Central College Web marketing

This past weekend was Homecoming/Family Weekend at Central. Among the many activities, we hosted Wartburg for the football game and unfortunately took our first loss of the season which ended a 28-game win streak.

At any rate, we had streaming video of the football game and we did a little more advertising than when we hosted Lakeland. It was also nice to see that Pat Coleman of D3football.com added a link to the video stream to their game day blog. The stats tell us we had roughly 694 unique viewers and 1187 total viewers. Comparing to our last effort when we had 161 unique viewers and 232 total views, I would say that it was a success.

We have also heard from a few of our alumni, and they tell us the video quality was a little better. The voice over from KNIA/KRLS also was a lot better than the dead air we had last time.

We are continuing to explore the feasibility of making this happen for our other sports. This weekend we are hosting a volleyball tournament which will be a good opportunity to see if we can make things happen in the field house. It should also be interesting to see how the stats compare for volleyball to football.

Since we added the football broadcast highlights to the athletics pages, I figured it would only be fair if we did something for the music department as well. Actually this was something that we were working on well before the football highlights.

You can check out the music major page since we set everything live yesterday. Hopefully prospective students will enjoy hearing the music, and we can track how many times the visitors to our Web site listen to the clips.

We added the football highlights from the Lakeland College game to the athletics homepage today. I found a nifty little flash player and a small piece of JavaScript to use which is so much nicer than building everything myself in flash. A huge thanks goes out to Trevor Castle and KNIA/KRLS for providing us the highlights of the football games.

We also have been compiling the highlights as an iTunes feed for anyone who wants to get the podcast of the highlights as the season progresses.

I am sure it appears that we are giving more attention to the football program than some of the other programs on campus. But the reality is that the audio player that we are using will be part of a new feature for the fine arts section of the Web site that we are working on as well. Hopefully it isn’t as one-sided as it looks.

We gave streaming video a try on Saturday at the first home football game. I was pleasantly surprised at how well things went considering the amount of time I have had to put into the project.

We still have some bugs to work out of the system. For example, we didn’t have any audio coming through on the broadcast for some reason. Unfortunately our livestats feed wasn’t working either so I ended up overlaying text onto the video for a score board. Hopefully we can remedy this problem for the next game.

Ustream does a good job of keeping stats of the broadcast. We averaged 29 visitors for the three hours we were broadcasting. I saw as many as 51 viewers simultaneously and we had 161 unique viewers and 232 total viewers.

Considering we did absolutely no promotion, I am presently surprised. I added a link on the homepage when we had the broadcast up and running. I also posted a tweet on our twitter account that it was up and running. Pretty impressive numbers considering.

We’ll work on the bugs a little more in the next few weeks and give it a go at homecoming. The pressure is on to deliver a top-notch broadcast especially since we are playing an important conference match. Also a huge thanks goes out to Tim Hoekstra in the Media Center and Lee Weers in IT Services for the help in setting things up.

We just put on the final touches and launched a new feature for our admission homepage that allows prospective students to find events in their area. I wish we had some cool top-secret code name for this project, but we don’t.

On the admission homepage, you will see a list of “upcoming high school visits and college fairs.” Now that doesn’t sound all that impressive until we throw in a little twist. You can search for the events closest to you. We also added in a map that will give students driving directions to the high school (which probably won’t be used that much) but also to the college fairs.

What is even more brilliant, is that the admission counselors maintain the list of events for themselves through C2AP (our administration panel) so we don’t have to worry about the list of events becoming out of date.

Matt Wenrick in ITS deserves the kudos for making all of the pieces work. We’ll give it a month or so and report back with some data on how much it is being used.

When I was at the eduWeb conference at the end of July, Noel-Levitz presented some information about the e-expectations of parents. Unfortunately, the presentation that was given didn’t spend enough time on the data that was collected. It was apparent that I needed to take a second look because there is some interesting information. I have been wanting to sift through the data for about a month now, but haven’t quite made it that far yet. Luckily Karine Joly of higheredexperts.com put the information together in an easy to read pdf.

Here is a quick highlight of what I found interesting:

• 80% of parents prefer to go to the Web site for information, but if it is a school they really like, they will call or read brochures to get answers.
• 56% of parents help their student with some of the research and paper work.
• 40% of parents have submitted a form for their student.
• 83% of parents would prefer to receive email messages to communicate with the institution.
• 88% expect their student to enroll during the fall semester.
• 91% of those surveyed had high speed internet
• 44% said they have not and would not like to read a student or faculty blog

The first bullet is particularly interesting since we currently don’t have any budget for our Web site. If 80 percent of parents are going to the Web site for information, we probably should invest some time and money into building quality into our content and using new tools to showcase the institution. Perhaps we need to refocus the publications budget 20 percent?

It is also particularly interesting that parents would prefer to receive email messages when communicating with the institution. We do a great job with the parents of our existing students. But there is a lot of room for improvement for our prospective parents.

The last piece that I will touch on are the student and faculty blogs. Obvisouly this is not the target audience for our bloggers, but it is particularly interesting that so many parents aren’t interested in a first-hand account of what it is like to be a student at a school they, or their child, is interested in.

The trend that we have known for a while now is that parents are becoming ever-more important in the recruiting process. It is also becoming apparent that print publications are no longer front and center as a primary information source. If parents are going to the Web for information, what can we do to cater to their needs?

School is starting to pickup and so is the traffic on the Web site. We see significantly more traffic than we did last year at this time with almost 8,500 more visitors. We are almost back to 2006 levels when we did a significant file clean-up on the Web server. With almost 46,000 unique visitors to our Web site every month, we continue to prioritize content to meet our marketing goals.

The admission area saw slightly more visitors than last year this time, as did Central College Abroad. The athletics site grew the most having just over 3,800 more unique visitors than they did last year at this time. We continue to seek new ways to drive traffic to our Web site.

It is also important to note that the use of our department Web sites is increasing. We continue to investigate new strategies on how best to maintain this section of our Web site while having a hands-off approach on content maintenance.

Also new this month is a heatmap of the homepage to help us understand how people are using the homepage of the Web site. Data was collected last week starting on Monday until we reached 5,000 visitors on the Web site.

See the full report here.