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- part 1 (pptx)
• The F Word-part 2 (pptx)

The F Word: Communication with Feeling (PDF)

• The F Word (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 7^th-9^th 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 3^rd 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?