December bears witness to one of the most interesting dichotomies in higher education communication: the holiday e-card.

For advancement and public relations, the holiday e-card is an exciting end of year project that reminds alumni and the community of the institution and hopefully reminds them that their alma mater is still part of their lives and family.

To the creative teams and web developers that are tasked with creating the card, it’s frequently a design-by-committee project that takes up valuable time right before the start of a new semester and  offers very little return on investment.

Both sides have valid points, but love them or hate them, the holiday card is a fixture of the higher educations communications landscape. Like anything, the truth lies between the two assessments.  Done right, and done strategically, the holiday e-card can be a good relationship building tool. The trick is in managing expectations and in planning.

Managing Expectations – Resources

• Holidays means big meals and appetites, and often our eyes are bigger than our stomach. All too often, our administrators are sent a card by an institution or business with a much larger budget for their holiday message, and they ask us to replicate. It’s at that point that we either creatively find a way to recreate the project on a smaller scale, or pack ourselves into a box with a note saying “Don’t open until President’s Day.”
• Use metrics to determine what resources to put behind your card. If your cards receive very little social engagement, then consider taking a different rout in your presentation this year or scale back on the costs and productions.
• Provide resources for units that do not have them. The University of Florida’s University Relations team produces two or three holiday cards per season that are added to an online repository of cards for units to use.

Planning

Holiday card projects often come to the creative team at the last minute. But they don’t have to. The holidays are a known quantity. WE KNOW IT’S COMING EVERY YEAR (except maybe in 2012).

This gives us a great opportunity to plan in advance. Keep suggestions open for holiday cards throughout the year.  Keep a list of good ideas.  Begin thinking and conceptualizing your cards early. October presents a good month for laying some ground work – after the fall semester madness, and before vacations in November and December begin eating up staff and administrator time. By thinking ahead, we can avoid the crunch time that makes these projects so onerous.

Spreading Holiday Magic: The 2011 West Virginia Holiday Card

The West Virginia University’s 2011 Holiday Card is a beautiful blend of web and video. The video is below, but you should check out the web page itself, which interacts with the video itself with subtle lighting effects. I spoke to Dave Olson, programmer and project manager with WVU University Relations, about the project.

Tell me about the Christmas card for your institution this year.

The primary element for our holiday card this year was a video that featured a sprite that spreads the magic of the season across campus. Related to it, and the primary piece that I worked on, was a website that integrates with the video. For the website we tried to create an atmosphere (e.g. snowflakes, fog, sparkles) and functionality (e.g. buildings light up as the sprite visits places on campus in the video) that complemented the video. Also, as a mobile guy we tried to make sure it was mobile-optimized as well.

Who was involved in the development process?

The holiday card was done by a cross-unit team from our University Relations department. We had folks from our graphics, TVand web units involved. The team fluctuated a bit during the project but we had about eight to ten people working on the project. We’re lucky to have a large team with a broad set of skills.

Do you find there is a disconnect between the creative team responsible for your card and the communications personnel who develop the project?

The holiday card project was very much driven and defined by the creative team. We were given the broad themes to address in the project but otherwise the actual creative implementation was left up to the team. I think that’s what made the project interesting as well as successful. Everyone felt like they had a say in the final product. Or, at the very least, I did.

Do you find the development of a card worth the time and effort it takes to create it?

Watching the responses today and hearing what West Virginia University means to folks is always gratifying. From the perspective of team building, giving each other a better understanding of processes in other units, and playing with new technology then this holiday card paid off big time. For example, this was the first time I was involved in and had influence on the creation of a video. As a web person I was then able to take those ideas and create a tightly integrated web & video experience. It just made everything feel a whole lot more integrated.

What ways could you recommend making the process of developing a card easier?

The three keys seem to be time, a project coordinator, and more time. Time is the obvious thing but time to brainstorm & time to implement lead to the best morale and best products. We had several people step up over the course of the project and keep folks on task. For us, we started brainstorming in October, production in mid-November and we delivered in mid-December.

How do you create engagement with your holiday message?

I think it’s all about stirring up emotions. If you can do that then the engagement and sharing will take care of themselves.

Photo by linh.ngân, Flickr.

In her presentation, Mallory Wood discussed the need for institutions to have a robust student ambassador program to meet the changing needs of both students and parents in making their decisions about the institution they would like to submit applications to.

For about $4,000, Mallory built an online ambassador program at St. Michael’s that eventually connected with 9 out of 10 incoming students.

An online ambassador has to be passionate about your institution and in talking with others.  They have to be comfortable with technology – but not someone who is closeted away with a computer. They need to be INVOLVED and CONNECTED on campus – student leaders, student government representatives, and club presidents. Content needs to be aware – authentic, well-connected, and avant-garde.

Targeting Audiences

Noel Levitz’s latest studies show that only a quarter of students and parents read ambassador blogs. Mallory argues that this is still significant enough to be in the mix – think about how many engagement tools on your campus do not even reach a quarter of potential students. For St. Michael’s, her student ambassador programs had 70,000 unique visits in a year, which was a significant amount of traffic for an institution of that size.

Tim Nekritz at SUNY Oswego is using a niche marketing campaign this year, where individual students will focus on certain aspects of Oswego – campus activities, the social scene of the town, etc. – in order to create niche blogs for students looking for specific content.

Mallory’s Student Ambassador blogs at St. Michael’s were made available from a landing page that included name, class of, and indications of if the student was an international or transfer students. Photos were provided by students, giving the page a personal, organic feel and allowing the audience to make a connections to the students’ personality.

Mallory found that traffic to the blogs came more from Facebook or Twitter than direct traffic to the website. This traffic was primarily from the student ambassadors tweeting or posting their blog entries to their social networks.

Formspring

Formspring was also a powerful tool for the ambassador program. Students on campus tours rarely ask questions of the tour guides, especially if it perceived to be an embarrassing question they’d rather not share in a crowd. Formspring, however, gives an anonymous forum where the answers are collected in a crowd-sourced set of relevant frequently asked questions for incoming or prospective students.

Twitter

Mallory also questions Noel-Levitz’ statistic that less than 10% of students or parents use Twitter to make a decision. It gives insight into the student’s personality and gives additional content to feed into a blog. 3 in 10 users access the service daily, making it an active audience.  Social Media hubs that consolidate the information help to combine the strength of individual Twitter accounts into a centralized resource.

Video

60% of students and parents said they want to see video both from the institution and from students about campus life. Consider having video bloggers to meet this need.

Facebook

15% of students and 25% of parents have visited an institution web site to ask a question. While a good experience via Facebook might not make the difference in deciding to go to you school, a single bad experience certainly can take you out of the running.

Class Of… Pages

Find a student ambassador to take charge of being the point for these groups.  If we are the primary point of contact in the group, it is a little…creepy. Be involved to answer the tough questions, but let the ambassadors handle the rest.

How to Put it Into Practice

Let Your Bloggers Blogs and Your Tweeters Tweet

Let them be authentic and let them go.  You cannot micromanage and approve every message. It diminishes the power and the personality of the messages.

Ask Interested Students to Apply

It is far more important for your ambassador to write well than to speak well.  Put them through a rigorous testing pattern – have them do content for a month, and see if they would be able to sustainably do it for a full year.

Train

Holding a training session is essential.  Communicate the goals and reasons for the program so they are fully invested.

Contracts

Using contracts defines the responsibilities of the ambassadors. It allows to specify the benefits they will receive, and it gives you protection in case an ambassador does not meet the specified requirements and has to be let go from the program.

Takeaway

Find passionate students on your campus than can engage and inform, give them the tools, and give them the freedom to express themselves. Potential students, their parent, and your institution will thank you for it.

Nestled between the classrooms of Turlington Hall, the Office of Communications and Outreach for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences is located in the best place to accomplish its mission. It’s literally the heart of campus and is full of energy. Faculty and students can drop by in between classes. The view from my desk includes a view directly down onto Turlington Plaza, where many of the student-driven events take place. From here I can see everything from flash mobs to step dancing to zombie attacks and student protests. The campus carillon tower is across the street and provides our office with random performances of classical music and modern interpretations. Last spring break we rocked out to School’s Out by Alice Cooper.

Being a small team with large responsibilities, we have to quickly establish ourselves with our clients as knowledgeable, easy to work with, and fully invested in their goals. Our office helps ease clients’ anxieties when coming to us. We use a neutral color scheme of earthy colors to create a calming atmosphere. Our front area, used for large client meetings, has a display of artwork, photography, and examples of past projects to define the space as a creative work area.

This is Communication and Outreach's front office, set up for our intrepid interns.

A larger view of the office's hidden nook.

Truth be told, I'm more wholesome than the comic books.

Stepping into my office is like stepping into a comic book store. I started small-scale, primarily bringing in posters and action figures because there was no place to display them at home. It’s swelled into a slightly overwhelming display. But, I’ve found that it actually serves a valuable purpose–it serves as an ice-breaker for initial meetings and gives us a common frame of reference to work.

Almost everyone who comes into my office can connect to something in there, whether it’s an icon from a favorite movie or favorite cartoon as a child, or it’s an item that someone’s children or grand children enjoy. The vibe I’ve created helps us overcome that first hurdle in talking to one another and allows me not to come off immediately as a professional that will be speaking technical jargon over their heads.

My web team doesn't seem to get anywhere. I suspect the project manager, or that guy right behind who thinks this all happens by magic.

Cobra Commander's Plan to take over the world with a large mustachiod man on a Beetle was foiled by SHIELD.

Raisin X: Bet this is Marvel's next concept series.

I work using a fairly ancient Apple G4 with a cinema display screen. I have a new iMac I intend to transition to using but have not yet had a chance. To the left of my screen sits a small framed print of Dylan Wilbanks’ takeaway from Higher Ed Web 2010: “Love higher ed. Love the web. Love people. And yourself.” It’s right next to the phone, in case I need to reference it quickly while on a call.

WORKPLACES EXTRA: This is my favorite piece in my office.

I rescued it from the trash heap downstairs when they cleaned out an old imaging department. To me, this single panel represents the challenges of communication – bringing together various groups with differing ways of communicating and finding a common ground for engagement and connection.

Plus, the wolf said okay, which is awesome.