And with that awful pun I launch into my last blog post of the year...

I'll start by outlining an addition to our course lists, which are now all alphabetically sorted. For a while now we've made do with these displaying as a long list which, although being dynamically updated from our course database, were pretty static with no anchor points. This is why we undertook a bit of work to make them more accessible and to include a little alphabet picker at the top. Job done and much more user friendly! We're also planning on rolling this out to our other asset lists in the near future.


New staff training opportunities
coming soon!
Other things the team have been working on of late are content updates to our Student Life, Alumni and Partnerships sections and delivering the first of many Writing for the Web training session. The latter is something which will offered to all staff in the new year - meaning that we hope for the quality of writing on our site to improve tenfold. My favourite quote from the first session has to be "This is WRITING for the web, not copying and pasting..."

Yesterday afternoon I attended the unofficial Squiz/Funnelback user group at City University. This was a great opportunity to talk to our equivalents at other universities (and beyond) who work with Matrix on a daily basis.


This is about as classy as
our decorations get
Lots of great ideas were shared and I particularly liked the demo of Trello, a fantastic free project organisation tool. We're already setting it up with the idea that this is now the go to place for all web projects and progress monitoring. We also used the meeting to talk about how we found the upgrade to Matrix version 14.8 which is something we're in the middle of having implemented right now!

In other news, it's been a week full of getting into the Christmas spirit. From spending all of the swear box money accumulated through the year on decorations from the 99p Stores (we have a LOT!), to going out for a festive pizza with the team. We also exchanged our Secret Santa presents, took part in national Christmas jumper day and 'Christmas-ified' our intranet to coincide with the launch of our digital Christmas card.


Looking back on 2013 (my first full year in the job) it's been a pretty intense but rewarding time. We've seen some team members come and go (the former mainly due to me as I've been on nine interview panels this year!) and also have had more than our fare share of accolades in the form of external awards (two golds, three silvers and five ceremonies) which have been tremendous fun. I've also learnt lots and loved the opportunity to work on the first University cinema advert which seems to have been a great success. On a personal level it's also been great as I've welcomed my third child and have started studying for a diploma (having just submitted my first assignment...)

So what do we have planned for 2014? Definitely loads of revamped website sections and we've been gearing up for these in the last month by undertaking a variety of audits. We're also working on stage two of our events calendar and are in the process of a complete homepage redesign.

I hope you all have a brilliant Christmas and new year break. My final task for 2013 is to get my 'to do' list down to double figures...

Merry Christmas from the University of Bedfordshire Digital Marketing team!


A badly Photoshopped montage of the team. I've excluded myself as there's enough
photos of me on here already!
In our team it's easy to focus on keeping the website ticking over, supporting our editors and monitoring the progress of our campaigns. This can leave little time to focus on new developments, which of course, is the fun part! Everyone loves a new toy (especially at this time of year) so we've recently set aside some time to look at some new solutions which will help us more easily monitor and communicate our vast amount of public content.

Our new social dashboard with live
updates being published to the site
every twenty minutes
The first thing we've just gone live with is our new Social Dashboard. This basically combines all of our social profiles (our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram accounts and blogs) and presents them in one regularly updated place. After some extensive research (and lots of free trials) we decided on the paid service Tint. This did everything we wanted and had the benefit of being easily customisable and responsive with some great analytics functionality.

We were also very impressed with the level of customer service we received with Tim (at Tint!) being particularly helpful and supportive of our cause. Now we're up and running we're looking for a way to further promote it on our homepage, make evidence based tweaks to the presentation and also roll out more specific 'Tints' - e.g. by creating one just for our student blogs.

We've now also gone live with with our new Belong at Bedfordshire CRM. This means that we've added all of our enquirer data and they should have received emails from us encouraging them to sign up. The benefits for them at the moment will be content (videos, blogs, subject guides and key dates) which will be tailored to their interests. The plan is that we can now communicate with them much more easily and give a great user experience to them before they even come here!

Another big development is around our brand and social monitoring. Thanks to some amazing work by Ranjit at Statistics Into Decisions we're now getting live updates of wherever we're mentioned the very second it goes online. This is from anywhere on the internet from news sites to Blogs to people's personal Facebook pages. We can then engage with them or add Google adverts to articles which mention us - it's true real time marketing! This has been a lot of work to refine and block out some of the noise around our brand (a lot of which we create) and is a bespoke fusion of two big media monitoring tools. We've already picked up some brilliant content which would have gone unnoticed otherwise and have Tweeted it out immediately!

In other news Graeme also attended the opening of our new crime scene investigation rooms with TV presenter Nick Ross and filmed the below video for our news stories:



Lauren has also been busy working with other departments to completely revamp their web sections and has this week launched both new Open Days and Part Time sections. It's been a lot of work to bring them up to speed and decide on which content to move, delete or create. Obviously, this is still a work in progress but a website's never finished right?!
It's been quite a varied week since my last blog posting and I've welcomed some changes to the usual routine. The first of these was the opportunity to get more involved in the curriculum here at Bedfordshire. This is always something I've been interested in and my previous role at a South London academy gave me lots of opportunity to make my way into the classroom or to attend residential trips.

This time I was contacted by one of our lecturers to help with a project currently being undertaken by our MSc Business Web Analytics and Management students. They have been asked to come up with a full marketing plan to promote their degree and this is where I came in! It was really great to get a chance to go along and talk to them about what we already do and how we decide which courses to push and through which channels. I particularly enjoyed going back to basics and reminding myself why I chose to work in this sector. It's always great to see that the majority of our academics are extremely conscientious and good at getting the best out of their students - sometimes that's easy to forget in the haze of emails and last minute requests. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing what the students come up with following our chat...

Following on from that, we've had our last bit of training with our friends at Azorus in Canada and I met with our partnerships office regarding a complete revamp of their web presence. As a University it's also been announced that we've been awarded the Queen's Anniversary Prize for our research which is the highest form of national recognition open to higher and further education institutions in the UK. Throw into the mix some challenging emails from one member of staff and the great buzz that our graduation ceremonies bring to social media and it's all been pretty hectic!

(L to R Graeme Stenhouse, Lauren Hague,
Me and Laurie Taylor)
The real crowning achievement this week though (from my point of view), was our WIN for Best Website at the first ever Prospects Postgraduate Awards. As previously mentioned, this was our fifth awards ceremony this year and to go out on such a high was truly amazing!

In a change of pace we made our way up to Manchester in the morning for a 12.15pm start (stopping at the Christmas market to build up an appetite on the way). We were accompanied (as usual) by Sarah from the Marketing team as they were nominated for best prospectus in a very competitive field (where they unfortunately just missed out). We then took our seats at the Radisson Blu hotel in a room full of other universities for an introduction from compère Laurie Taylor. We felt we had a pretty good chance as we were sat next to the staff from Prospects themselves (surely they wouldn't want to sit next to the losers?!)

We were so happy to win, and the trophy itself is a great example of glass design which we're now looking for somewhere to display. Bring on next year and hopefully some more ceremonies - these have been massively enjoyable and I couldn't have done it without such a dedicated and supportive team. It has been tiring at times (those award entries don't write themselves!) but it's all been worth it to get some much needed internal and external recognition (and some very delicious three course meals!)
Here we go again... Yet another blog post on a night out at an awards ceremony! Last Friday night we attended our fourth one of the year so far - the Thames and Chiltern CIPR PRide Awards. These awards celebrate work done in the public sector and this was the second one of these we were due to attend after the CIPR Local Public Services Awards back in February. This time we were shortlisted for Best use of Digital (for our corporate film) and Best use of Social Media (for our Clearing campaign).

Having a full table meant we could
make quite a noise when our categories
were announced!
After some time off studying, and a few days of respite to digest my new knowledge, I whizzed into Luton to meet the team in the office. It was definitely quite amusing finding them sat at their desks wearing their finery before the taxi took us to the (conveniently local) Sopwell House in St. Albans where the ceremony was due to take place! Our group for the evening were Elisabeth and Lauren from my team, Sarah from the Marketing team and Andy, our Market Research Manager. We also had some very special guests as we were joined by Spectrecom who did an amazing job of working with us on our corporate film. Finally, the evening would not have been complete without a blast from the past in the form of Hannah! She has now moved on to a promotion elsewhere but seeing as our two nominations were predominantly her work (and she wrote the awards entries!) it wouldn't have been right to exclude her...

After being the first to arrive (I guess we had the easiest journey) we sat down for a very nice three course meal (we're getting used to these now) and the awards proper. Our first nomination came around pretty quickly and we were delighted to win another silver for Best use of Digital. This was actually our fifth silver in the last few years showing a definite pattern!

Us receiving our gold award on the
stage. Black was definitely the outfit
colour choice of the evening...
However, the curse was soon to be broken when it was announced that we were awarded GOLD for Best use of Social Media! Finally, a new start! Needless to say were were extremely happy and I could hardly hide my excitement by bouncing up and down in my chair.

To top off a brilliant evening the Marketing team also won gold in their category for Best External Publication followed by another surprise award for Best use of Research, Planning, Measurement and Evaluation. Wow! A clean sweep - I'm guessing we weren't that popular with the rest of the room. Andy was particularly pleased to have won a much deserved award for his research especially as he has teased us in the past for our insatiable appetite to be externally recognised at these ceremonies! This is to be the penultimate awards ceremony of the year with our fifth and final one taking place on 19th November where we are nominated for Best Website at the Graduate Prospects awards. Let's hope we go out in style...!
Our venue for the next two days
It's that time of year again! Last Thursday and Friday the team and I headed down to the Inmarsat Conference Centre in Old Street for for the second ever Squiz and Funnelback European User Summit. This year, was set to be a little bit different as it was spread over two days and I had been asked to give one of the 30min presentations. Thankfully, I had lots to talk about - including our new events calendar.

On arrival we were greeted with pastries and coffee and found it was a great opportunity to network with Squiz's other university clients. The focus of the first day was client stories and it all kicked off with an opening Keynote from Stephen Morgan (Managing Director at Squiz). The first two client stories of the day focussed on Elsevier's new site launch and the corporate setup of the prison service which led them to creating their new intranet. After a short coffee break (which allowed a much needed intake of sugar) it was my turn on the podium...

Me on the podium talking about the
importance of collaboration
As we've been Squiz clients since 2011, my presentation looked at how we rely on them to take on a lot of our development work. I also wanted to give an overview of how best to manage external and internal relationships. To reinforce the former I made reference to this excellent blog post from a few years back. Apparently this prompted a sharp intake of breath from the Squiz staff as they wondered what context I was going to put this in!

I also ensured I had a section on the importance of responsible content which led on to talking about our recent web strategy document and events calendar. Here's my conclusion as Tweeted by Finlay at Squiz:
All in all I thought it went pretty well and the import thing is that I stuck to my allotted time! There also seemed to be a really positive buzz on Twitter. All of the sessions are now online so feel free to check out my performance below:

Squiz Funnelback 2013 European User Summit - University of Bedfordshire from Squiz UK on Vimeo.

The afternoon sessions then continued to contain some very interesting case studies (particularly from our friends and rivals over at Hertfordshire!) and were wrapped up with canapés, drinks and a complimentary bottle of champagne for all presenters (which was a very nice surprise!)

Day two was set to be much more intense as the Squiz web technical consultants took the floor to talk us through some tips, tricks and new developments. The most exciting of these was a move away from Java for the admin interface of Matrix and our CMS now utilising Javascript. We're due this update in December and it's definitely going to improve our user experience. Suffice to say I made copious notes and have compiled a new shopping list of features for our site which we'll get to work on immediately. So, overall two days very well spent!

After these two days of professional development I'm now off to the IDM to begin my diploma in digital marketing. Let's just hope there's room in my head for all of this new information and it doesn't push out vital pin numbers!
First things first. Before I get started on writing about our forthcoming CRM system I'd like to make mention of us making (another) awards shortlist!

This one is at the first ever Prospectus Postgraduate Awards where we are finalists for Best Website. The ceremony itself will take a bit of a different format from what we're used to as it's due to take place on 19th November in Manchester over a lunchtime! We're all excited that we're in the running for another website award, so watch this space for a write up of how we get on...
Anyway, on with the main event! Our new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software...

Our system of choice. We're currently
being trained on their new 'jazz' interface.
As far as marketing in the 21st Century is concerned no big company can be without a system like this! We are currently in the position where we have been relying on stitching together a number of different solutions (some online, some offline) in order to deliver our own CRM. However, soon after I began in this job it was decided that we needed a system which bought all this together in one place and made it more manageable.

And so began the tendering process... As a result of this the provider which we chose to go with was a Canadian company called Azorus. What swung it for them was the fact they offer integration into our SITS database and also have a good portfolio of existing university clients. We'd just have to work on ways to manage the time difference between us and them (and remember the dates of thanksgiving!)

We then needed to define exactly how the system would work. In short, it requires applicants to sign up (either online or via iPads at our open days) to access personalised content on the courses they are interested in (including student blogs and videos). We were very cautious at the planning stage to ensure that they would get some quality content which is also helpful to them (i.e. a calendar of UCAS deadlines etc.)

What is in it for us is that we can then send out targeted communications based on when they signed up (e.g. 'Thanks for coming to our open day' emails) and chart their progress through the application cycle to becoming fully fledged students. The SITS link is vital in this so that they don't continue to get communications from us once they have started university or have removed their applications for any other reason. We'd like to thank Leicester who have given us some great pointers on how they use the system and work with other teams to ensure it's success.

My team have been heavily involved in the implementation of the system which has now been named 'Belong at Bedfordshire' and will offer full support to staff on adding content, the design of the communications and overseeing the quality and production of the media rich content. Also, we're developing a plan for rollout on our website and are now looking into running both prospectus requests and sign ups via our course pages through it. It's exciting times but we need to remember to learn to run before we can walk as a system like this can have so many uses. The plan is that we have the complete system up and running for our community roadshows - the first one of these will be in the Watford Mall W/B 4th November.

Right - that's the introduction! No doubt, I'll be posting again soon on how the launch went. I now need to get back to writing my presentation ready for this Thursday's Squiz and Funnelback User Summit 2013. Knowing I'm going to be presenting in a room full of web professionals is quite a daunting prospect...!
These past few weeks have seen a number of very different initiatives being handled by the team. Getting our teeth into some different things has been great fun and demonstrates the diverse mix of projects we get involved with.

The chandelier in the room we used
for the pitches. Putt is definitely the
most opulent of our campuses!
The first of these was my involvement in the new Prospectus pitches at our Putteridge Bury campus. In the past, this has been handled solely by the Marketing team, with some input from other areas (such as the International Office). However, this time it was felt that to deliver a truly integrated campaign it was important that I had some input with regards to how it would translate online. Obviously, this is something which I have been championing for a while, (the thousands of hits to our website show the importance of campaigns working across all media) and the success of our Clearing campaign shows that this is how we now need to work.

So, I met the team last Monday for a day of design pitches and tea drinking! There were three different agencies pitching for the contract and we were all very impressed with the quality of their work and their research. After a totting up of our scores there was a clear favourite, who have been informed that they will be leading on the production of our 2015/16 suite of publications (no wonder I get confused what year it is!)

Our new 'Creating futures' campaign
- this one stars Jodie who is now
a Production Co-ordinator at ITV
Aside from this we've been working on the final visuals and content for our 'Creating futures' Winter Campaign. This follows on nicely from Clearing but instead of showcasing current students it has a focus on our Alumni with some successful graduates talking about how their time at University helped them to secure their dream jobs.

Our involvement has been to go to their places of work and film interviews with them and to produce a variety of online marketing materials such as Google ads, banners, digital signage and a landing page. As usual, we'll be closely monitoring the statistics to monitor it's success.

One of Sophie's drawings depicting
how university courses are taught!
One really enjoyable project has been constructing the new Bedfordshire Academy website with our Partnerships Office. The idea of this is to promote University from primary school age right up to sixth formers. This gave us the opportunity to make a bespoke website which, although fitting into our brand, also offers something a little bit different. Therefore, we have been working with Sophie Carpenter one of our BA (Hons) Art and Design students who is also an illustrator and she has been doing a great job of making it look fun and appealing to people who wouldn't usually visit a University website. We've also been playing around with her illustrations to create little HTML5 animations! We're very nearly there and are now just waiting for the last bits of content before going live. Watch this space for a link to the finished product.

In other news, I'm just about to begin studying for my Digital Marketing Diploma with the IDM (finding the time to do the work required will be the main challenge!) and I'll also be putting the finishing touches to our new CRM. I know I've promised it for a while but this will definitely be the focus of my next blog post. I just need to ensure it's 'above par' before making it live to the world...
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