Innovators: Dan Forbush, Founder of ProfNet

Dan Forbush has served as executive director, communications, at Skidmore College for more than two years. But for nearly 12 years previously, he was president of ProfNet, a division of PR Newswire. PR Newswire is the global leader in news and information distribution services for professional communicators, businesses, and organizations of all kinds.

PR Newswire didn’t create ProfNet; Dan Forbush did. As he explains in the following interview, he had a vision of how campus PR directors could offer their services directly to members of the media using email. At the time, Forbush was associate vice president, university relations, at SUNY at Stony Brook. His idea doesn’t seen like a big deal now, but in the early 1990s, it was a radical one. Many campus PR officers were just starting to use email—and many journalists at newspapers didn’t even have email access at their desks.

Dan’s plan was pretty simple: journalists would call or fax their requests for experts to ProfNet, which would distribute them via email to campus PR staff, who would then follow up on their own to pitch their own experts to journalists. At first, the daily emails were pretty lean; then, as journalists discovered that ProfNet yielded a wide range of qualified experts, they grew in size.

Eventually Dan left Stony Brook and began to run ProfNet full-time and, a year later, sold it to PRNewswire. The sale provided the resources and scale that ProfNet needed to build out a substantial web presence, and, using PRNewswire’s powerful and wide-reaching distribution, provided better placement for ProfNet members.

In 2007, Dan left ProfNet and joined the senior staff at Skidmore.

What experience did you have in higher education before ProfNet?

The most important experience I had was working with people like Fred Gehrung, Frank Dobisky, and Bill Tyson at Gehrung Associates in Keene, NH. GA was (and remains) a small PR firm that specialized at that time in national media relations for colleges and universities. I worked there for three years in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

We had a lot of success simply by virtue of the fact that we represented 40 colleges and universities and could come up with an expert on any subject for a reporter simply by getting on the phone to our clients. We weren’t just a PR agency; we were an expert resource. After GA, I went on to become head of PR at Syracuse University and SUNY Stony Brook, but this is the experience stayed with me. I wanted to again be involved in the day-to-day development of major stories.

What gave you the idea for ProfNet? How did you get started?

Back in the early 1990s, email was a new medium—a powerful medium that for the first time enabled anyone to send a message around the world at no charge. It occurred to me that—by setting up a listserv of college and university news and information officers—our PR operation at SUNY Stony Brook could become a broker of queries for reporters in need of expert sources.

In short, we could create the same kind of interaction we had with reporters at Gehrung Associates, except we could do it for hundreds of institutions and we could provide the service virtually for free—which actually is how we ran it for the first two years.

What were some of the big challenges you faced in getting ProfNet off the ground?

It was fairly easy. Using a list that bought from CASE for $50, I sent out an invitation to about 900 news and information officers and quickly created a list of about 200 email addresses. Our IT department created a listserv in an afternoon. I announced the creation of the service in the “Journalists Forum” of CompuServe and on December 7, 1992, transmitted our first query for a UPI reporter who needed an expert on the hazards of winter flying. That proved the concept. Within two years, our team of student interns was sending 40 queries a day to a network of PR people at 600 colleges and universities. What really put us on the map was a story about ProfNet that appeared in The New York Times in May, 1994.

The biggest challenge was taking ProfNet global. Unfortunately, we never figured out how to overcome the barriers of language and cultural differences. ProfNet-like networks promptly sprang up in Germany, England, and Australia, and we played a direct role in helping to launch a ProfNet-like network in Sweden and South Africa, but we were never able to effectively link them in a world-wide service. Which was too bad, because I really enjoyed working with and visiting PR professionals and reporters in those far-off places.

What are some of the major changes ProfNet has made to respond to changes in technology?

When the Web came along, we created an expert database and launched a Webzine called “Media Insider.” Over a span of 12 years, we rebuilt the query delivery system four times. Over that same period, PR Newswire steadily integrated ProfNet’s main functions—such as editorial, sales, customer service—into the core of the company, and we closed our independent Long Island office in 2006. Other than sales, there wasn’t a lot more for me to do, and so—as I always figured I would—returned to academic PR. I feel fortunate to have connected with Skidmore. It’s a very creative and forward-looking place.

The media industry is changing; how will ProfNet change in response?

One recent step they’ve taken is to transmit queries via Twitter. That looks like a smart move. Any step that sharpens the targeting of queries will make ProfNet more scalable and give it a strategic advantage. The same is true of HARO, their new competitor in the expert space.

What technologies are you tracking as you think about the future of ProfNet?
I confess I no longer think about the future of ProfNet. Now, like everyone else in academic PR, I’m trying to figure out how we’re going to use technologies and networks like Facebook, Twitter, and our own soon-to-be-launched Skidmore-hosted social network.

What key lessons have you learned from your experience in creating and running ProfNet?

There are two. The first is that, since all of these new technologies are new, you have to be willing to experiment. The second is that evolution is truly blind. What works, works. What doesn’t, doesn’t. Sheer trial and error creates the path of development.

What’s the next big thing that advancement/marketing/PR folks in higher ed need to pay attention to?

One is Twitter, I’m afraid. I say afraid because I personally have not warmed up to the medium but a lot of people evidently have. Another may be Facebook Connect—the ability to synchronize one’s Web site with Facebook.

Some big challenges we’re confronting at Skidmore: How do we easily transform publications into compelling Web pages? And how do we efficiently manage the content that’s going into the seven or eight targeted email newsletters we’re currently producing. If anyone has answers, please drop me a note at .

What’s it like coming back to a campus after ProfNet/PR Newswire? What surprised you?
I wasn’t really doing PR at ProfNet; I was running an information service on behalf of journalists and PR people. So I had to quickly get up to speed on things like content management systems, HTML email delivery systems, and online video. Beyond those, not a lot else had changed.

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (275)
Categories: Change management / Content and writing

Discuss this article (3)

Trends and Judges’ Report, CASE Awards of Excellence for Websites

This year, I chaired the judging panel for the CASE Awards of Excellence Judging for websites. The judging was hosted by Roosevelt University, Chicago—a shoutout to Lisa Encarnacion, director of university outreach, who made all the arrangements for us, and to Lesley Slavitt, vice president, government relations and university outreach.

This year, 15 judges convened for two days in March for the judging. The judges represented American and Canadian colleges, schools, and universities, public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, web technology, and marketing. We also had a number of consultants on the panel, one of whom spent years working as a high school counselor. More than half of the judges have won national CASE Awards of Excellence for their websites. (Typical panels that judge other categories in the Awards of Excellence competition number about six to eight.)

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This year we awarded a Grand Gold and two Golds. In Category 10A, George School won a Gold for its redesigned site. And in Category 10B, Xavier University won the Grand Gold for Road to Xavier and Nazareth College took a Gold for FlightoftheFlyers.com.

Short list of Award winners for 2009; more details about each in the Judges’ Report for 2009.

What makes an award-winning institutional website? Here were some of the important elements we identified this year:

• a sound strategy


• sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search


• good content, effectively deployed across the site


• effective management of the site


• appropriate look and feel, distinctive to the purpose of the site and consistent within the site


• appropriate use of technology and adherence to standards


• evaluation plan; appropriate results

We also ask whether the site does something particularly interesting or unusual. We’re not very interested in sites that merely look good. It’s easy to make a site look good, but is the site great at what it’s designed to do? If a site looks good but isn’t well-organized or lacks coherent messaging, it won’t get an award. Competition in this category is very rigorous, and winning is difficult.

Managing Conflicts of Interest
Judging panels for other CASE Awards of Excellence categories top out at about six people. There are a number of reasons why we invite such a large number of people to participate in judging this category. First, building websites is a complicated undertaking and we want people with different kinds of expertise in the room to comment on issues such as audience appropriateness, usability, design, and other issues as they came up. Second, we have a lot of sites to review and having a large group of people makes this process go faster. Third, having a large group of experienced people with strong opinions ensures that a broad range of opinions is heard. Finally, the large group ensures that conflicts of interest do not emerge in this judging.

We take conflicts of interest extremely seriously. Several of the judges represented institutions that had websites entered in Category 10, and several mStoner clients entered sites in this category. Judges with a relationship to a site being judged do not participate in viewing the site during the first “elimination” round; if the site survives this round, judges are expected to recuse themselves from judging the site, are not allowed to comment on it, and are asked to leave the room when the site is being discussed during the final round when awards are given.

Trends
I’m sorry to report that the judges were underwhelmed at what we saw this year. One remarked, “I felt as if I was looking at websites from 1997. I was disappointed and surprised at how bad they were.”

Some sites we explored are clearly reaching for “wow,” but wow in and of itself isn’t enough. Without functionality, wow quickly becomes annoying. We noticed a lot of gratuitous elements that had no purpose and/or were not useful; examples of bad design; and many generic websites. One judge remarked, “I don’t see many best practices emerging this year.”

It was particularly galling to see sites that completely lacked any sense of branding or even a sense of place: the institutions could have been anywhere. For example, we looked at one site from an institution on the California coast and couldn’t find a single image that showed us where it was located.

And as important as authenticity is today, many of the sites we looked at seemed to lack authenticity. Authenticity was one of the elements that people liked about George School’s site, as well as Northland’s and Nazareth College’s Flight of the Flyers.

Another shortcoming overall was a decided lack of great content—we saw very little excellent writing or video on any of the sites we viewed. Too much of the writing was characterized by the usual university-language clichs. Sites need to be edited—and not just for misspellings (we observed far too many). And, often, excellent content was buried deep inside the site: this is good content used poorly, where one had to stumble upon it in many cases. This is not only a waste of time (and/or money), but also attention: visitors want good content!

One judge observed, “When I’m looking at your site, all I have is what is on the page. Don’t assume I know who you are; or where you are.” [Note: one of the strengths of the award-winning site for the George School is that the site provides a sense of what George School is, in words, images, and video.]

There were a number of sites that did a nice job in tying real-world experiences into the web—particularly Nazareth University’s Flight of the Flyers site. This site, McGill’s Six Word Stories site, IUPUI’s Events Calendar, and The Road to Xavier were particularly good at engaging visitors with the sites and encouraging them to share information in a variety of different ways and on different platforms, including social networking sites.

Some final comments:

• One judge noted, “What’s with the small fonts?” It wasn’t just older judges who complained about the lack of readability of small type on websites.


• We noted that a lot of sites used Flash and provided no alternatives, so they were inaccessible.


• We noted that many of the people who entered sites this year hadn’t spent much time thinking about how to evaluate the results of the all the work that went into their site. There were some clear exceptions, two of them being George School and Xavier University. At Xavier, a robust analytics toolset allows people on campus to monitor how the site is being used and respond to groups or individuals appropriately. Bravo to these award winners—and to others who thought through this key step to making a site “effective.”


• Many of the entries were a bit cagey about the use of consultants in the redesign process. Some of the winning sites were designed by on-campus teams; others were designed by consultants. We’re not particularly focused on how much a site costs, but on how good it is and what kind of results it gets. Please credit consultants for their work and be transparent about the share of the costs allocated to consultant fees when you prepare your entries. We’ll recommend that, next year, entries that reference consultants but don’t break out their costs be eliminated.

Additional Resources

Short list of Award Winners for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (275)
Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Alumni / Content and writing / Fundraising / Marketing and branding

Discuss this article (1)

Award Winners, CASE Awards of Excellence 2009: Category 10, Websites

There were 56 complete institutional sites entered in Category 10A [Complete Institutional Websites] this year and 94 sites entered in Category 10B [Individual Sub-Websites]. This category includes special-purpose websites ranging from campaign sites to alumni sites, virtual tours, admissions sites, annual reports, search sites, and others.

Full report on the judging, complete with comments about each of the award winners, is here [it’s a PDF].

The entry form for the category states:

Grand Gold, Gold, Silver, and Bronze medal awards may be given for innovative Web sites or pages developed for any institutional use. Do not enter only your homepage for evaluation. Judges will only be looking at multi-page/layered sites or pages.

Category 10A: Complete Institutional Websites
This category included sites designed to represent an entire institution, from the home page down. In the past, we’ve noted that it’s difficult to have all the parts of a great site come together at once at an institutional level, and this year was no exception. You’d think that a small institution—a school or a college—would have an advantage here because the scope of work is narrower than that of a large university.

Gold
George School

Silver
Northland College
SUNY-Potsdam

Bronze
University of Virginia
Georgia Tech Research Institute

Category 10B: Individual Sub-Websites
These sites—developed for special purposes for particular audiences such as prospective students, alumni, or others—allow institutions to develop a coherent, deep web experience for visitors. It’s often easier to build a special-purpose site: there are usually fewer political issues, a clearer purpose, and more of an opportunity to measure results—assuming, of course, that there is a plan in place to do so.

Grand Gold
The Road to Xavier, Username: hopsonk1, Password: Twitter1

Gold
Nazareth University Flight of the Flyers

Silver
Boston University Annual Report
[url=http://www.bu.edu/admissions]Boston University Undergraduate Admissions Website{/url]

Bronze
Boston University, College of Fine Arts Website
Cornell University Photography Image Library, login: case; password: case1
Hobart and William Smith Colleges Daily Update
Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis Events Calendar
McGill University
Virginia Military Institute Don’t Do Ordinary Website

Additional Resources

Judges’ Report for 2009

Judges’ Report for 2008

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (275)
Categories: Admissions and recruiting / Alumni / Content and writing / Design and usability / Marketing and branding

Discuss this article (0)

How to Win a CASE Gold

People often ask me, “Mark, how do I win a CASE Gold medal?” And I say, “Hoss, (I address everyone as ‘Hoss,’ including my mother) here’s whatcha gotta do . . “ And then I wake up.

Back in my waking life, two mStoner-designed sites were honored last week. A site we did for the George School won a CASE Gold Medal, and a site we did for the College of William & Mary was one of three nominees for best overall web site on EduStyle.net. We are very pleased for both clients and defer much of the credit to them as these were very collaborative—and very rewarding—projects.

They were also very different projects. George School is a small Quaker boarding school. William & Mary is a public university with the nation’s second oldest college at its core. And the nature of those places required very different sites, and, to a certain extent, different processes. But both projects shared certain attributes that helped make them successful. Those attributes add up to something of a formula for giving any marketing or communications project a school undertake with consultant the best chance of being extra special.

Do lots of intake, most of it with students and faculty. Obviously we need to know the president or headmaster’s vision for the the school. And we’ll need to talk to the Admissions, Development and Alumni Relations staffs to get sense of the school’s competitive situation and how it is currently perceived by its various audiences. But if we’re going to make a website or a suite of enrollment pubs that represents the school in an accurate and compelling way, we have to talk to the students who choose to go there and the faculty who choose to teach them. We need to know what they like about the place and how it fits their own sense of themselves. We have to absorb as much of their enthusiasm for the place as possible. Put another way, our job is to drink the Kool-Ade. The client’s job is to serve it to us. (And just to belabor the point, Kool-Ade is made from students and faculty who love the school and are enthusiastic about its mission.)

Test thoroughly. Use the results thoughtfully. One of the things mStoner does with its intake is develop a message platform—basically a short list of things a website or viewbook should be saying to anyone who reads it. Then we give that message platform and a creative brief full of insights about a school’s students and competitive situation to teams of writers and designers and ask them to develop two or three (sometimes four) very different-yet-audience-appropriate ways of expressing that message platform. Then we test those ideas with current and prospective students to see which ideas convey our key messages most compellingly. We always do an online survey. George School, like many of our clients, chose to supplement the surveys with on-campus focus groups, which are great because in addition to letting us probe for more detailed feedback, it gives us a chance to see body language and other kinds of response that surveys don’t capture. Getting a chance to see kids ooh and ah over the winning concept made George School much more comfortable moving forward with a challenging concept. After much consultation, Ball State, which won the EduStyle “Best Overall Site” award a year ago, deliberately chose a design the came in a close second in testing because they felt it better reflected the school they wanted to become. William & Mary was faced with a similar choice and decided to go with the winner.

Trust your institution. This is probably the toughest one, particularly now when prospective students and their families are particularly price sensitive and feel obliged to go where they’re getting the best deal. But to get a student to apply in the first place, they have to want to go to your school. And that means you need to be as appealing as possible to the students who are the best fit. Both George School and WIlliam & Mary knew they weren’t for everybody. George School wanted to highlight their International Baccalaureate program. William & Mary wanted to remind people that their sometimes-overly-studious student body knew how to have a good time (guerilla a capella, anyone?) But both schools were otherwise comfortable in their own skins and willing to let go of those prospects who were not likely to be a good fit anyway. And it’s much easier to come up with an engaging, meaningful creative idea when you’re trying to say one clear thing to a particular audience than trying to be everything to everyone.

Trust your consultant. Okay, this one is as much on us as on you. We—or whoever your communications consultant might be—have to earn your trust. With George School and William & Mary we did our best—as we always try to—to make the process as collaborative as possible and to listen to the client’s needs and the reasons behind changes when they requested changes. In return, they listened to us when we occasionally pushed back on changes. In addition to making us all feel good about the process, that respectful back and forth made the designs better.

So there you have it, Hoss—a four-stop process to getting a website or a viewbook that says something authentic and compelling about your school. We can’t guarantee that it will win you an award, but we feel reasonably confident that it will win you enthusiastic students who fit your institution.

Posted by Mark Sheehy
Additional Posts (2)
Categories: Content and writing / Design and usability / Marketing and branding / Strategy

Discuss this article (0)

@ShayTotten Reports: Using Twitter to Report Breaking News

Totten is investigative and political columnist at Seven Days, an alternative weekly in Burlington, Vermont. And while many reporters and writers have been quick to adopt new technologies—and many reporters are using Twitter—much of their tweeting is focused on trolling for leads, sharing resources and stories they’ve reported, and personal brand-building. Totten’s reporting illustrated how powerful Twitter can be in the hands of a pro reporting on a breaking news story.

Two weeks ago, Vermonters (and people in other states) were riveted by discussion in our Legislature about a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. Passed by both houses of the Legislature, it was vetoed by Governor Jim Douglas. There was never a question about whether the Senate could muster enough votes to override the Governor’s vetto, but no one knew what the House would do. The galleries were packed as discussion began.

Shay Totten was not content to sit in the press box and file his report when the debate was over. Tweeting as @ShayTotten, he offered real-time debate updates via Twitter, which were tracked using the #vtfreetomarry hashtag and became part of an ongoing Twitter conversation.* [If you don’t understand what these terms mean, see the introduction to Twitter below.]

A reporter’s insights about tweeting breaking news

We asked Totten to share some insights about using Twitter to cover an event like this. Here are his comments.

How did you decide to use Twitter to report on the Senate and House civil marriage debates?

At Seven Days, we’ve been experimenting with a different social media and other online tools to engage readers in real-time discussions during big news events. In some cases, we partner with other media (WPTZ and Channel 17) to provide live video streaming. But, at the presidential health care forum on 19 March, we used Twitter almost exclusively. This foray proved to be a hit with readers, so we thought I should try it again during the same-sex marriage debates—which we all knew would have much more interest to Vermont readers and readers around the country. It was also something different than hosting a live blog, which other media were already doing (along with a lot of live streaming). Also, this gives us a chance to cover breaking news, which is hard to do in our weekly newspaper.

Because you were tweeting about the debate, you were communicating in real-time with your followers.* It strikes me that that’s quite different than taking notes and digesting them in a report written after the debate is over. What was the experience like for you?

Communicating with readers in real-time is different than taking notes (in fact, it’s more like letting people read your notes in real-time), but it’s not completely unlike being in a press gallery where there are sometimes brief bursts of conversations, commentary, or “who said that?” queries. Live-blogging while reporting is much more arduous than replying on Twitter—and most of the questions that came in while I was Twittering were pretty straightforward and easy to answer.

That said, the reader queries served two important elements for my reporting: There are always some lulls in live debate coverage, so answering reader queries kept the coverage moving forward even when the debate wasn’t. And followers often bring up some of the “obvious” questions reporters often overlook while in the throes of taking notes.

In the end, though, I think reader interaction is what I’m after—whether through DMs, re-Tweets or @replies during the event.* I’m their eyes, ears, and typing fingers (if not a personal news ticker) during an event and I like to know there’s someone on the other end who is doing more than just scrolling along.

Did you face any obstacles in using Twitter in the House and Senate galleries?

Not many, but there does seem to be a technical glitch with the Statehouse wifi system when working in the Senate gallery. For some reason after a certain period of time, the security certificate for Twitter is rejected and therefore I can no longer use the laptop. So, I then switch to my iPhone, which can be a bit of a pain in the thumbs, but it’s not all that much slower. Makes for more difficult simultaneous note-taking, so I have to switch between the laptop and the phone more. The House gallery does not seem to have this issue. During big events like the same-sex marriage debate, it always pays to get there early and stake your claim as space is limited and once the TV crews show up they take up a lot of space.

You used a hashtag—#vtfreetomarry—for your tweets. Were you tracking the conversation associated with the hashtag. If so, what was it like to do that? Did it affect your reporting?

I was tracking the conversation associated with #vtfreetomarry, and at times (during the lulls) I was able to get a sense of what those who were impassioned about the issue were saying about either my Tweets, or observations of others, or their own observations based on watching a live stream or live audio feed. I wouldn’t say it affected my reporting, but it did reinforce for me that what I was doing was important and relevant in a different way than just making commentary. I was truly trying to achieve a dialogue of the debate—from all sides—to boil it down for those who might not have access to these other media.

One other fun tidbit regarding a conversation associated with a hashtag. At one point during the debate, #vtfreetomarry had trended in the top 10 on Twitter and I was the most reTweeted of that hashtag. My brief flash of Twitter fame and glory.*

Will Twitter be part of your reporting arsenal in the future? When might it be inappropriate to use it?

Absolutely. I’ve already done a little bit more at Burlington City Council meetings. I believe large protests, gatherings and major legislative debates are a perfect time to use it. As for when not to use it, I think it all comes down to what your audience wants to read and what it doesn’t. That’s an ongoing dialogue that columnists such as myself, and the newspapers we work for, have on a regular basis. I would say it might not be appropriate when in closed quarters with an interview subject, or when the news value is low (arduous debates about zoning regulations, for example).

What advice would you give to other reporters using Twitter to cover breaking events? Anything you wish you’d done differently?

To other reporters, I say give a whirl. It’s a lot of fun, and you can use the “transcripts” to inform your stories for the next morning, that afternoon or next week. I’ve used Tweets for same-day blog posts, and weekly columns. There are always aspects of a story that can’t be easily told in 140-character bursts. Tweets are components of a narrative, not the complete narrative. While I try to provide context while I live-Twitter, it’s more appropriate to provide such contexts in a long form.

If you work at a big-enough news operation that runs a simultaneous live-blog, you can have a hashtag feed into your live blog so reportage can inform—and inspire—debate on the live blog (this takes the onus off of reporters to report and reply all the time).

As for doing anything differently next time, I’m not sure yet. I think this last iteration of using Twitter worked much better than in my past attempts (election night, health care forum, city council meetings, etc.) as I learned how to inspire a dialogue and to get people to reTweet or DM during an event. Each time, I tend to hone my skills given the 140-character limitation. One thing I’m trying to do better is provide people with links to stories and blog posts (by myself and others) during a debate to provide additional resources. Already, I reTweet posts from colleagues in the media so people know there are other ways to track a debate.

*Intro to Twitter
A quick description of how Twitter works, for those who don’t use it: Twitter is a microblogging service, allowing users to send 140-character messages (called “tweets”) to people who’ve signed up to “follow” their messages. A person’s Twitter ID is indicated by an “@” followed by a word or phrase (I tweet as @mstonerblog.) On Twitter, “hashtags”—designated by the “#” followed by a word or phrase—to track a subject. Searching for a hashtag on Twitter helps you find out what people are saying about a specific topic. If you like something someone tweets, you can “retweet” it to your own followers; you can reply in public; or you can direct message (DM) them with a comment. Avid Twitter users follow topics in the news by watching the hashtags and topics that emerge as ”trending topics” throughout the day. But now that even @Oprah is using Twitter, you need to find out about it for yourself.

Posted by Michael Stoner
Additional Posts (275)
Categories: Content and writing / News / This Electric Life

Discuss this article (1)

Respecting the Site Visitor and the Medium

This week, workshop madness! I just completed a series of four of them for a local client—they had selected four pilot units within the college to go live with new sites for their specific areas at the same time that the main, public site launches later this year.  In a three-hour format, we reviewed the principles of visitor-centered design, information architecture, writing for the web, and navigation development and then wrapped up with a chalkboarding exercise in which we started to wireframe the new homepage for that unit, based on principles that we’ve discussed earlier in the day.

The goal: to help pilot units understand how and why we’ve created the information architecture and navigation for the main college site and to help them flex that model to their specific needs.  In one workshop, someone asked me if the goal was to design to the lowest common denominator. In another, one participant asked if the goal was to design for a 20-year-old (the reason he asked was that he, as a seasoned academic, had come to expect text-dense, very long, and formally worded prose). Both questions really caught my attention and made me think. And in both cases, the answer was "no, not really." I personally think that the goal is to serve your site visitors well by respecting both them and the medium.

Steve Krug’s book "Don’t Make Me Think" was published in 2005 (eons ago, in the web world), but it remains a touchstone for me in all of the planning and training that we do. Its main premise: that websites should be so intuitive that people don’t need to question "where will I find this" or "how do I accomplish that?"

Business school taught me to think in threes—the top three principles I cover in our workshops:  1. Sites should be designed with your site visitors in mind. And those site visitors don’t think in terms of organizational charts or industry jargon (in one workshop, someone explained to me that course articulation translated into "will I get credit for this course;" who knew?). 2. Some site visitors self-identify. Some wayfind from topic to topic and link to link. Some search. Some think in terms of tasks or "I want tos…" Most will do all four, depending on the information they’re looking for.  3. People skim pages more often than they read.  When you based site design on these principles you inevitably gravitate toward labels that are simple and straightforward and clear. You also offer multiple entry points to accommodate the different mental models that people use for parsing information. And you write with ruthless journalistic discipline—being as compelling and concise as possible.

I’d argue that sites designed in this way actually broaden your reach and appeal, and that’s a good thing.

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (79)
Categories: Content and writing

Discuss this article (1)

Migration Madness

Whew, it’s been a busy few weeks—just wrapped up migration on a couple of projects, and it’s nice nice nice to end the week with a go-live!

I have a love-hate relationship with migration. There’s a part of me that really enjoys the sense of accomplishment and the feeling of organization that migration can bring. There’s another side of me that wonders whether it was worth the MBA tuition dollars to spend parts of my day cutting and pasting. What I’ve realized through all of our projects is that migration isn’t for the weak or undisciplined or haphazard—doing migration well requires tenacity, attention to detail, basic knowledge of HTML (yes, even with a CMS), a good understanding of information architecture (those hyperlinks don’t link themselves), and, IMHO, some background in copyediting and design (check out http://tinyurl.com/aveqrm, please, it’s a fantastic book for those of us who didn’t study design in college).

Migration has been on my brain lately because one of our clients who planned to do their site buildout internally asked me if I could put together a guide of sorts to let her know what to expect. The excerpt below is my top 10 list for making migration as easy and painless as it could be. Hit me up at if you’d like a DPF of the guide in its entirety.

10. Lock and Load. Prepare everything you need (site outlines, edited copydecks, metadata, images and their alt tags) ahead of time. Having well organized and clearly labeled files is essential.

9. Save the dates. Give yourself the time that you need. When we first started building websites, we told people to budget 15 minutes per page. Now we tell them to budget an average of an hour per page. It really does take that long.

8. Be label-conscious. This is really important for digital image assets that start out with filenames like IMG_0303.jpg. Converting these names to something more sensible like deangodenzi.jpg will make migration much smoother. Apply the same principle to clearly labeling PDFs and other documents you plan to post to your site.

7. Keep it tight. It’s better better to have a small team of good workers than a large pool of people who generate more work than they actually accomplish. And choose your people well. You want migrators who pay attention to details, because it’s the details that matter.

6. Let migrators play in their own sandbox. Assigning each of them entire section(s) for which they’re completely responsible allows them to become very familiar with the content and eliminates confusion that ensures when several people have their hands on one page.

5. Save early, save often. The page that you’ve worked on heavily—adding hyperlinks, graphics, formatted table data, and the like—will be the page that you lose when your browser crashed before you’ve remembered to hit “save.”

4. Strip. The content that you’re migrating usually comes from two places—the existing site (for pages that didn’t require any rewriting) or from copyedited manuscripts created in a word-processing program. The content that you copy and paste will carry with it some formatting that you don’t want to keep. And even the “strip formatting” function that most CMS packages have doesn’t do a very good job. Use a three-step approach to eliminate that legacy code: copy the content from the HTML page or Word document, paste it into TextEdit (PC) or a program like TextWrangler (Mac, http://www.barebones.com), and then copy that content and paste it into the appropriate CMS field.

3. Break for Life. Realize now the migration is tedious, and you can’t do it for long stretches without going a little insane. For this same reason, you shouldn’t expect migrators to get a full eight hours of migration in each day—more likely, five hours. Past that threshold, work tends to get sloppy.

2. Have one list to rule them all. Provide a single master list of edits and changes as reviewers comb through the site.  And make sure that they provide clear, actionable feedback.

1. Know that it’s never over. Once you go live, expect to spend the majority of the next two weeks fixing, changing, and adding to your website. It’s normal, really. Please don’t cry. 

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (79)
Categories: Content and writing

Discuss this article (2)

Getting Past the Smile

“And then he showed me the burn marks.”

The setting, mStoner’s planning room (picture the batcave, minus the bats and the really cool car but with plush microsuede couches and a shag leather rug). The quote, from Laurel, explaining that the best story she ever heard was from her father, who as a child ran into a burning house to save his dog and to this day has the scars to prove it. The impetus, Dark Kevin wondering whether the personal profile had died but had yet to be told it should bury itself. Death of personal profiles? In the face of such a challenge, we did what we always do: we ordered in, and hashed it out.

Since we launched the firm (almost 10 years ago now), every project has incorporated some sort of personal profile. Everyone agrees that these profiles help to connect prospective students to the school’s community, to show donors the life-changing impact of their generosity, to strengthen the bonds between alumni and their alma mater, and to humanize the organization for the people whom it serves. Profiles help to tell an institution’s story and to create a sense of authenticity in communications.

Problem is, we’ve seen so many profiles, on so many sites, of so many shiny happy people laughing, that the smile ceases to register. How do we get past the smile and into some substance?

Earlier today I went to a lunch meeting (Potbelly’s sandwiches, yum) on the subject of storytelling with Laurel, DK, James, Doug, Patrick, Jeremiah, and our good friends from Gaper’s Block, Andrew Huff and Naz Hamid. We shared some anecdotes from our personal experiences with interesting and unusual stories. As we talked, it became clear (to us, anyway) that the biggest problem with profiles used for storytelling is simply that a profile in and of itself isn’t a story.

The Center for Digital Storytelling outlines seven key elements for a story told online:

Audience - Stories have a particular audience in mind.
Purpose - Stories are trying to accomplish a task (inform, educate, entertain, scare, etc.)
Content - Content must be meaningful. Digital content adds to the story.
Voice - Stories are told from a specific perspective(s) and uses the tellers voice to enrich the story.
Technology - Technology is used to extend the story.
Connections - Good stories connect with the participants.
Economy - Stories tell enough to get the point across and no more.

How many profiles have you seen recently that incorporate these elements? I think “economy” is particularly hard. It’s a huge task to cover diversity, collaboration, a supportive community, opportunities for leadership, the chance to see the world, friends for a lifetime, faculty members who know your name, and a brilliant post-degree future with a far-reaching alumni network in 300 words or fewer.

Several sandwiches later, we landed on the simple idea of taking the focus off of the person … in favor of that person’s story. One discreet experience or encounter, told purposefully through a compelling, real voice, crafted carefully, and augmented by content (images, audio, video) that help make that experience come alive for the people the story was meant for. It seems like a small thing, but I don’t think it is. Imagine the difference between responding to “tell me about yourself”  and “What will you remember most about the first week of your freshman year?” Specificity, the primacy of the experience rather than the individual, a beginning and an end to the narrative, and most importantly, an actual point to it.

Doug once said to me that he thought everyone had at least one good story in them. I’d agree. And most haven’t really had the chance to tell them yet.

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (79)
Categories: Content and writing

Discuss this article (0)

Mundane Matters

I was recently debating with a client the merits of modules vs. blocks. In a nutshell, “module” was the term that they used internally, but block provided a simpler, perhaps more easily parsed, description. More mundane, yes, but ‘block’ was simpler.

The debate brought to mind the fact that, when developing link names for websites, simplicity matters (mundane or not).

Check out any recently redesigned university site: the cleanest of them will separate audience-based navigation from topic-based navigation. And that task-based navigation will read something like About, Academics, Admissions, Student Life, News & Events, Athletics, Giving.

Why? Because it’s what makes sense to prospective students and their parents, and those labels provide them with clear paths to find the information that they want.

Was a time that people wanted to get jiggy with their labels (I’ve got a giftcard for anyone who can name the college that once had Before _____, During _____, and After _____ as their three main site links!); thankfully now, more and more, people are choosing clear over clever. The goal now isn’t to wow the visitor with catchy new phrases (or to use the official names of offices or departments) but to connect them quickly and easily to the information and services they want by using the terms they’d use themselves.

Some examples of terms we know that students get:
- Majors & Minors
- Applying
- Student Life
- Parking
- Housing & Dining
- Study Abroad
- Tutoring Services

Examples of terms that, well, not so much:
- Prospective student, future student, aspiring student
- Courses of Study
- Student Affairs
- Department of Public Safety
- The Office of International Programs
- Sodexho
- The Center for Academic Success

As for the module vs. block debate, the client went with module, but surrounded it with clear, concise content that explained how block-like a module can be…

Posted by Voltaire Santos Miran
Additional Posts (79)
Categories: Content and writing

Discuss this article (2)

DIY College Website Redesign

(The kick-off of an ongoing series…)

With shrinking endowments, budget cuts and hiring freezes (or worse) fewer institutions are in a position to hire a hot-shot consulting or design firm to tackle all aspects of a far-reaching strategy / ia / design / content / html / cms implementation type of project.

Instead, colleges and universities (at least many of the folks we’re talking to lately) are looking for ways to do more with limited resources, which often means dividing work between internal teams and consultants like us. Partially to shave costs, partially to build internal capacity and partially just because a website redeployment is a lot of fun (really!). Sometimes we’ll do strategy and design and the college project team will handle writing and programming. Or the opposite. Or a completely different division of labor. The idea is to meet the client where they are: relying on their strengths, filling in gaps where additional expertise is needed.

But… in order for this divide / conquer approach to actually work (and to result in an actually great website) everybody needs an understanding of the nature of the work involved. So over the next few months we’re going to explain — in excruciating detail — the steps we run through in a “typical” website redesign (from initial planning to post-launch debrief meetings).

If you’re running your own project and this helps you keep it all straight, excellent. If you’re considering working with mStoner, it’s important to understand exactly how we work so you can determine what makes sense for you to do and what for us to do. No matter what, if you know up front all that’s involved in your big ol’ redesign then you can make some informed decisions about what to tackle on your own and when (if at all) to look for outside expertise.

The outline of our DIY Website Redesign guide looks like this:

• Groundwork
• Plan of Attack
• Design
• Content
• Technology
• Policies & Procedures
• Training Programs
• Sustainability

And, starting tomorrow we’re running through ‘Groundwork’ (probably an 8-part series).

Details to follow…

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
Additional Posts (8)
Categories: Content and writing / Design and usability / Marketing and branding / Strategy / Technology and software

Discuss this article (1)