Trying something new. (The benefits of phoning it in.)
At mStoner, we always—well, maybe not always, but often—try to find new and better ways to do what we do every day. Sometimes that means forming discrete project teams (um, Voltron and Tweamus) rather than playing endless rounds of “who’s available to work on this project?” Sometimes it means developing a new product or service, such as the free mobile webinars we’ve been running. Lately, we’ve been looking at new ways to do intake.
Intake is the process by which mStoner gets to know a new client, suss out their strategic goals and cultural attributes, and establish the needs and specifications of the project at hand, whether it’s a branding refinement, a social media strategy, a new website, or a suite of enrollment publications. Usually, that intake involves several members of the mStoner team spending two to three days on campus talking to students, faculty, admission and alumni relations staff, the marketing and communication team, the president and provost, the deans of the professional schools, the IT staff, the dean of student life, the head of the library, the assistant vice president for the first-year experience . . . you see where this is going. Some of the meetings are necessary to doing the work. Some of the meetings are necessary to building and maintaining institutional trust and support for the work. Some of them—and this is totally fine and legitimate—are simply to grease the client’s squeakiest wheels. We like it. Getting to know an institution and bonding with a new client are truly one of the most fun parts of the job, but during the 25th meeting of a three-day intake . . . let’s just say one’s ability to form complete, coherent sentences declines.
So the question becomes, how do we do our intake more efficiently so a) we’re doing better work for the client, and b) leaving some mini-bottles of scotch for the other passengers on the flight home?
We’re finishing up a branding project for Swarthmore College in which we did all the administrative intake—the president, the provost, the head of admission, etc.—via conference call, so we could focus our time on campus talking almost exclusively with current and prospective students, faculty, and alumni. That process gave us a depth of understanding of Swarthmore that we crave with all clients, but don’t always satisfy. Now we’re using the same process with the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. With Ross, we conducted one-on-one phone interviews with the heads of admission for each of their degree programs in advance of our on-campus intake. Each of them got more attention than the on-campus process would likely have allowed, and we got to break that intake into more digestible chunks. And the biggest surprise to this former English and Philosophy major was that I had a blast talking to the head of the Master of Accounting program. We got off on this entertaining, not-quite-tangent about accounting as storytelling (notice the smartass in me resisted saying “fiction writing”) and how accountants were more like lawyers constructing a case from evidence or doctors producing a diagnosis from a collection of signs and symptoms than the visored bean counters they often are in the public imagination. (Hmmm. How do we pitch a “rebranding the accounting profession” project?)
So anyway, that’s one of the many things news this month at mStoner. More news about new stuff as we, well, find time to blog about it.
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