Central College Web marketing

The role of the Web site is constantly changing, and the pace is faster than ever. With social media being part of the new frontier, we are constantly searching for ways to leverage this new medium specifically for higher education.

Typically higher education is slow to evolve and adopt new technologies so it is refreshing to look at different industries to see what they are doing. Joe Gaylor from FJ Gaylor photography passed along this article from the Washington Post via twitter this morning about Barrack Obama’s new-media gurus. Putting aside political views, it is interesting to see how they are leveraging various technologies to build their campaign.

Why does this team “get it?”
Let’s start with video. They have shot more than 2,000 hours of video and uploaded 1,100 videos to their youTube site. Pretty impressive numbers, considering the campaign is a little over a year old. Using youTube to connect to the voters is unique in the fact that you can bypass mainstream media to get your message out.

Next is text-messaging. While the debate goes on as to how invasive this method of advertising is, I find it particulary fascinating that people are willing to pay $.10 to get a campaign message from Obama. While it might be invasive, it is a personal form of communication. The high school students that we are recruiting almost always have their cell phone with them. You know a message going to their cell phone is going to be read, especially if they are willing to pay $.10 to get it.

On top of these two pieces they are already leveraging many of the social media sites like twitter, facebook, flickr and more.

Obama’s online operation “gets it” by using all of these tools to support their cause. When will higher education “get it” that running a Web site is not enough? Developing a complete online presence is key. Mobile is a component of the new communcation landscape, but I have yet to hear of an institution using it interactively.

Who will be the first higher education Web team to “get it?”

While this doesn’t particularly pertain to the marketing Web site, I figure I could share this information. Over the weekend changes were made to myCentral, the following is an excerpt from the announcement module:

Changes have been made to myCentral that will hopefully make information easier to find while providing a cleaner look and allowing greater customization.  After logging in, additional tabs will appear, and the following tabs can be customized: Home, Blackboard, and For Students.  Customizing means that you can add, remove, and rearrange the modules (blocks of information) to fit your individual needs.

All the information that had been included in the previous design is still here, but perhaps on a different tab or as a link instead of a module.

If you have comments or suggestions about myCentral, please contact a member of the Portal Working Group (Beth McMahon, Terri Vander Molen, Bonnie Dahlke, Jacob Oyen and Deb Bruxvoort), or send them to mycentralcomments@central.edu.
Taken from my.central.edu

Every person uses myCentral to a different degree and for different reasons. We feel that these changes will be most helpful to everyone on campus. Leave a comment if you think you can help us make improvements.

After eduWeb wrapped up, I was in Kansas City and ran into Lyle Kraft from Plattform. We chatted about some of the things at eduWeb and then we got going on the admission process. As we talked briefly about “ghost applicants,” I got to thinking I should get some data to establish a baseline. We define ghost applicants as the students that the first point of contact with them is an admission application.

Here is the info on our ghost applicants for this fall’s incoming class at Central. I took the liberty of narrowing down the data to just online apps.

• 81% of our applicants applied online.
• 11% of our total applicants used the online application as their first point of contact. (These are the ghost applicants.)
• 63% of the ghost applicants were accepted.
• 12% of the ghost applicants deposited, and we expect to see them this fall.

This data is somewhat interesting, as I was expecting a higher number of ghost apps. Our typical acceptance rate is around 77 percent, while our ghost apps are much lower than that. One would assume that some kids complete the application knowing that they won’t come here, or that they do not meet the admission requirements.

I would imagine different admission processes would affect the numbers that you get. At Central, we mail a paper application with the viewbook to some of our prospective students. They can bring the paper application with them when they come for a campus visit and have the application fee waived. For some students, delivering the application to an actual person is incentive enough to complete the paper application over the online application.

It would be interesting to compare this data with our conference institutions as well as institutions across the country to see what kind of numbers they have.

It’s time for the monthly analytics summary again! After 15 months of seeing traffic lower than 2006 levels, we finally surpassed our traffic levels from July 2006. What is even more exciting is that we had 7,669 more visitors this year than we did last year for the month of July.

All three of our focus areas (admission, alumni and Central College Abroad) continue to see more traffic than last year. While our focus areas are seeing more traffic, our non-focus areas like the student life section of the site are also seeing more traffic. Most notably, the campus life homepage saw 326 more visitors than the admissions homepage as students are beginning the transition to campus.

I posted last week on how we added a link to the department Web sites to the homepage of the Central College Web site. This didn’t significantly alter the amount of traffic to the departments Web site since it was only done a week ago, but we did not see such a drastic drop-off in the summer as we did last year. Since we added the link to the homepage we have only had 7 of 59 total visits from the Central Web site.

See the full report here.