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...
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...?!
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