Shame on me!

This afternoon I presented a webinar on admissions portals.  We are trying one for the first time this year and getting some great feedback.  2 big catches about this though.

1) We decided late in the fall to pull the trigger so our complete staff was not involved in the implementation or have the really spent a good deal of time on the tool.

2) I did not send along the invitation to everyone at the office to participate.

Error number two is without question the biggest offense.  This was not done with malicious intent, but to prevent distractions when giving the presentation.  This evening I realized I was a dummy... A WEBINAR CAN BE VIEWED ANYWHERE, DUH!  So I missed a great chance to help folks in the office understand the tool, and in turn become evangelist for it with their prospective students.

Shame on me, well lets hope the web-ex recording worked!

How many folks does it take to sail an aircraft carrier?

Being in the middle of a web redesign it often feels as though we are trying to sail an aircraft carrier around the world with only 5 people aboard.  It just can be done efficently, because anytime you hit resistance all 5 must work on one issue or task!

Rachel Ruben posted a great article yesterday on .eduguru http://tinyurl.com/d3qls6 about getting others on board.  It is well worth the read if you have or will be doing a redesign!

A little behind = comfortably behind

All most everyone in the office from interns to grandmothers have a Facebook account. An account that they can navigate more easily than their desktop settings.  The reality of this situation never hit me until this morning while reading a post by Ron Bronson "Not everybody has it easy on the web".  We are not a little behind... we are comfortably behind!

2+ years ago nobody in this office had Facebook accounts except student interns.  There were no compelling reasons to invest time in learning an uncomfortable new technology or service.  As a result it took 2 years to become comfortable with Facebook. The same cycle continues today with tools like Twitter. Ron's post closed out with a great point and I'm going to steal it and make a business point of my own:

Some of us mock end users lack of awareness or make assumptions about what people know versus what they don’t. Once you roll your sleeves up and show them that it’s just not that complicated they become converts and bring others along the way. It can be empowering to save people time, money and help them reach out to others. 

Too many folks are being left behind.

It is time to schedule a our own version of the Google 80:20 rule regularly for everyone to become comfortable with these new tools.  Maybe its once a meeting once a month to bring everybody along from the decision maker to the individual that answers the phone.  The decision maker can be an evangelist on the benefits of the technology when staffing and budgeting time comes along.  The person answering the phone or greeting a student at the door is now capable of doing more than handing out a flyer or name dropping the service on the phone.  They can be an evangelist capable of showing the user how to find AND leverage the service.

To be on the edge you must have a comfortable understanding of what will get you there and an understanding uncomfortable times can be some of the biggest difference makers for any business. 

Don't settle for being a little behind or comfortably behind only settle when you are uncomfortably on the edge and teaching others to be comfortable.

The Curve

Above the curve below the curve, where is your office? Where are you? It is that time of year when many of us start the evaluation process. With many colleges having already frozen increases in salary, this may be the year that they serve the best purpose.

This is the time of year when we can ask our bosses and co-workers for the support (financial or political) to meet the goals for the coming year. Have you always been honest with superiors and co-workers during the evaluation process or has there been a cloud of salary fear? If you said yes maybe this is the time to change that. It has been my experience that honesty and frankness can aggravate initially, but if you stay true to that message it can pay dividends in the future.

This economic time with salaries frozen might be a great opportunity to get over the concern about what effect honesty will have on a salary change! It might help the office and yourself move along the curve!

Don't fear the change in salary, love the change in how you do business! This will have the greatest impact on how others view you and your ideas.

Replacing the day 1 binder

So we hired someone new today they won't start for a while, but the question was asked "where is the The How-to-binder? " We all have a binder somewhere in our office that we received on day 1 of our jobs. If you work in higher ed like me you might have 3 or more that you received on day 1. Heck, all 4 binders I received were outdated when handed over.

• Benefits/HR Policies - Consider removing lastupdate stamp
• Departmental Procedures - DITTO
• ERP Manual - Prior owner lost all the college specific info
• CRM Manual - It was a version behind

For one of binder they actually handed me a manila envelope with replacement pages and an instruction sheet for replacing them myself.

Thinking about this today it hit me. We all want to communicate with our external constituents better and in a more technology savvy methods. Are some of these day 1 binders a test case for new technologies?

To worried about features for those on the outside, I didn't realize the potential inside. From wikis to RSS feeds, even social networking. Here is an example if you work on a system of any type you most likely have a book mark list of trusty sources for when your in a pinch. Would those same sites help the guy or gal in the cube next to you? Mine would and I'm not sharing those on delicious or digg, but you can find the most recent Fark.com story I read.

What new technology test bed is sitting on that bookshelf beside you that could kick start a learning experiment on social media and knowledge sharing practices for your office?

1 Goal = 1 system or 1 integrated operation

ERP, CRM, CMS, LMS...What does this acronym alphabet mean for integration and sharing of knowledge? 

Integration at step 1?

Changing the view of the campus system is paramount to the success of higher-education.  We have all sat in meetings where vendors say their single product can do it all.  At this point in the conversation remember big business of the 80's & 90's. They brought in the big guns at the start, but still today look for outside products to pickup the slack.  Slack that most ofter occurs when dealing with external audiences, because ERP often place reporting over productivity.

  

In higher-ed studetns are our customers!  Admissions offices are judged on the size and quality of a class, and Academic Dean's on retention of those students.   I would be willing to bet your campus' ERP is deadly accurate on invocies and accounting, but that it is not resonably flexible to adjust with changing communcation?  Colleges need to see that a campus system is not one product, but a collection of products that places productivity and reporting on an even ground.  We all remeber one of our first childhood toys, change can be easily realized when we stop tryign to fit round pegs in a square hole. As you begin any individula alphabet purchase be sure to consider what other acronym it needs to share information with initially or potentially in the future.

Please mail it back...

Business reply mail is still how many of us do business at college fairs.  We ask students to complete a card before they leave a table or ask them (read beg) to mail it back to us.  We have recently began exploring new ways of engaging students about the college and less emphasis on the information.

Having spent the last three days on the road watching students texting, twittering, or updating their facebook status as they walked by, should I have been asking them to join our College's Class of XXXX group or maybe even become a fan of the college?

• Can access content when they want
• The student can opt-out of the group when desired
• Students are pushed to content and drive analytics

Instead of handing out a business card with a phone and email only should we offer our twitter or buzzable accounts for questions?