Last week finally saw the end of months of planning, hard work and testing. as we launched our new University wide events calendar. This was proposed a long time ago, but staffing changes and the lengthy sign off process for the brief has meant it's been a bit longer in the making than originally planned!

It all started with a conversation with our events manager who highlighted the need for something much more intuitive than what we already had. I completely agreed and so set to work. Internally, there's a growing understanding that staff need to have more responsibility for their own content, and this was a common theme in every process of the planning.

I began by looking at various examples of online events calendars, both in the HE and FE sectors and beyond, to get an idea of how we would like ours to work. As soon as we had a rough framework I then wrote an extremely detailed brief on the back end functionality and followed this with designs of how we would like it to look. As well as adhering to our brand, one thing that was particularly important was that it should be searchable and filterable - it's a good job we run Funnelback on our site which would be easily be up to the task!

After nearly two years our working relationship with Squiz and Funnelback is now particularly efficient. Hence, we only needed one project briefing meeting before they got up and running with the more technical aspects of the build. This involved weekly burn down reports, regular questions on variances in the functionality and design and finally, a weeks worth of (intensive) testing our end to ensure it was all good to go live.

To briefly summarise, the calendar works like this:
  • A member of staff accesses our online form which they populate with the full event details (with a number of required fields)
  • This then enters workflow so our team can ensure there are no errors in format or content
  • Once it is published it is added to the full events listing (following the Funnelback re indexing)
  • This is filterable by audience, department, category and campus (once applied there is the option to embed calendars for specific audiences on their pages)
  • It also feeds the day's events through to the homepage
  • An automated response is sent to the event originator two weeks before the event occurs
  • Once the event occurs it is then automatically archived
Crucially, this now empowers staff to be owners of their own content. We've also coordinated an internal communications campaign to ensure that all staff are aware of this new product. There's now no excuse as to why events are not well attended - so many different departments run them and once this becomes routine for them I have every confidence we'll be showcasing a very impressive portfolio.

Now that we're live and staff are populating it with content we're looking at some extra features for phase 2. These will include the ability to add key dates, the next event showing on the homepage rather than the events on that day and more details on the events pages themselves.

Upon completion, I was asked to present on this (among other things) at last Friday's Heads of Department meeting. So far, the response has been overwhelmingly positive with staff particularly impressed that they can just fill in an online form to create new events (that one is thanks to the Squiz asset builder!)

See you at Immarsat Conference Centre,
Old Street, London on 24-25 October 2013
A massive thanks for all of the work carried out by Squiz and Funnelback to turn this around whilst broadly adhering to our brief (and for being able to interpret my designs!) I'll be delivering a presentation on the above process and also demoing some of the functionality at the Squiz and Funnelback User Summit 2013 on 24 October which will be entitled 'Super Search'. I'm really looking forward to it as it will be a great chance to highlight our work and learn about the work of others. Maybe I'll see you there?!
Working in the Marketing department is definitely very fast paced and this is what I really enjoy about it. We're allowed the flexibility to try new things (some work, some don't and our constant monitoring of our campaigns/website bear this out). Working like this allows us to keep up with the latest changes in web and we're supported by a healthy budget - all in the name of recruitment and improving the student experience.

Thankfully we're given the resources
for this not to happen!
It's always interesting to me to see how we're perceived in the institution. My opinion is that we have a responsibility to offer the best possible service to our colleagues, and in the last year I've spent a lot of time fostering relationships around campus and giving presentations on our working practices. I've particularly targeted staff who have been quite vocal about our digital/web provision in the past. More often than not they have good reason to be. Only by listening to them, giving them an understanding of what we do and why, can we improve our internal reputation. Sometimes they have some great ideas too!

This week I've been updating our section on our intranet for staff which includes our latest website developments, our strategy and project gantt chart and (of course) this Blog! I really enjoy writing this as it makes me realise what we have achieved and shows colleagues the wide range of projects we get involved in. Complete project transparency...

Can we fix it? Yes we can, (as long
as we know the asset number...!)
Quite often we're at the end of the line when it comes to getting jobs done. Someone has an idea for a project, they talk to various stakeholders, they get a budget approved, and then they come to us to action it! If someone reaches the end of their understanding of how to design or build something then when we get involved... This means we have quite a lot of power because we're relied upon as the 'doers'.

This is not without its own challenges though. Sometimes we get very little time to turn something around, sometimes we get a wooly brief (e.g. 'I want a banner/header image by Thursday!') and sometimes people's lack of technical understanding makes work take a lot longer than it should. Institutionally we do pretty well, with most staff understanding the more technical aspects, and the fact that we're in a more competitive sector has made a number of senior managers up their game, making our life much easier.
There's also increased understanding from above that we are the experts in what we do. This is because we back every decision up with reams of statistics to prove that our contribution works! As we are the 'doers' there's the danger that we're perceived as the people who are responsible for something going wrong or not getting delivered on time. By saying we'll fix something we're then admitting responsibility, which can be a problem. However, rather than pointing the finger we're keen to be the team who will say 'I know that's a problem - we'll fix it!' and often we do...

Our Clearing meetings have shown that senior staff are genuinely appreciative of our work (and the extra hours we've been putting in recently). All this leads to a much happier workforce and much better inter-departmental working.

Now, what do you want fixed...?!
Writing this blog can sometimes be pretty tough (and I don't just mean finding the time to do it!)

Our online dashboard interface (with video!)
Things move very quickly with the web and digital marketing, and this is what I particularly enjoy about the job I do. However, writing about our latest initiatives in such a public forum is something I need to be careful about, in what is becoming an increasingly competitive sector. With that in mind, I wanted to showcase some of the work we've been doing to track our Clearing campaign as it begins to come to an end.

We have been working with Ranjit at Statistics Into Decisions for over a year now and it has been a truly collaborative process. We usually liaise with him when we have any big campaigns to monitor (i.e. our Virtual Open Days) and then he provides daily reports on what is working and how we can better focus our efforts. It's really useful for us to get an 'outsiders' view on things and pull together all of our campaign monitoring in one dashboard. Well, this year for Clearing we're gone one better...

Data for our Bing search campaign.
Bigger bubble = more activity.
Ranjit has built us a bespoke online dashboard based on our campaign activity and requirements - and best of all it contains LIVE data! This makes refining our campaigns much easier as it's all comparable and in one place. We also have the ability to drill down and exclude areas of activity which are dwarfing others (Google - I mean you!)

Two other great features are the daily videos and the competitor analysis (I'm keeping quiet on the latter of these!) All of this has been built to be iPad compatible and is really useful when demonstrating the impact of what is and isn't working to our Vice Chancellor.

This information has helped us change and mold our campaign as we go along and I'm very pleased we had the foresight to write this extra spend into our campaign plan at the beginning! Some of the extra activity we have added includes many revisions to our AdWords campaign (which has been much more competitive than ever), a little Facebook new starters posting and a series of videos on tips for students applying through Clearing (see below).



We'll definitely be taking this new initiative further for all future campaigns to ensure that we are as informed and targeted as possible. Now back to checking more stats to see how we can push the last of our remaining courses...!
Here we go again! Finally, our many months of hard work has been launched in the form of our Clearing campaign. This has been the ultimate team effort and has comprised not just getting our website up and primed but planning and implementing a full digital marketing strategy as well.

This year we have a truly integrated campaign with an increased amount of activity and also some really exciting new initiatives:

A whole new way for us to spend
our online marketing budget!
The first of these is Twitter advertising, which has been available in the United States for a while but is only just being rolled out over here. Signing up with them has meant we've had our account verified (the little blue tick next to our logo) and can pin a chosen Tweet to the top of our timeline. The main focus though is promoted Tweets where we can target key messages to people Tweeting specific keywords (e.g. 'clearing' or 'results'). We can also target chosen @ handles to grow our followers.

We are one of a handful of universities experimenting with this and so far we're really liking the results we're getting and how easy it is to administer. Look out for us invading your timeline soon!

We're also running with Video on Demand advertising for the first time ever. You can see us on ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 with a remixed version of our cinema advert. There's also a number of video interviews with the students who feature in our print campaign (expertly edited by Graeme):


Alongside all of this, we have text messages going out to unplaced applicants via Weve, radio adverts (on Heart FM, Choice FM and Capital FM), Facebook promoted posts and adverts on various higher education websites. We're also running with our usual aggressive Google AdWords campaign!

While all this is running and being optimised we'll be working closely with our old friends at Statistics Into Decisions to monitor all activity around the campaign. This year they've built us a live (iPad compatible) online dashboard so our VC can keep up with how we're doing.

So basically, log on anywhere online in the next few weeks and you'll see us! I'll be writing another blog post soon on how it's all been going for us...

Lauren (in a previous life) helping us
out as an extra in our cinema advert
Finally, I'm really pleased to say that we now have a full compliment of team members so I've been busy with inductions. Angela Soane is our new Web Content Officer and she has already set to work on updating our research section and will definitely be a big asset to the team.

We've also welcomed Lauren Hague who has moved over from the Marketing team to fill the role of Digital Marketing Officer. She's straight in the deep end with Clearing but has the advantage that she's been with the University since 2011, so should understand what she's getting herself into!
This blog is quickly becoming just a list of awards ceremonies we're either shortlisted for or have attended! Therefore, I'm going to make the first part of this post as brief as possible before moving on to write about some of the work we've been doing...

We found out on Friday that we have been shortlisted in two categories of the CIPR PRide Awards 2013 (for 'Best Use of Social Media' and 'Best Use of Digital'). Obviously, we're very excited about this so roll on the 1st November 2013 at Sopwell house in (conveniently local) St. Albans! Also, a big shout out to our colleagues in the marketing team who are up for 'Best External Publication'.

Now to write about the work we've been doing over the last few weeks - apologies if it's all a bit brief as each one could easily warrant a blog post of their own!

Staff Conference presentation - 8th July 2013

Early this month I submitted a proposal to present at the annual University staff conference. The theme of the conference was 'The Student Experience' and I thought this would be a great opportunity to educate staff on our use of social media. I was particularly encouraged that 85 people signed up to attend my 45min session meaning that people internally are waking up to the importance of social media. It all went pretty well and there were some great questions at the end. As always, I was preaching to the converted but the fact this number is growing can only be a good thing!

Believe it or not, this is one of Luton's
more aesthetically pleasing buildings
aside for the University's ones of course!

Office move - 10th July 2013 

We're now settled into our new office (necessitated by the building of a new Library) and it's like we've always been here. Despite being open plan and closely resembling a call centre it's been all good and a very easy transition. The air-con has been particularly welcome in the hot weather we've been having!   

This move was made much easier by us in the Digital team just picking up our iMacs or MacBook Air and then wandering across the road. The same is not true of some colleagues who seem wedded to paper and files in this now digital age - all of our files are stored in Dropbox! It's a good job the office is also much more spacious, to accommodate the new additions to our team...

Team interviews - 22nd & 24th July 2013

We've recently advertised for two roles to complete the team. A Digital Marketing Officer to replace Hannah and a Web Content Officer. I'm now in a position where I feel I've interviewed the entire office at some point or another but was particularly looking forward to these as we had two strong fields. I'm pleased to say that we've managed to recruit for both roles and one of them may be familiar to regular readers of this blog (introductions later). Both were tough decisions but we're confident we chose correctly.  They are due to start in time for Clearing so they'll be straight in the deep end no doubt...

Blogs and Graduations - W/B 22nd July 2013

Finally, just a quick note that our blogs (including this one!) have now been plugged into our website search. We're really pleased with this development (thanks Funnelback) and by looking at the analytics it's clearing had an affect on our viewing figures as well. Now to further educate our authors on correctly tagging up their content!

Olympian Greg Rutherford at our
Bedford graduation ceremony.
We also made a big step this week by live streaming all of our graduations. This proved a big hit and we could watch from our desks the likes of Greg Rutherford, Kriss Akabusi, Darren Gough and Kevin Whately receive their honorary doctorates. It looked pretty hot in the marquee at our first ever Putteridge Bury graduation!

That's all from me for the time being. My next few posts will focus on the rollout of our new CRM which has been taking up a lot of our time. Also, we're frantically putting the finishing touches to our online Clearing campaign which is more detailed than ever before.
The big awards event for anyone working in higher education marketing are the Heist awards. This year the Renaissance hotel in Manchester was to play host to these on 11th July. We were extremely chuffed to be shortlisted in two categories: 'Best Website' and 'Best use of Digital/Social Media'. Whilst our colleagues in the Marketing team were shortlisted for 'Best Postgraduate Prospectus' and Learning Resources for 'Best Internal Communications Campaign'.

After a busy morning finalising the visuals for our clearing campaign (more on that in another post) off we trekked to Manchester in search of fortune and glory... We arrived in plenty of time and were in great spirits thanks in part to the wonderful weather. After checking into our hotel and enjoying a pre-awards drink, off we walked past the Arndale Centre (reminding us of Luton!) to the venue.

The theme of this year's ceremony was 'A Night at the Movies' meaning that there were lots of clapperboards and cardboard cutouts of film stars everywhere - Darth Vadar being a particular favourite of the group! We took our seats, in an admittedly very crowded room, to enjoy a great three course meal (the dessert was sickly to the extreme - even the spoon was chocolate!) Then it was time for the awards to begin and to welcome our celebrity host Meera Syal...

Team 'University of Bedfordshire'
proudly displaying our awards
The Marketing team were up fifth for 'Best Postgraduate Prospectus' in a particularly competitive category of nine nominees. Unfortunately for them they weren't selected for a prize on this occasion but this did not dampen their spirits. It also gave them that added impetus to come back bigger and better next year.

The next category we were up for was 'Best use of Digital/Social Media' where we had entered our already award winning Digital Clearing Campaign from 2012. This was a massive category of fourteen nominees and again we came away empty handed - it was all down the the final two categories...

The tenth category was the big one for us: 'Best Website' this being a particularly big accolade as there isn't a university in the land/world without one! There was to be no bronze in this category, instead just two highly commended. As these were announced I was getting more and more nervous, and then it happened:

Needless to say I was over the moon punching the air as we skipped up to the stage! This is a truly remarkable achievement at such an event as this and will definitely help give us the collateral we need internally to reassure people we are definitely delivering cutting edge work. That was me smiling for the rest of the evening!

Winners! I didn't let our award out of
my sight for the next 48 hours...!
Up twelfth were Learning Resources who received a very impressive bronze award in the 'Best Internal Communications Campaign' category for their promotion of Discover. This was again, much deserved and topped off what was already a very enjoyable night.

The next morning we surfaced for breakfast in a continuation of our chirpy mood (despite the lack of sleep). We were really pleased to find that The Complete University guide had written an article on our successes from the night before. They summed up our website as 'An intelligent use of analytics contributed to a well presented and engaging site with good functionality giving a good sense of the university'.  A long journey home after very little sleep has never felt such plain sailing. Check out the short video of our great night out below:

The main campus at the University of Bath
Woah... I am tired... I just got back from a return visit to the Institutional Web Managers Workshop which this year was held in the city of Bath. The theme of the conference was 'Managing Change' and with the shake up introduced to the sector in the form of tuition fees, as well as this possibly being the last IWMW (due to funding cuts),  it was extremely apt. Each plenary session had clear undertones of how things are now very different for staff in higher education, there is no longer a guarantee of a job for life and return on investment is more important than ever.

These conferences are unique in that they have good representation from the vast majority of UK web teams and have a great mix of sharing best practice, learning new things and therapy sessions! The parts I particularly enjoyed was the opportunity to speak to other universities about what is working for them at the moment. This happened in two sessions which focused on social media and analytics and how they are being used. I was really pleased to come away feeling what we are doing is up there with the best and that the effort we're putting into tracking all of our campaigns is really paying off. This was also evident during one of the lectures delivered by our friend Ranjit from SID. He went to great lengths to showcase to everyone all the work done by us during clearing last year and the benefits it had on recruitment.

Taking a break on campus between lectures
Two talks which had a real effect on me were those delivered by Paul Boag from Headscape and Neil Denny from allLD. They benefited from having great presentation skills and from not being afraid to tell it like it is. I agreed with the vast majority of Paul's talk which basically stated that instead of feeling hard done-by it's up to us to make a change to the way we're perceived professionally. Only by being proactive, outspoken and full of ideas will we be respected and given the resources we need to innovate. It also ended with a great quote from Grace Hooper that 'It's Easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission', so instead of acting like victims we just need to take the bull by the horns (something I wholeheartedly agree with!)

The Roman baths in the early evening
No trip to Bath would be complete without a visit to the Roman baths themselves and we were fortunate enough to have the place to ourselves on the second evening's drinks reception. It was truly breathtaking and highly recommended to anyone who is in the area. We also had a chance to catch up with our good friends at Squiz and Funnelback who did a great job of keeping us entertained as well as discussing some of the big projects we have on the go at the moment - it's great to see them expanding yet further in HE and they are busier than ever before.

Finally, there was a good session on working with developers and the benefits of having an in house team or outsourcing, the usual mentions of responsive web design and lots of thinly veiled recommendations on the need for Agile project management. No doubt my favourite quote cited in a presentation was one from Winston Churchill: 'Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm'. A great message and hopefully one that is taken on board by the organisers so they can continue to keep this event going into the future...
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