I n October I saddled up and ambled down Austin way to present and attend the Higher Education Web Professionals Association conference. Every year, the best and the brightest in web development, marketing, communications, and applications development come together to share their knowledge and insights, to present new ideas, and collaborate with one another in one of the most engaging and social groups I’ve experienced.
Over the next few days I’ll be live blogging for the HighEdWeb magazine, Link, as well as heavily tweeting about the sessions and writing my summaries here to share with the UF Academic Health Center.
What Robocop Can Teach Us About Alumni Engagement
I gave a presentation at the conference on using micro-donations as a tool for engaging the younger, less affluent alumni audiences that are typically ignored by Foundations in favor of alumni that can donate large sums of money. By exciting and involving these audiences, higher education institutions can create crowd-sourced campaigns that can do a lot of smaller scale social good in the local, targeted communities, meeting mst higher education institution’s mission of outreach.
Presentations Covered in Blog Posts
- Workshop: Creating and Maintaining Web Content
- Student Ambassador Programs (For Link: the Journal of the Higher Education Web Association)
My Top Five Professional Takeaways
- Large-scale engagement doesn’t mean a lot of money. Seth Odell showed us the tremendous results that can be achieved with two people, a laptop, and a web cam. Why have a small event on campus that can invite a few dozen people when the potential exists for reaching hundreds of additional audience members online for very little extra effort?
- Be sure, then go ahead. Karlyn Morissette exemplified Davy Crockett’s maxim in her presentation on the Insane Clown Posse. If you are sure of your target audience and what they want, and have a plan to reach them, execute that plan and stay true to it to the very end. Don’t let the naysayers derail the process – stay true and reap the rewards.
- They aren’t prospective students. Doug Tschopp’s user analysis of incoming students showed that they don’t use the word prospective students – it’s not how they identify themselves. Find a better term for this: Become an Aggie, Join our School, Incoming Students, Come to UF – anything that actually resonates with your audience.
- Personas aren’t an abstract concept. In the past, personas have always seemed to me to be a good concept but give limited time and resources it often had to be sacrificed to meet immediate needs. Now I realize they are a crucial benchmark we should all be using. Aaron Baker’s presentation on information architecture, user interaction and personas showed that creating well-rounded personas can keep your information architecture on track and focused and deflect institutional demands to add content and links that are not germane to the mission and target audience of the site.
- Higher Education news and communications needs to be better – and there is no excuse for not doing it. Georgy Cohen’s presentation on news in higher education talked about the traditional stumbling blocks in improving their presentation – time, money, resources – and how they are all hollow crutches. Newspapers have managed to make these changes in the last few years to remain competitive, and their budgets are not much better than those of higher education news units. By being smart and taking advantage of new and generally low cost options, every higher education news unit could present a robust online presence quickly and within their operational means.
My Top Five Social Takeaways
Another great advantage of the heweb convention is the tremendous social and networking opportunities it allows. heweb, capped at around 500 attendees, is still small enough to allow intimacy and the ability to meet a large number of people from various institutions.
- The Tuesday Night Excursion. Where to begin? The evening began with performing in the Man in #000000 Johnny Cash tribute band with Aaron Rester, Tim Nekritz, Georgy Cohen, Lori Packer, Joel Goodman, Larry Falck, Kris Martin-Baker, and Mallory Wood. I sang I Surfed Everywhere and a rapping solo on Rebecca Black’s Friday. Followed by hours of karaoke – including the best Paradise by the Dashboard Light with Kerri Hicks – impromptu crowd-sourced singing of Friends in Low Places on the bus, and hours of singing at a piano bar. Finally, a rooftop performance by Guilty Pleasures. It was an epic night.
- Practicing for the Man in #000000 on Monday night. Just a lot of friendly singing in a hotel room, followed by a hotel atrium performance of Seventy-Six Trombones. If you had already gone to dinner, you missed out.
- Free form jazz and quiet conversation with Carl Lew on Thursday night, after dinner at Threadgill’s, viewing the bats, ice cream and beers and conversation with Dave Tyler, Mitsi McKee, and others.
- Exploration of the Gypsy Food Truck Festival, followed by a Day of the Dead celebration and listening to Tish and the Mizzbehavin’ Band at the Chugging Monkey with many, many attendees.
- Quiet moments stolen away to talk to Georgy and Rick Allen.
Conclusion
The Higher Ed Web Conference is a must for anyone involved in developing a web presence – not just developers and designers, but content writers, strategists, and marketers. 2012 promises to be a big year for the Association, and I invite you all to check it out.
