Web Strategy and Development Blog

Highlights from Confab Central Conference

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Confab StageIn May 2015, Lucie Amberg, Nicki Donnelson and Courtney Wendel-Stevenson traveled to the Confab Central conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The conference focused on content strategy, writing for the web, web design and technology. Keynote speakers included Jonathon Colman from Facebook, bestselling author Anne Lamott and Gerry McGovern from Customer Carewords.

You may view presentation slides and watch recordings of select sessions.

Courtney’s takeaways

  • The work we produce needs to be customer centric, rather than organization focused. Specifically, we need to work to understand our audiences and their needs, then create content that meets those needs.
  • Creating a culture of openness is crucial to creating teams that are collaborative and empathetic to their clients. Outwardly empathetic teams are characterized by their authentic desire to understand their clients’ needs. This better positions them to ask the right questions in order to uncover latent problems, for which they can deliver creative solutions.
  • Managing feedback is challenging, but knowing how to approach it can help make your work more successful. Some of Margo Stern’s tips:
    • Grounding your content in context is crucial. When you submit content for review, provide context to give reviewers a better framework of understanding. Otherwise, it’s anyone’s game.
    • Rank stakeholders. Know whose feedback is most important and revise thoughtfully.
    • When given challenging directives, ask the person: “Can you tell me more about the problem you’re trying to solve?”
    • If 85% of your work makes it, that’s pretty good. Let the last 15% go.
  • View Courtney’s #ConfabMN Twitter feed.

Nicki’s takeaways:

  • Project management takes time. If you don’t have time to plan, you don’t have time for the project.
    • Budget for it, round up, then add 20% to the total project time. This sets you up for a realistic plan for success.
    • Check out tools like TeamGantt
  • Marketing should be about differentiation.
    • What makes you better/different?
    • Talk about how that fulfills a need – hopefully in an emotional, storytelling style – to help move your audience to action.
    • Don’t feature dump.
  • Ask yourself: What is the basic group of things we can do to make a change? Start there.
    • Don’t wait until it can be done perfectly.
    • Good design today is better than great design tomorrow.
  • View Nicki’s #ConfabMN Twitter feed.

Lucie’s takeaways:

  • Watch out for the “cult of volume.” Many organizations are generating and distributing too much content, and such excessive content creates a barrier to effective content.
    • When working with clients, start by identifying what the target audience needs. Then help the client develop content that meets those needs.
    • Take a minimalist approach – which isn’t the same as simply shortening text. Minimal content is as long as necessary to meet your audience’s needs and to accomplish your purpose. But no longer.
    • Check out Marcia Riefer Johnston on Writing Tight(er)
  • Be wary of over explaining.
    • Attention spans are decreasing while competition for our audience’s attention is increasing.
    • Stay slightly ahead of your audience; otherwise you risk losing their attention.
  • View Lucie’s #ConfabMN Twitter feed.

Takeaways from Confab Higher Ed 2013

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In November I attended the Confab Higher Ed conference in Atlanta. This was the first time a Confab conference was focused solely on content strategy for higher education institutions, and it was also my first Confab conference.

Confab Higher Ed conference

Session recaps

Below are some takeaways from two of my favorite sessions:

Transmedia Storytelling in Higher Education

Felicia Pride’s presentation on the concept of utilizing transmedia to tell your stories contradicted the COPE (create once, publish everywhere) mentality advocated for by the majority of presenters at Confab, and was a welcome variation on how to approach disseminating your content. Transmedia focuses on story research and development, looking for ways we can allow people to experience a story in more than one way, with a focus on making the subject the protagonist of a story. Henry Jenkins defines this concept as:

Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience.

The goal of storytelling in a transmedia context is to let each platform – whether that is a social media platform, video, long-form text piece, photo, etc. – do what it does best. We as content creators simply need to know the place where people are telling their stories, rather than forcing people to come to us. Finally, there are seven questions content strategists must ask themselves as they create and publish stories in order to successfully utilize a transmedia approach:

  1. What’s the story (goal)?
  2. What are the elements (message, plot, characters)?
  3. What actions do you want your audience to take?
  4. How do we tell the story (what platforms/where is our audience)?
  5. How do we share our story?
  6. How do we measure the impact of our story?
  7. How will we continue our story?

Fit to Print: Creating Purposeful News Content

Georgy Cohen gave a great presentation as always, this time focusing on how news content can live beyond the typical news release. Analytics tell us that less than 1% of our site visitors view news releases, so we need find better ways to tell our story through our news releases, and allow these news stories to be content generators rather than an end destination.

Such an approach hinges on news releases being written in a way that allows for social sharing; news needs to speak the language of social to excel at social. This involves rewriting headlines and excerpts for different social platforms, taking the time to include visually interesting photos and videos with our news stories, and allowing for user interaction and sharing.

Other conference recaps

Conference recaps, presentation slides, and presentation storify recaps have all been collected on Meet Content if you would like see other presentations and read more impressions from other attendees.

Content is king: Lessons learned from “Mark It Day”

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I recently attended the 2013 Sizzler conference, a national conference for users of iModules – a software developed for higher education institutions that helps organize databases and provides tools for email marketing, event management, online directories and more.

Many of the sessions at this conference focused on best practices for the software’s use and featured speakers from institutions that had implemented new email marketing strategies, hosted successful fundraising events and more. As I listened to these individuals speak, I realized there was one thing many of them had in common – great content.

Content is King

While many speakers’ presentations included examples of their institution’s creative content – video parodies, conversational emails and innovated designs to display content – there was one presentation that truly stood out to me. It was a presentation by Hart Larew of Arizona State University about how his school used clever, purposeful and engaging content to help their university raise more than $170,000 in 37 hours. Take a moment to let that sink in… Impressive, right?

I mentioned that ASU’s campaign content was clever, purposeful and engaging. It was that content that helped them achieve this feat.

Clever:

Many organizations, nonprofits and institutions ask individuals for financial support every day. Arizona State is unique and was successful, in part, because they asked in a creative way. ASU asked their community to help them match their student enrollment for the 2012-2013 year by raising one dollar per student, setting their goal at $73,373. In addition, they tied their request to another clever and ambitious goal – raising the money in a day. They named the day “Mark It Day,” encouraging their community to make their individual marks on Arizona State through financial support.

The success ASU had by asking the same question many people ask, but in a different way, is a great reminder that creativity and thoughtfulness make a big difference on the impact of a message. In this case, it helped the university more than double their goal.

Purposeful:

During his presentation, Hart Larew mentioned that ASU has a large commuter population and that many of their alumni and students aren’t receptive to appeals to loyalty (e.g. You should give to Arizona State because you went to Arizona State). Consequently, they decided to change their focus and make their campaign appeal to individual interests and motivations instead of general loyalties.

Arizona State made videos from the perspective of individuals who were a part of different constituent groups, who would each have different motivations for giving. Groups included young alumni, international students, students benefiting from financial aid (paired with the donors supporting them), University staff, parents of current students, athletics fans and more.

The key here is that ASU took the time to understand their audience and crafted the content of their campaign with their audience in mind. The videos they made were purposeful and meant to connect with specific individuals. This purposeful action made all the difference in their success.

Engaging:

Mark It Day When you open the “Mark It Day” website, one of the first things you’ll notice is how interesting, entertaining and engaging it is. The website features videos, a philanthropy timeline that has the Markie mascot edited into historical photos, links for social engagement and more.

During the campaign, the website featured a dynamic map showing alumni gifts from across the country that thanked donors by name. The feature has since been updated to tell the story of the success of the campaign and facts about where donations came from and went to.

To enhance engagement and communication, ASU actively utilized Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social sites to connect with their audience and encourage giving.  Beyond “Mark It Day,” their social sites support a general culture of philanthropy and generosity, rather than consistent calls to action for giving to the university. These social interactions again help tie to individuals’ personal motivations rather than general loyalties.

The engaging nature of Arizona State’s website and campaign for “Mark It Day” is a reminder that presenting a message in a variety of ways and allowing audiences to interact with it can make a significant impact on how the message is received and what actions individuals ultimately take.

What stood out to me during the iModules conference was that Arizona State University’s “Mark It Day” campaign was not only a great example of the software’s usage, but a great example of the power and effectiveness of great content.

Airport ad welcomes keynote speaker for Collaborative Diversity Conference

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On April 15, 2013, one of the digital advertisements at the Springfield-Branson National Airport was changed to the following video. It will run through April 19, 2013, when the Collaborative Diversity Conference concludes.

[youTubeVideo url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TVpBufGias” width=”620″ height=”378″]

This was a special opportunity ad to welcome the Collaborative Diversity Conference keynote speaker, Tim Wise, who is traveling through the airport.

Background information

The goal of the ads is to provide name recognition for the University and invite travelers to engage with the University. The ads run at baggage claim and the meeter/greeter area. Ad space was purchased through June 30, 2013. At this time, we do not plan to renew the ad space for another year.

Video production credits

  • Chris Austin, web designer in the office of web and new media, designed all of the text and images used in the videos.
  • Tyler Beck, videographer in the office of web and new media, created and edited the video animations.

If you are interested in having our office produce a video for your University unit or department, please visit our Video Services page for more information.

2011 UCDA Design Conference Takeaways

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I attended and presented at the 2011 UCDA Design Conference in Phoenix, AZ on October 16-18, 2011. I wanted to share a few key takeaways from some of my favorite sessions at the conference:

Creativity, Confidence & Collaboration

by Wil Heywood, Arizona State University

  • This was probably my favorite session I attended, however it is really difficult to put down to words all of the creative concepts that Wil shared with us.
  • My main takeaway is that one must be vulnerable to be creative, and you also must be confident enough to state your thoughts and expose yourself to being vulnerable to rejection.
  • Wil also shared with us some interesting ideas about how to ‘force’ collaboration among groups; he used his students as an example. He puts them into small groups, gives them a difficult problem, and then has them solve it in ten days. The students hate the project, but by the end of it they have gained better social awareness, as well as self-management skills by being forced to collaborate with others.

Bridging the Gap: Building Design Strategy on Marketing Research Data

by Elizabeth Scarborough, SimpsonScarborough

  • Elizabeth shared with us that your brand should never (ever) be deviated from. Once you pick your brand, you have to stick to it no matter what; if you or other stakeholders don’t commit to it then you lose the impact of that brand immediately. All stakeholders on your campus must use the brand; if they do not like it, they must find their niche within that brand and figure out how it works for them, instead of deviating from it.
  • She also shared some great examples of other universities she has worked with, namely American University and Thomas Edison College.
    • American University initiated a new campaign called WONK (which is “know” spelled backwards). This campaign labels their audience as wonks – someone who knows something backwards and forwards. This is a very original campaign and is definitely worthy of further investigation.
    • Thomas Edison College went from traditional spotlight-style advertisements to more modern, typography-heavy ads. These ads were very popular with prospective students and those in the younger demographics, helping them to better reach younger audiences. While the ads were not as well-received overall as the traditional spotlight ads, they were very popular with this particular demographic and therefore were very successful in helping to recruit new students.

My presentations

I presented two general sessions at this conference on Sunday, October 16. My morning session was a new version of my presentation on Transitioning Alumni Magazines from Print to Web and my afternoon session was on Ten Tips for Creating Online Video.