Carolina's Community of Digital Creators and Communicators

Category: Resources (Page 1 of 7)

Plain Language Matters: creating web content that is accessible, usable and understood – November 2019 Recap

Plain Language Matters: creating web content that is accessible, usable and understood

  • Learn how research-supported plain language strategies can improve the user experience, save staff time, and help you achieve your communication goals.
  • The primary focus will be on website content, but these strategies can be used with any form of communication, including email, social media, or print media.
  • Plain language is an important part of digital accessibility compliance but applying these techniques will make all of your communications more effective, no matter the audience.

DateThursday, November 7, 2019
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (30 minutes of extra time if needed)
Location:  Graduate Student Center
Presenter: Rachell Underhill, Director of Web and Information Systems, The Graduate School


Presentation Slides

Presentation Handouts

Resources

Tools

Training

Office 365 Tools 2: OneDrive and Teams – May 2019 Recap

May Webmasters Meeting Details:

Date:                                     Thursday, May 2nd

Time:                                    2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (30 minutes of extra time if needed)

Location:                             Graduate Student Center (211-A W. Cameron Ave.)

Presenter(s):                     Alison Campbell, Office 365 Program Manager with ITS

Presentation Topic:                      Office 365 Tools 2:  OneDrive and Teams

Office 365 is a suite of applications that are built with productivity and collaboration in mind. There are more than a dozen apps to choose from and it can be intimidating and time-consuming trying to figure out which ones might work for you. In this session we’ll talk about 2 applications and the tools within them that are geared towards helping you collaborate in a more productive and efficient way:

  • Teams
  • One Drive

Meeting Recap and Notes:

May 2019 Webmasters Meeting – Office 365 Tools 2: Productivity and Time Management

Meeting Information

  • Date: 05/02/2019
  • Time: 2:00
  • Duration: 1 hour
  • Location: Graduate Student Center
  • Attendees: ~20
    • 2 First Timers

Presenter(s)

Notes – Presentation

  • 2 Office 365 Apps
    • One Drive
    • Teams
  • One Drive
    • Office 365 Cloud Storage Solution
    • Approved for Sensitive Data
    • Folders and individual files
    • Sub Menu
      • Many actions available for folders and files
  • MS Teams
    • Browser vs. Desktop Client
      • Both work well
      • Personal preference which you use
    • Collaborative Work Space
    • Conversations
      • Features
        • Add attachments
        • Increase the size of text edit field
        • Emojis and
        • Meeting Invites
          • Will add to Outlook calendar
          • Will be Teams Meeting
    • Chat
      • Essentially skype for business features
      • Can be with 1 or more people
      • Can add additional people to a chat but it will start a new conversation with that individual
    • Files
      • Any file you attach will be put in the “Files” tab
      • 2 places to interact
        • Files Tab
        • Files Option on left menu
      • Provides you similar actions to One Drive
      • All Files
        • Can see various options
          • Recent
          • Which team
          • Items within a team
          • One Drive (available in teams)
    • Video and Audio Calls
      • Can initiate a call easily a call with an other person
      • Works with both
    • Message Options
      • Mark as read/unread
      • Edit
      • Delete
    • Screen Sharing
      • Can show your screen to others
    • Pinning People
      • Can pin people you interact with often
      • Can notify if someone is available
    • Teams Space
      • Duplicate chat feature but team-wide
      • Left navigation changes from people to teams
      • On a team, everything is shared
    • Team Channel
      • Way to organize information, not people’s permissions
      • Always a general channel by default
      • Recommend that you start in general and make more as you need them
      • Tabs
        • Conversation
        • Files
        • Notebook
    • Creating a team
      • Button at the bottom
      • Generally, choose “Staff Members” for the Team type
      • The name of a team is very important
      • You are creating an Office 365 group when you create the team
      • Good to have a naming schema for consistency
      • Will be labeled as “Private” so only members you decide can join
        • Public teams allow anyone at UNC to join
      • If a team has guests, the team will denote that
    • Managing a Team
      • Tabs
        • Members
        • Pending Requests
        • Channels
        • Settings
        • Apps
    • User Levels
      • Owner
        • Do anything in the space
        • Should only have at least 2 owners
      • Member
        • Can manage files and content
        • Can remove items
      • Guest
        • Can only add and edit items
    • Staff notebook
      • Essentially One Note
      • 3 sections
        • Collaboration Space
          • Where team members share notes
        • Content Library
          • Push out read-only information (ex: instructor syllabus)
        • Student Notebooks
          • Notebooks for individual members for the teams
          • Owners can see the contents
        • Can add a staff notebook for a team if it does not exist
    • New Tabs/Applications
      • If you run into an application that is not available, reach out to ITS as they verify the application before it is available
      • When it is available, it is for all of campus
    • If someone makes a mistake, how to go back to original version?
      • Open in SharePoint as it is how you open the group OneDrive space
      • Click on file options, version history
    • Meetings
      • Will pull in your Outlook calendar
      • Can join Zoom meetings with Teams
      • Can Schedule Meeting
        • Defaults to On-line meeting
        • Populates to the Outlook calendar for anyone added
    • Shifts
      • If you have shift workers or student workers, the app may help
      • Allows people to take time off and perform scheduling
    • Notification Icons
      • You will see icons for any activity in a team or chat
      • The icon shows a count for the activity
    • Activity Bell
      • The activity bell will show activity across teams and chats
    • @ mention
      • You can mention the entire team or just a single individual
    • Privacy
      • Can allow individuals to contact you if you are set to private
    • Size
      • Teams have 5TB of storage
      • Individuals have 5TB of storage
      • If you want more, ask ITS

Questions

  • Is it syncing updates simultaneously?
    • It does sync simultaneously
  • If you are editing the same sentence, how does that work?
    • Office 365 can register changes when editing at the same time
  • What about One Drive for a group, is that through MS Teams?
    • Yes, but the MS teams interface seems easier
  • Difference between SharePoint and Teams?
    • SharePoint is the underlying structure for teams
    • Alison thinks SharePoint is pretty heavy for most users
  • Can you start multiple chats with the same person to organize?
    • No, a chat with another individual is singular
  • If I switch over from Skype for Business to Teams, can we have cross-pollination between teams chat and Skype?
    • The two should work interchangeably
  • When you add a file, can you remove the file at a later date?
    • You can remove or choose to stop sharing
  • Are there chats that are outside of Teams?
    • Use the chat feature for individual communication
  • If each Team creates a group, do you need to create the group first?
    • No necessarily, but creating a Team will add additional features
  • Is there any way to filter channels for individuals?
    • Individuals can choose not to follow or see, but they will still be available to access
    • Can hide channel
  • When you create a channel, are users notified?
    • No, but they will see it
  • If an owner leaves, what happens?
    • The team becomes orphaned but ITS always has access
    • This is another argument why you want multiple owners
  • If a file on One Drive is buried under multiple folders, if I share the file on the team what happens?
    • If you upload a file, you are giving your team permission to edit the file
    • It stays in its original saved location
  • Bringing in People outside UNC?
    • For Teams or just OneDrive?
    • Can share folders, files with individuals, they need an Office 365 account
      • The Account is free
      • All permissions/features are the same for these individuals
  • When people come on board, does a team automatically add the user?
    • No, you will need to add them
  • If a user is added to a team, will they see the history
    • Yes, once you are on a team, you see its history
  • When do you start a team vs. a channel?
    • Channels are ways to organize and segment interactions
    • You always get 1 channel on a team
  • Does it save locally as well, if we were without internet, could we access it?
    • If you have the MS Sync client, yes, otherwise no
  • If you share a document, can you have a notification remind them to view something?
    • Not at the moment

Office 365 Tools 1: Outlook, OneNote, To-Do, Planner – April 2019 – Recap

April Webmasters Meeting Details:

Date:                                     Thursday, April 18th

Time:                                    2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (30 minutes of extra time if needed)

Location:                             Graduate Student Center (211-A W. Cameron Ave.)

Presenter(s):                     Alison Campbell, Office 365 Program Manager with ITS

Presentation Topic:

Office 365 Tools 1: Outlook, OneNote, To-Do, Planner

Office 365 is a suite of applications that are built with productivity and collaboration in mind. There are more than a dozen apps to choose from and it can be intimidating and time-consuming trying to figure out which ones might work for you. In this session we’ll talk about 4 applications and the tools within them that are geared towards helping you manage your work in a more productive and efficient way:

  • Outlook
  • OneNote
  • To-Do
  • Planner

Meeting Recap and Notes:

April 2019 Webmasters Meeting – Productivity and Time Management

Meeting Information

  • Date: 04/18/2019
  • Time: 2:00
  • Duration: 1 hour
  • Location: Graduate Student Center
  • Attendees: ~20
    • 4-5 First Timers

Presenter(s)

Notes – Presentation

  • 4 Office 365 Apps
    • One Note
    • Outlook
    • Planner
    • To-do
  • Outlook
    • Multiple different ways to organize
      • Rules
        • Automatically perform some action based on some ruleset
      • Folders
        • Could be based on Projects, contacts
        • 3 folders to organize work
          • Tasks
            • On-going items
          • Follow-up folder
            • Areas that require follow-up
          • Some Day
            • At some point
      • Quicks Steps
        • Automatics steps for organization
        • Ex:
          • Move to folder
          • Flag and Move
          • Custom
      • Flagging Emails
        • Click on flag icon, will color code
        • Can organize by flag in the inbox
        • Adds to Outlook tasks and OneNote
        • Flag Types
          • Can add dates, canned or custom
        • Can drag and drop to Task interface
          • Will bring up a task interface
      • Tasks (similar to the To-do structure)
        • A basic task interface for creating tasked based items from
        • Interface allows you to set dates and other relevant data about
      • Clean Up
        • Icon with the envelope with an X on it
        • Can remove redundant items
    • Other Features
      • Out of office messages
      • Email Signature
    • Batch Email Time
      • If you can do something in less than 2 minutes, do it in your batch email time
      • If it will take longer, make time for those email message
    • Delay Delivery
      • Can set an email to send an email automatically at some prescribed date and time
      • This allows you to compose the email at your leisure and
    • Add Ins
      • Extra features available to certain apps
      • UNC ITS security needs to vet the add-ins before the can be used
      • Can view the list at http://office365.unc.edu/3rd-party-applications/
        • There is a request process if you want an add-in that we do not currently have
  • OneNote
    • Can get at https://office.unc.edu
    • Many different versions
      • Web client
      • Windows 10 applications (multiple)
      • Mobile App
    • Use for
      • Helps with project management
      • Uses to store agenda and meeting notes
    • Organization
      • Notebook
        • Group of sections and pages
      • Sections
        • Group of pages
      • Pages
        • Where you store data
      • Integrates with Meetings
        • Can pull in meeting attendees
      • Email Page
        • Can email a page
        • Everyone in a meeting will be in the to field
      • Sharing
        • Must use a shared notebook if others will need to view
      • Tagging
        • Checkboxes
          • General to-do task structure
        • Highlight or Star an item
          • Note for later
        • Easy to pull important items from notes
        • Can integrate with Outlook tasks
      • Individual vs. Group Notebooks
        • Everyone at UNC gets an individual OneDrive account and Individual OneNote notebook
        • The individual one is not shared by default
        • Can be team based from MS Teams
      • Search
        • Can search all note books, sections and pages
  • ToDo
    • Similar to Wunderlist
      • Wunderlist bought by Microsoft
    • Simple to-do list application
    • Only available in an online application
    • Similar to the Outlook task interface
    • Structure
      • Lists
        • Every list can have tasks
      • Tasks
        • Every task can have additional information
      • Steps
        • Like sub tasks
      • Add to My Day
        • Can add tasks to your day
        • Can drag a task over to My Day
      • Set Reminders
        • Can show up in Outlook
      • Due Date
      • Planned
        • Items with due dates
      • Flagged email
        • Flagged items in email
        • Choose to connect to email and the items will connect
      • Tasks
        • General bucket as a place to store uncategorized items
  • Planner
    • Structure
      • Buckets
    • Similar to Jira
    • Not as powerful as MS project
      • No Gantt charts
    • Good for basic tasks and assigning to people
    • Shared via an Office 365 Group
    • Can assign to anyone in the group
    • Can add
      • Due date
      • Start date
      • Assignment
      • Tasks
      • Attachments
      • Notes
      • Comments
      • Description
    • Copy Tasks, or copy link to tasks
    • Charts
      • Can see the progress and status
      • Late items,
    • Schedules
      • Calendar view of items

Questions

  • Where to store email archive, server or computer?
    • Generally, want to move to a separate space
    • OneDrive is a great space to store this
  • Interacting with Email and MS Teams?
    • Daniel Reeves uses it as a way to monitor MS Teams
    • You can get a reminder that there is a conversation that you missed
  • How to get to the Flag view?
    • In the header space, the icon looks like a flag
  • How do I have multiple auto-generated notebooks?
    • It is usually an individual issue and would need to be reviewed by ITS to be sure
  • If you don’t get through all your tasks in MyDay, what happens?
    • The items will just move off of my day
    • All the items will still be in the lists where it originated
    • You cannot see the list of items not completed in the MyDay
  • When you assign a person to a task in Planner, do they get an email?
    • It can, you just
  • What is the difference between To-Do and Planner?
    • Individual (to-do) vs. shared (planner)
  • Outlook calendar integration?
    • Not planned from what we know

Productivity and Time Management – March 2019 – Recap

March Webmasters Meeting Details:

Date:                                     Friday, March 15th

Time:                                    2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (30 minutes of extra time if needed)

Location:                             Graduate Student Center (211-A W. Cameron Ave.)

Presenter(s):                     Alison Campbell, Office 365 Program Manager with ITS

Presentation Topic:

Productivity and Time Management Tips

Productivity and Time Management are topics that anyone with too much on their plate or no idea where to start can benefit from. We’ll talk about why you should care about managing time and being more productive with it, how to start when you don’t know where to start, and general tips to be a more productive and efficient human at work and elsewhere. Productivity and time management is all about  getting things done with efficiency, so you have more time and energy for the other parts of life.

  • Tools: Office 365 (Outlook, To-Do, Planner, OneNote)

Meeting Recap and Notes:

March 2019 Webmasters Meeting – Productivity and Time Management

Meeting Information

  • Date: 03/15/2019
  • Time: 2:00
  • Duration: 1 hour
  • Location: Graduate Student Center
  • Attendees: ~20
    • 4-5 First Timers

Presenter(s)

Notes – Presentation

  • Why
    • Values
      • Save Time
      • Reduce Stress
      • Increase Efficiency
      • Focus on important things
  • Steps
    • Specific Steps
      • Assess
      • Remove
      • Reassess
      • Organize
      • System
      • Observe System
      • Keep Improving
    • Example: Cluttered utility drawer
      • Assess
        • Identify what is in there, so you know what you are working with
      • Remove
        • Remove all items to know what is there
      • Reassess
        • What should be in there?
        • What should not?
      • Organizing
        • Organize space
      • System
        • Create a system for the organization
      • Observe the system
        • Verify the system works properly
        • Look for challenges with the system
      • Keep Improving
        • Make the process iterative
        • Continually improve the structure and organization
  • Productivity and time management
    • Notes
      • It’s subjective
      • What are your goals?
      • Focus on what is important
      • Be consistent
      • Create a habit
  • Productivity Tips
    • Notes
      • Inbox management
      • Everything in one place
      • Unsubscribe
      • Delete apps
      • Unfollow
    • We spend ~55 minutes a day looking for things (in general)
      • Designating places for things
    • Remove unnecessary things from your life
      • Wastes your time
    • Techniques
      • Mind sweep
      • Brain dump
      • “Later usually means never”
      • Undesirable #1
      • Smallest, easiest step
      • Decision fatigue
  • My ideas
    • Mark out time for lunch every day
    • Plan out on the previous day
  • David Allen
    • Expert on organization
    • TED Talks

Notes – Discussion

  • How would you say these principles apply to departmental processes and activities?
    • Yes
  • With trying to have conversations through various applications, how do you keep track of it all?
    • Remove some of the complexity
    • Set some organizational rules for how to have a conversation can be helpful
      • As a group, decide how you will communicate and have some process to ensure those rules are followed
    • Move content to the proper place
  • How do you organize your email and reduce the clutter? Where to put things for later reference?
    • Email rules, folders
    • Flagging/tagging of email messages
  • When working remotely, how do you keep on task?
    • Consistency with work behaviors
    • Put in breaks to give yourself a break and keep you on track
  • Any tips for not getting distracted by social media when it is part of your job?
    • Segment the interaction
    • Have times to checking and working on it
    • Be intentional about what you will be notified about
  • When you batch your time, how do you choose to structure it?
    • She has a good idea of how much time things take
    • Get a sense of common work so you know roughly how long things take
    • Plan ahead and establish what you will do to help

The F Word: Communication with Feeling – January 2019 Recap

Our students and alumni are bombarded. Every day, they visit dozens of web pages, receive hundreds of emails, and see thousands of social media posts float across their screens. But we can break through the noise and make meaningful connections.

Brendan Foley, from the Morehead-Cain Foundation, will join us to talk about building the foundation for better digital communications and the small things you can do now to produce immediate results. We’ll cover some practical examples related to better social media, email and web engagement.

  • Location: Graduate Student Center (211A W. Cameron Ave.)
  • Date: Thursday, January 17, 2019
  • Time: 2:00 – 3:00 PM

Presentation Files
(courtesy of Brendan Foley)

The F Word: Communication with Feeling (PowerPoint)

The F Word: Communication with Feeling (PDF)

Presentation and Discussion Notes

Notes-Presentation

  • Content Focused Techniques
  • The F Word, communication with feeling
    • One thing to remember
      • We must try communicating with empathy, emotion, and efficiency
        • Understand where people are coming from
        • Be a person, be relatable
        • Communicate effectively, use the fewest, best-fit words
      • When joining UNC, he tried to find out how to communicate
  • People come to use needing solutions
    • 2 things we need to do
      • Be helpful
        • Builds trust
        • Leads to increased engagement with people
        • Helps establish us as a valuable source of information
        • Helpful in doing everything else we do
      • Be human
      • Addendum – 3 additional things
        • 3 things
          • Inform
          • Educate
          • Entertain
        • Still need to be helpful and human while we are doing these things
  • How can we be helpful
    • We need to consider our readers first
      • Often times, content creator focus on themselves or their colleagues
        • Need to consider the needs of the readers over the needs of the creators
        • Ex: Professor wants their work on the home page, but that only
      • 3 questions
        • What is our goal?
        • Who is this content for (email/page/post)?
        • Is the information easy to find and understand?
      • Quote: The responsibility [for creating understanding] really belongs to the person speaking, not the person listening” – Alan Alda
        • It is our job to communicate clearly and make sure consumers of content understand us
  • Let’s avoid Academic Speak
    • We exist in an environment where we are surrounded by brilliant people who discuss high-level concepts and projects in ways that most people do not understand
    • There is quite a bit of language that is used in higher-ed that most people do not hear/use on a regular basis
      • Though that language is accurate and familiar to us, it may not be
    • Flesch-Kincaid index
      • Scoring method for readability
      • Between 7th-9th grade level
  • Let’s avoid overwhelming our readers
    • Simply adding the information to the page is not effectively communicating
    • Avoid overly complex sentences and language formulations.
    • For example: Where you can use bullet points, use them
  • Reading Level
    • Communications need to sound smart
    • Communicating with really busy people, don’t have time to decipher complex speech
  • Let’s avoid the passive voice
    • Making an active sentence can make it more readable and understandable
  • What does all this mean
    • We need to embrace our roles as our reader’s friendly (but professional) advisors
    • Vision/scope: We serve the students, we serve the alumni, we serve the campus
    • Ask: Would I want to read this?
  • I’m getting emotional
    • Personality and emotion are great things
      • They make us relatable
    • Ask yourself: If your school, unit, or organization were a person…what type of person would it be?
      • Be aspirational
        • Ideally, if your organization was putting something out into the world as an individual, what are we trying to convey?
        • Ex: Morehead-Cain
          • Welcoming
          • Adventurous
          • Inspiring
          • Positive
          • Determined
  • identity.unc.edu
    • Guidelines for personality and tone
    • Helps define how we should present ourselves in our communication
  • Let’s create better web content
    • More than half of visitors spend less than 30 seconds on a webpage
    • Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to find the information they are looking for
    • Amount of time spent on a website is not a great measure of success
      • Ex: user spends 5 minutes on your site, but they do so because they cannot find what they want
  • Let’s create email messages people enjoy
    • One thing everyone hates
      • Promise value in your subject lines
      • Deliver (some) value in the email itself
    • Good emails should not be a series of breadcrumbs (links)
      • Even if I don’t click the link, I can learn something
    • Guidelines
      • Single column format (easy for mobile)
      • Provide content in the email itself
        • Provide
      • Use emoji if your guidelines allow for it
        • Used sparingly, they can work well
        • Shows playfulness if done in moderation
          • Overuse is gimmicky
  • Newsletter Subject Lines
    • Quick hit of 3 top stories
      • Short blurb of the stories covered in the letter
    • Picture of the top Instagram posts for the month in the email
  • Call to action
    • Want people to directly react to the call to action
    • If you put in the middle, people may not finish the email, but they may actually take the call more often
  • Let’s create engaging Social media
    • Every social network has its own audiences, quirks, and rules of engagement. Play with them
      • Give each its own mission statement
        • Establish a clear vision of what you are doing in each platform
      • Consistency is key
        • Consistent posts help set expectations for users
      • … but quality is crucial
        • Better to do fewer posts really well than just posting to post
  • Let’s get started right now
    • What can we do today?
      • Strive to understand your readers’ problems and offer solutions
        • Review your information and revise to make clearer to read and understand, are there ways we can make this clearer to understand
        • Keep an ear out for accounts of issues with the interface, and probe for details you can learn from
      • Personalize your drafts
        • Helps write from the heart
        • Ex: Brenden starts all drafts with Dear Jen, the name of his wife
          • This helps frame his mind when creating communication
        • Write clearer
          • Use contractions
            • Humanizes writing
            • It is how we talk
            • Easier to understand
            • Not for overly-formal content
          • Ditch adverbs
            • Usually, an adverb is a sign that someone is too lazy to find another verb
            • Find a better, more powerful verbs
  • Great Resources
    • readable.io
      • ~$3 per month
      • Score your text and URLs
      • Gives you readability score
    • Really Good Emails
      • Many email newsletter examples
      • Provides you HTML content for the example emails
    • Coschedule
      • Headline, Subject and Social Media Post Analyzer (Optimizer)

Notes – Discussion

  • Do you build your email messages in HTML and just send them?
    • Build them in an email platform that provides a WYSIWYG interface where you can build the email as you like
    • MailChimp’s editor is pretty good for this
    • iContact
      • Free for non-profits in NC
      • Up to 10K subscribers for free (may be more if ask about it)
  • Would you worry about people providing information that allows more precise content to be displayed (on the Morehead-Cain site)?
    • Short answer is not, given the way the process is structured
    • The nature of the site and information, it is unlikely that users choose the incorrect item
  • How do you deal with pushback from content suppliers who nitpick the content and set rules for how things are presented?
    • Having clear institution hierarchy over content control and rules
    • Make sure the final person who makes these decisions have both the knowledge of content strategy and the authority to enforce content rules
    • There is a larger question about institutional support
      • You need someone who understands the importance of clear and effective communication
    • Style guides help as well
    • Go back to the foundational goals as well
    • Data can help as well, depending on what we are doing, to define how effective our communication will be given various choices
    • Use the 3rd party tools to help enhance your argument
      • Blogs and articles about readability
  • Do you have any resources that would be helpful in explaining the analytics data you are getting?
    • Google has a “schools” feature for training, Google Analytics Academy
    • Morehead-Cain worked with an outside company who helped them identify meaningful analytic areas for them to review for the site design
  • Can you tell us how to sort the various needs of a department (student, alumni, faculty)?
    • Majority of visits are prospective students
      • Need to tailor the content to those situations
      • You may have to manage individuals who want to add content that is less relevant to your goal/mission/audience
      • Ask the question: Will anyone want to read this?
« Older posts

© 2024 Web Professionals

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑