Whale Tarot

The Students

Ah, the students. They’re the whole point, right?  

They are dreamers and idealists. And they stay up too late and don’t always work as hard as they should. And whether they’re 17 or 35, elite athletes or Rhodes scholars, they tend to expect a lot from a college or university. And the things they sometimes want — like a giant link to webmail on the top of your website, or real time data on solar energy usage — aren’t always realistic.

If the point of higher education is to educate people, the students are at the center of everything. Of course that’s not a college’s only job, and students aren’t the only stakeholders that matter. There are alumni and parents and community members and faculty and deans and more; the students are just part of the picture.

How would your job — or your website — be different if its only purpose was to serve the needs of your students? 

The Faculty

Faculty are the most important and elusive ingredient of a higher education storytelling effort.

They have a perspective on your students and their academic experience that nobody else has. They are the keepers of the classroom magic that communicators like us are trying so hard to show the world. And many of them have fascinating and unique passions, interests, and life experiences of their own.

But their job is teaching students, not marketing a college. And although they often have lots of opinions about the website, they don’t usually have a lot of time to work on it.

There are ways to harness the storytelling potential of your faculty without putting more work on their plates. It’s a challenge that’s important to figure out. 

Are there faculty members that you work with on web projects?  Who are your favorites?

The Team

There are all kinds of teams in the higher ed technology landscape. 

Some teams are tiny; some are huge. Some are efficient and effective; others struggle with gridlock and decision paralysis.  Some teams work together in the same campus building; others are remote and haven’t ever met in person. 

In our experience we’ve found that you can’t really predict the quality of a team by looking at it; some of our favorite clients have some of the smallest teams, but we see large teams do great work too. Here are some of the questions we sometimes ask the teams we work with: 

• Does everyone on the team feel empowered to share their opinions and ideas? 
• Does the team have a clear process for making decisions? 
• Does everyone on the team want to be there?

In general we think that the number of people on a team isn’t as important as the quality of the communication between the players.*

How big is your team? What are your biggest strengths? What are your challenges? 

* Except in sports. A three-person team of NBA all-stars probably couldn’t beat any team in the league. But you get the point.

The Community

Every technology product serves a community; some are specialized, some are more general.

In higher education we’re more likely to talk about the community: in fact, higher education web content is unusual in that the community it’s for is the same community that it’s about.

Faculty, students, staff, and alumni are both stakeholders and storytellers, consumers and producers of the work that we as web professionals create. Having to satisfy the community on both sides is one of the great challenges of higher ed communications. 

When you think of the community at your institution, who are you thinking of? 

The Committee

In colleges and universities, a lot of decisions are made by committee. And that’s OK!

Most of us know the experience of a great idea dying in committee. And we might sometimes dream of jumping through fewer hoops on the path from beginning to end of a project.

But consensus and discussion are part of the fabric of higher education; one of the things we love about working with schools like yours is that everyone has a voice. You know your workplace better than we do, of course, but we think the open forum and democratic spirit of the modern higher ed workplace is worth a bit of inefficiency and occasional frustration.

Are committees a big part of the decision making process in your workplace?

The Storyteller

Storytelling is the central element of our work as communicators and technologists. 

We believe great storytelling is the product of a collaboration between the people who shape and facilitate stories (writers, designers, photo/videographers, web developers) and the people whose stories are told (students, faculty, and alumni).  Finding the people with great stories is the first step in building a campuswide storytelling effort. 

Who are the storytellers on your campus? 

The Calendar

We’re always telling people that the calendar is the most important page of a college website. (And not just because we sell calendars to colleges.)

Your calendar is the one page of your site that literally everyone who cares about your school is interested in. A calendar is both a storytelling platform and an enormously important tool for students, faculty, and staff to plan and organize their lives. No wonder it’s so hard to get right! 

Could your calendar be better? Talk to us.

The Deadline

Some deadlines are real. Some are theoretical. It’s important for all of us to know which is which.

A healthy, shared understanding of deadlines and their flexibility (or lack thereof) is a crucial part of a healthy workflow. We can allocate resources, energy, and attention to the genuinely meaningful deadlines and work together to make the theoretical ones into practical, reasonable, actionable milestones that can be put on the calendar. 

What deadlines are on your mind right now?

The Invisible Opinion

The most opinionated people in your community are invisible.

Everyone thinks your idea is great! But there are some people that it’s just not going to fly with. Some people just aren’t as adventurous as we are.  

These some people are never actually seen, identified, or talked to. But their opinions loom large on a college campus.

Here’s a rule we try to follow — not always successfully, of course: 

If a person has a name, they’re entitled to an opinion.

How do you overcome the invisible roadblock?

The Darkness

Sometimes it gets hard. 

There’s more work to do than three people could possibly do, and it’s due sooner than four people could possibly deliver it, and you have two people. Or maybe just one. Senior staff are nervous and time’s running out and it’s 11pm and the VPN is down so you can’t even log in. 

(This happens to everyone sometimes, right?  It’s not just us?) 

Periods of panic and stress are part of the job for almost everyone who works in technology. What we always work to remember is that they pass. A couple of hours’ work results in a thorny problem getting solved, and suddenly the rest of the job seems easy. Or people come to their senses and add a couple of weeks to the timeline. The work always gets done and the pressure relaxes. (And if it doesn’t, have a talk with your manager. She’ll get it.)

How do you get by when things get hard? 

Collaboration

Real collaboration is as special as it is rare.

To us, true collaboration means joint authorship and shared ownership. We view our client projects as collaborations because we want our clients to be the owners of these projects. We want them to own the decisions and feel proud of the end product. 

Who are your favorite collaborators?

Research

We’re always telling prospective undergraduates about the research they’ll be able to do.

But research and learning is an important part of our work — and yours, too — and institutions of higher education are uniquely great places to learn on the job. One of the best things about working at a college is you can keep being a student. (Except you’re not accumulating as much debt and you can get to bed earlier.)

What’s the last new thing you learned during a work project?

Discovery

We’re not here to tell anyone how to work or live, but “try to learn something new on every project you work on” is as close to a universal recommendation as we’ve got.

“Research and discovery” is sometimes treated like a single thing (in our scope of work documents, for example). And obviously they go together— finding is (ideally) the result of searching. Research is the process, discovery is the outcome. 

So take notes. Keep an eye out. You’re going to learn something in the project you’re working on now that will make the next one easier.

What’s the last new thing you learned during a work project? 

Uncertainty

If everything about the work we do was knowable, we wouldn’t need humans to do it.  

Uncertainty is part of every project. Will everything go smoothly from start to finish? Will alumni like the final result? Will the president? Does that matter?

We try to plan ahead as much as possible — but we like not knowing everything in advance. Uncertainty is why human brains, hearts, and hands will always be needed to get things done; making decisions in uncertain environments might be the only thing AI won’t be able to do. 

When’s the last time you had to make a judgment call? 

The Big Idea

Big ideas come in all sizes. 

Some big ideas are actually pretty small — like “double the font size of the first paragraph of every page on your website.”  Some big ideas are medium-sized, like “have students write the content of your faculty profiles.”  And some are massive, like implementing a portal or switching sign-on protocols.*

We always hope our clients can recognize good ideas — of any size — that are powerful, actionable, and simple enough to write on a napkin. Those are often the ideas that are worth paying attention to, and allocating resources to make happen.

What’s a recent big idea that came across your desk? 

* If the small and medium ideas sound more interesting and realistic, it’s probably because we tend to like small big ideas more than big ones. :) 

Curiosity

In 2000, Steve Krug published a great book with a terrible title. 

“Don’t Make Me Think” brought the topic of web usability to a much wider audience, and influenced a generation of web developers to think more carefully about the human beings that we build things for. It’s full of great ideas. But my gosh. Why on earth would you build a college website that didn’t make people think?

Curiosity is the electricity that powers higher education.  The most curious students do the best work; the faculty who retain a sense of curiosity are the best teachers. As communicators we want our web audiences to think.

If we can make a prospective college student look at web content and think and wrinkle their brows and ask questions — 

• Huh. Neurobiology. What’s that?
• What’s the person in that photograph doing? 
  
• I wonder what alumni at this school are like? 

— they’ll apply.

The Payoff

What’s the best outcome of a project?

For most technology, marketing, and communication projects, we think it’s straightforward: The payoff comes when the project launches, the community it serves has more of their needs met, and the people who built it can feel that they did their best work.  

Is that always a realistic goal? Oh my gosh no.  But we think that the goal of a shared feeling of accomplishment can make for a more thoughtful and communicative work process. 

What’s the last project you worked on that paid off in a satisfying way? 

The Web

The web is what we — most of the people reading this, anyway — do for a living. But the Web — the interconnected, interdependent network of people, devices and ideas that brought this world into being — is why we started doing it in the first place. 

The Web has changed a lot since we started our company almost 25 years ago. It’s less open and more predictable; it generates a lot more revenue but not as much delight. But it’s still real. The devices and people and ideas are still there. And it’s still worth working on, no matter how hard Silicon Valley tries to lock it away. 

What’s the first thing you remember doing for work on the Internet?