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April Fools’ Day, public affairs website and Welcome Weekend activities receive awards

March 10, 2014 by

Missouri State University recently won 12 awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) District VI. Three of the 12 awards were for Web and new media projects:

Gold award: 2013 April Fools’ Day

For the past four years, the office of Web and new media has instigated an April Fools’ Day prank incorporating some element of the Missouri State University website. The April Fools’ Day prank for 2013 debuted new experimental BearPass log in methods.

On April 1, 2013, the Missouri State homepage received 49,000 pageviews. The BearPass tab, which directly connects users to the login screen, was selected 14,594 unique times. The tab received a high amount of traffic due to it being a Monday and one of the first days for fall registration.

The following employees received a gold award for Integrated Advancement Programs — Creative Uses of Technology and New Media:

Chris Austin, Web designer
Chad Killingsworth, assistant director of Web and new media

Bronze award: 2013 Public Affairs website

Each year Missouri State hosts a series of events focused on a central theme, like the 2013-14 theme of “Global Perspective: Why It Matters.” For the 2013-14 year, this series of events was officially packaged as the seven signature public affairs events.

The public affairs website project successfully incorporated the new event series and brought consistency to how the details about each event are presented. Site organization and design elements give each event its own feel while keeping it part of the public affairs family.

The following employees received a bronze award for Integrated Advancement Programs — Websites:

Chris Austin, Web designer
Brys Broughton, student developer
Sara Clark, director of Web and new media
Brittany Dilts, student developer
Courtney Wendel-Stevenson, new media specialist

Bronze award: Move-In and Welcome Weekend

Move-in and Welcome Weekend is one of the busiest and most exciting times to be on campus at Missouri State University. More than 2,400 new students arrive on campus and thousands more return to Springfield to continue their studies.

The goal of this campaign was to carry the real world excitement about move-in and Welcome Weekend to the online world and to make the process as smooth as possible. The campaign included website, social media and media relations activities.

The following employees received a bronze award for Integrated Advancement Programs – Creative Uses of Technology and New Media:

Chris Austin, Web designer
Sara Clark, director of Web and new media
Jessica Clements, new media specialist
Brad Mitchell, new media producer
Kevin White, senior photographer

About CASE

CASE is the professional organization for advancement professionals at all levels who work in alumni relations, communications and development. CASE District VI includes colleges, universities and independent elementary and secondary schools throughout the Midwest, including Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Lessons from CASE VI: Brand consistency, storytelling and institutional longevity

February 7, 2014 by Lucie Amberg

Standing out in a flattened world

A few thoughts from the recent CASE VI conference, which I was fortunate to attend:

I first attended It’s the End of the Web as We Know It by Mark Greenfield, consultant and director of the office of Web services at the University at Buffalo. One main contention: the exponential growth of technology is “flattening” the higher education landscape, particularly with the rise of new curricular options such as MOOCs and competency exams. (Greenfield covers this topic on his blog and avidly chronicles it through aggregated articles on his Delicious feed.)

These trends seem positive for enrollment and accessibility, but if a university is assuming a majority of students will follow the four-year, on-campus path, it may be assuming too much. And there are other concerns. It’s challenging to fully evaluate MOOC-driven learning against traditional models, and it’s hard to gauge whether proving skills on a competency exam has much to do with the critical thinking and personal development colleges have historically provided.

Greenfield’s presentation started me thinking that as technology muddies curricular waters, a university’s culture, history, environment and goals– basically, its brand –must become more prominent. The university experience should be bigger and richer than a math equation of credits and degree; it should be an opportunity to play a role in a story that spans generations.

Thinking about depth as well as breadth

I didn’t expect these thoughts to overlap with another presentation, Empowering Faculty to be Brand Advocates, led by Kristen Smarr of the University of Missouri’s College of Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources. She described how she designed and executed training workshops for select faculty with the goal of helping them provide “more human” context to their highly technical lectures. In order to achieve this goal, she led participants through a series of exercises that strengthened their storytelling techniques. A couple of sample exercises Smarr shared:

She had participants craft and present their life stories — in a three-minute format.
She had them explain their field or research and why it matters in 60 or fewer seconds.

These exercises revealed that each faculty member had a gripping story to tell about his or her intellectual journey, and each of these stories illustrated the committed pursuit of knowledge. Essentially, they were all brand advocates, now eager and equipped to tell personal versions of the university’s big brand story.

Bringing it back to brand

The two presentations offered such different– and such effective –views. Greenfield’s bird’s-eye, futuristic, tech-driven world really overlapped with Smarr’s highly personal, elegantly simple vision of scholars telling stories. In both cases, I heard that brand consistency is the key to success. And meaningful branding is about so much more than using the proper logo and language (although that’s important). It’s about the big story, the one that spans generations, the one that students want to participate in and contribute to.

Gold CASE awards given for mobile app, website and video

November 8, 2012 by

Missouri State University recently won twelve awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) District VI. Three of the twelve awards were for Web and new media projects:

2012 Public Affairs Conference mobile and tablet app

The following employees received a gold award for Integrated Advancement Programs — Creative Uses of Technology and New Media:

Lindsay Thomack, Web designer in office of Web and new media
Chad Killingsworth, assistant director of Web and new media

2012 Public Affairs Mobile and Tablet App

My Place at Missouri State website

The following employees received a gold award for Integrated Advancement Programs — Individual Sub-Websites:

Jessica Clements, new media specialist in university communications
Lindsay Thomack, Web designer in office of Web and new media
Brad Mitchell, new media producer in office of Web and new media
Tyler Beck, student videographer in office of Web and new media

Like a Student video

The following employees received a gold award for Communications and Marketing Programs — Video Recruitment Features:

Brad Mitchell, new media producer in office of Web and new media
Adam Wagner, student videographer in office of Web and new media

About CASE

CASE award given for Undergraduate Admissions Guide website

March 16, 2012 by

Missouri State University recently won eight awards from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) District VI during the annual conference in Denver.

Website receives silver honor

The following employees received a silver Excellence in Multimedia: Website award for their work on the Undergraduate Admissions Guide:

Lindsay Thomack, web designer in office of web and new media
Michelle Rose, writer and editor in publications
Kyle Falconer, web works student developer in web and new media
Sara Clark, director of web and new media
Adam Wagner and Tyler Beck, student videographers in web and new media

About CASE

Live Video Streaming

May 24, 2011 by

We undertook our first real test of live streaming an event on campus during the Spring 2011 Commencement ceremonies. Seth Odell’s Real-Time Campus Event Coverage session I attended at the CASE District VI conference last January was enormously helpful in guiding us on a successful path to begin more streaming of events on our campus.

We utilized the Tricaster system already set up in the production room of JQH Arena, and used Ustream as the streaming platform for this event. We also used the Ustream Facebook app to allow users to watch the live stream on our Facebook Page.

Since we considered this a test run, there was no advertising of the fact that we’d be streaming the Commencement ceremonies before the event took place. Once we started streaming and we knew that everything was working fine, we then started to post updates to Facebook and Twitter that the event was live. Updates included notices at the beginning of each Commencement ceremony informing users that the event was now streaming, as well as at the end of each ceremony which pointed users to the archived videos.

Over the three Commencement ceremonies, we had 501 total viewers, which exceeded our expectations for such a low-key test. There have been over 1200 views of the archived videos on Ustream.

Some of our key takeaways included:

Using the UStream Facebook App is a great way to add a second location for users to watch your streams. The app also allows users to comment and interact using their Facebook profiles.
Ustream allows the embedding of your streaming video on external sites; we plan on investigating this further for future events.
A great extra feature of Ustream is that archived videos are immediately available to users once a stream is completed. This is great for posting a raw video of an event immediately after its over while you are editing a well-produced video for final consumption.
Ustream is free by default, though this includes advertisements on your stream. Typically users watch a 30-second commercial at the beginning of the stream and also have small text ads pop up at the bottom of the screen during the stream. Ustream does offer premium services to remove the ads, which we will be investigating more in the future as well.