Ideas, insights and inspirations.

The Greeks called it their Muse. The Romans called it the Ingenium (the genius). I call it whatever that magic is that gets some meaningful words onto the page. Inspiration. I recently heard a great re-air of a RadioLab interview with Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love. In it, she tells the story of poet Robert Frost working on a particularly lengthy and draining piece for weeks and weeks and weeks. He finally finished the thing, completely dissatisfied, even though he’d put so much effort into it. Sigh. After all that. Nevertheless, Frost woke up the next morning, and sat down to write…  “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” (Arguably one of the most well-known poems of the 20th century… No joke, it was last night’s Final Jeopardy! question.) It was as if Frost was being rewarded for his hard work, Gilbert says. Sometimes that’s how the creative process works. Sometimes it really does feel like 99 percent … Continue reading

When launching a new marketing campaign, especially in Higher Education, tracking code and tag placement on websites, landing pages, blogs, emails and all pieces of the campaign are critical to evaluating campaign effectiveness and success. The process to set up and test this can be very time consuming and challenging. Coordination with the client marketing and IT departments, any third-party websites or services for installation, testing and corrections can easily result in delays to the campaign launch due to the complexity. Many technology vendors have come up with solutions to minimize/eliminate this problem. They utilize code snippets that enables users to make changes to data collection code remotely through a simple admin interface. These solutions were available at a cost and eCommerce sites were their main users. Now, with no-cost availability of tools like Google Tag Manager (GTM), Digital Marketers for Higher Education can take advantage of this opportunity. Any website that is already using Google Analytics (GA) can easily … Continue reading

When I was a child, I was fascinated by the PBS show The Woodwright’s Shop. If you haven’t seen the show, the host Roy Underhill makes amazing projects out of wood using manual hand tools. A significant portion of the show featured Mr. Underhill crafting his own tool to aid him in upcoming projects. For some reason, the tool making was my favorite part of the show. As a front end developer I have used plenty of boilerplates and frameworks in my work. If you have ever used one you know that they come with advantages and disadvantages.  Recently, I was inspired to build my own toolkit to replace *off the shelf* web boilerplates. The results are a better understanding of the code, and ultimately, a cleaner finished product. The Woodwright’s Shop was full of wonderful tools, both custom-made and hand-me-downs. The shop’s collection could not be purchased at the local Home Depot. it was collected and crafted over time … Continue reading

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The statistics are rather unsettling. The National Cancer Institute estimates that 1,658,370 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States in 2015 and 589,430 people will die from the disease. I wrote about my own cancer scare years ago for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and I always thought I could only fight cancer on a personal level. I eat veggies, stay active, slather on sunscreen, get a mammogram and donate money. What else can one person do? That all changed when I was asked to work on the website redesign for the Oncology Nursing Certification Corporation (ONCC). Now I had a chance to use my writing talents to help nurses who care for cancer patients, which in turn, helps those battling this disease. At Elliance, a website redesign doesn’t just mean put a few pretty pictures into a new layout. We ask questions. We think. We ask more questions. Then, we combine what we’ve discovered about the client … Continue reading

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In light of my yellow Elliance copywriter’s desk making its first journey around the shy Pittsburgh sun, I got to thinking about what I’d learned about higher education marketing in the last year, and if there was anything the handful of schools I’ve worked with had in common. It seems to all boil down to one thing: There are awesome people doing awesome things everywhere. Pardon my vagueness. There are about 2,000 four-year institutions in the United States, and each is known for different things — some more than others. But the one thing that I’ve found, no matter where U.S. News and World Report ranks them, is that 100 percent of these schools have staff, faculty and students putting their hearts into their work. I truly believe that there is magic that happens when passionate people work together. From the hundreds of thousands of service hours completed every year by a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts that has … Continue reading

We recently met around the conference table at Elliance to discuss the pros/cons of pursuing an RFP opportunity —  a major state research university wanting to sharpen its brand focus and tell a better capital campaign story in order to raise a nice round $1 billion dollars. Needless to say, with that kind of money on the table, stakes are high — for the customer, of course, but also for Elliance. Although the four senior people around the table could claim a combined 70-plus years of higher education marketing and higher education branding experience, none of us had ever worked on a capital campaign of this magnitude. The RFP spelled it out clearly: “significant demonstrable, direct work experience and expertise in the field of fund raising consulting and projects related to fund raising for institutions of higher education is essential.” My colleagues read this as a well-manned checkpoint and major obstacle. Their body language suggested skepticism and discouragement. I leaned … Continue reading

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Most people draw a clear line between conventional marketing of products and services, and social marketing, which broadly defined applies marketing principles to change human behavior in order to improve health or benefit society. But what happens when you bring a social issue forward that almost nobody knows even exists — one that goes to the very heart of an American ideal as old as the Declaration of Independence. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. True in countless respects, but not when it comes to gauging a child’s future academic success. Some children simply are born “gifted” or “talented” — and that wealth of talent spreads equally across all segments of the American population, regardless of race, religion, geography or family income. Researchers count about 3.4 million academically gifted American school children in grades K-12 who happen also to be poor. Here is where the story gets interesting. Year after year, grade after … Continue reading

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While your faculty and students may have taken the summer off from their college assignments, you know that the work of higher education brand building never ends.  Today, and every day, your college brand continues to do its daily work — on your website, social sites and across the continuum of digital and human conversation. As new and returning students unpack in residence halls and faculty reclaim their offices, it’s a good time of the year to ask: What can we do to renew our college brand for the 2014-2015 academic year? We offer five steps forward: 1. Begin investing in first impressions. That could mean redesigning an initial search mailing aimed at rising high school juniors, or rethinking training for new and returning student tour guides. First brand impressions hold great potential — but can also be overlooked. Given the number of campus visits that students (and parents) make, it’s worth preparing your student guides. Can they really translate … Continue reading

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Over the past year, we’ve made several existing website designs responsive, including Shady Lane School, First Commonwealth, and CMU Today. As you can see from these examples, responsive web design (RWD) helps modernize an existing design while it helps you reach a mobile audience. It removes the burden of having to do new IA and designs for those sites. To complete a responsive transformation, there are a lot of challenges you have to work through from navigation to site performance. Here are a few things to consider before you make your existing site responsive. Navigation Most large sites, especially complex higher education websites, have a lot of content. This leads to large navigations with multiple levels and different placements – from top navigation to in page sub navigation. This is the most complex problem you encounter when making your site responsive. Transforming the navigation, which was designed to be used on a desktop, into something that can be navigated on mobile takes … Continue reading

1. 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. (Sources: 3M Corporation and Zabisco) 2. Viewers spend 100% more time on pages with videos on them. (Source: MarketingSherpa)   3. Pinterest generated more referral traffic for businesses than Google+, YouTube, and LinkedIn combined. (Source: PriceGrabber) 4. Viewers are 85% more likely to purchase a product after watching a product video. (Source: Internet Retailer) 5. 46.1% of people say a website’s design is the number one criterion for discerning the credibility of the company. Find more great arguments for visual content at HubSpot.