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?

Twitter for more than a few

Twitter continues to grow in popularity, but for those students and staff not on the tool how do you demonstrate and leverage the power of conversations in a medium they are used to.

Brad Ward may have have stumbled upon a tool that could be very powerful for bringing twitter conversations to a central place Buzzable: Ask your Higher Ed Questions here!

Remember Google!

Did you know that burried within Google's search algorithim is the always tweaked variable of Page Rank, based on the votes or links around the web for specific content. So if you googled a term today and then googled it again tomorrow you have done an analysis on the growth of that topic. We can each spend hours doign analysis of every variable that might affect the success of a campaign or the likleyhood of a student enrolling. But does the answer always neeed to be arrived at from scratch?

Why is this important? Well next time you are assigned to generate a report or start a strategy! It's an easy way to listen to others before you share! And there are alot of others out there now to help guide!

Recovery

Okay new lesson learned never go home sick leaving your blackberry and laptop charger at the office. But I have reconnected and recovered.

$1.00

I OWE $1.00... Steroids might have been a bit extreme


Nothing like bringing the change bucket and being the first one to throw in a $1.oo. I was stuck in the past with yesterday's post. So I owe the first $1.oo. Higher-ed is a passionate business. from a counselor, to faculty, and even folks in institutional research all have a a personal interest in the success of a college or university. So how do we move forward?

Well, I found myself reading Ray Ulmer's post where he asked one simple question "Raise your hands if you're in sales". Would you have raised your hand no matter if you are a recruiter, analyst, or professor? With so many choices for good students how do you survive as an institution if you don't make the connection as Ray did?

Charge the toll to change

How many of us have ever heard an administrator or faculty member say:

"They will come here because we are ________, and they have come before"

That is most likely coming from the staff member that always dwells in the past. Sorry, but the bubble has burst. We have sat and watched as large college and universities have developed their brand, learned technology, and built relationships with students as if they were a small private liberal arts college. Now it is time to play catch up!

These schools and their pioneering staff paid a price for being first and now smaller schools and their staff (like me) are paying the price to catch up. It is time to put the bucket in the middle of the conference table and discuss changing. If you dwell in the past pay your dollar or make room for someone else at the table.

The Program was a great football movie and the craziest player had a desire to play so he paid the price and got a place at the table. Sure the steriods might be a little much, but tenure can be a tough egg to crack.

I want a place at the table and if you are reading this you probably do to!