who is Chief Digital Advisor at the University of Copenhagen and a part of their CMS selection project. This project started back in 2017 and recently led to the selection of open source CMS TYPO3 as their new digital platform.
Let’s take a step-by-step look at what happened and see what you might be able to use in your own selection processes.
Read moreSurviving the next several years as a school requires investing in digital marketing beyond a basic brochure website and a couple of tweets.
The hard truth is that most schools lack the means, executive understanding, and staff to succeed in digital marketing.
For example, after twenty years of market availability, a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) is crucial to understanding how prospects engage with your digital ecosystem. Yet, it's rare to find a school outside the top 5% that even uses a MAP for more than an overpriced email platform.
If you're a community college or a smaller school and you own a marketing platform from Hubspot/Adobe/Salesforce, the going salary for a digital marketer who can use those tools to get results is over $100,000. Have you budgeted that much?
Read moreIf you follow the news, even just a bit, you can easily get the impression that we live in an age of self-centeredness and are more focused on our own success than helping others.
In her work as the Alumni Communications & Digital Marketing Officer at Imperial College London, one of the UK’s leading science-based institutions, Tina Schmechel gets to work with graduates from a variety of backgrounds and walks of life. Her experience is the exact opposite: people are supporting, encouraging and giving their time, energy and enthusiasm.
Tina has been with Imperial since just before the COVID-19 pandemic and previously worked in marketing roles in the high-end fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) and luxury sectors, both in the UK and abroad. A journalist-turned-marketer, she’s authored one of Time Out’s most read articles on the 10 best rooftop bars in Barcelona and she wrote her thesis at Berlin’s Humboldt University on Banksy, the famous unknown street artist.
Tina is our expert of the month.
Read moreIn almost 20 years of working with the web in Higher Ed, I've seen many marketing websites built in all kinds of systems or even home-grown systems. The one thing that I've found in common with schools that use proprietary website platforms instead of the very common open-source ones is that no one knows how to use them! Especially at smaller schools and colleges.
Usually, no internal staff members have the technical know-how to affect change in the systems, and most schools don't have the luxury of hiring technology staff based on one specific platform with proprietary programming needed to do even the simplest of things. Additionally, these schools are mostly beholden to either the platform's creator, an agency, or both for any changes that need to be made.
Those factors = Time and Money.
Read moreCan you actually make mass emails popular? According to Ashley Budd from Cornell University’s alumni engagement and fundraising division, she’s done just that by fundamentally changing the university’s approach to newsletters and call to action emails.
Her strategies have boosted open and click through rates far above industry standards. In a recent member call, she shared samples of what makes her emails so popular.
Read moreIt’s all about building bridges - in particular between different ways of thinking
Talking to Kristina Larsen who is a UX specialist at VIA University College in Aarhus, Denmark, you might expect to hear about how her design leadership work bridges different departments, but as she shared her story, it became clear that her years studying at Aalborg University and Aarhus University, and now almost 14 years working in higher education, has taken her to the next level.
In her own words, she strives to make others feel welcome, heard, valued and supported, which applies whether you are a colleague, student, a customer at VIA or a close friend.
Kristina is also a leisure doodler, a freelance mini farmer living on a field in the middle of Jutland and dreaming about landing her first board position in the next couple of years. Earlier this month, she was a highly rated track leader at the Boye Aarhus 21 conference and she is our expert of the month.
Read moreAarhus University (AU) in Denmark announced in late June that they have selected Typo3 as their new common content management system for the entire university. Typo3 beat Sitecorein the final stages of the evaluation and will be implemented by Linkfactory, a small Danish consultancy.
Read more