Presenting new website and engaging faculty interest

[Melissa Y. Schultz]

I'm facing the task of presenting our soon-to-be-launched new website (we're behind by a good 10 years) at an upcoming faculty meeting. Our new system involves installing a CMS, tightening our branding, updating our analytics package and email marketing services, and handing over the task of editing and updating to the departments.

The campus community has been seeing/hearing updates about the project from our VP of Marketing and PR for a year now. My boss is hoping I be able to make a dent in the faculty's disinterest. So far, the new duties of content responsibility have not been well received. Most departments have assigned the role of content editor to their administrative coordinators. Furthermore, the content we've been receiving for the new site is verbatim out of our course catalog or the same bla-bla-bla that it was 2, 4, 6, or 10 years ago.

Any ideas on getting them to understanding the importance of this project and revving up their interest and passion for their departmental web content?

[Charlie Triplett]

Are you at a research institution?

[Melissa Y. Schultz]

Small liberal arts institution of about 1800 students.

[Charlie Triplett]

Every institution may be different, but here's what worked here within the MU College of Engineering (about 2000 students and 100+ faculty).

I am technically the developer solely for the main college site, but because of the poor state of our 7 departments, I wanted to bring them into the site for tons of reasons (marketing, consistent updates, and usability).

But the problem is this — people don't care about something they a) don't use and b) don't think is broken. Faculty typically fall into that category.

They don't use their own department site because... why would they? They're busy being the department. Out of sight, out of mind. When they do look at it, it has the course information blah blah blah they wrote a decade ago, and that's pretty good stuff... right? Their title is correct, that's what's important... end of story. Unless there's a challenge to that status quo, who cares?

Here at MU, our central WebCom office brings outside experts from industry to talk about usability, writing for the web, etc. If it comes from someone outside the politics of the institution, people are more likely to buy in. Suddenly the status quo changes because someone from the outside world came and told them so. That can excite some people a lot more than you telling them.

For me, it started with one department wanting to come on board. I did a ton of work bringing their site in, getting it right (as possible) the first time, and making dead sure the following was understood: "Yes, you can edit your site, but I retain the right to meddle in it for your own good."

Once one site is in, is fantastic, and is noticeably different, others will start to feel "competitive" and you'll gain momentum. It's the "Oooh, I want that too... how do I get that for my department?"

I only have one hold-out department now (Computer Science- go figure) with a horrendous site. They may never come into the CMS, but hey, you can't win 'em all.

The whole process took 1.5 years, and everyone came out friends (except for a few faculty here and there that lost their pet website).

As for the update duties falling on the admins— you're gonna have a hard time getting around that. Everyone will be quick to dump more load on the admin. It's the nature of faculty. You've just gotta be sure the admins know you're in their corner. You also have to be sure the admin has a "backbone" to say "No, I can't add this link on the home page." either through sheer personality or policy.

[Peter Mentzer]

We had some success by putting together a Word Doc with sample recommended structure for a departmental site. It wasn't required that they match it entirely. It was more a recommendation. Then all they had to do was fill in the blanks "About the Department", "Faculty Bios", etc. in Word, which they're comfortable with. Once the blanks are filled in, it's fairly trivial to have the dept. admin enter it into the CMS and format it.

I also agree with Charlie that if you can team up with one department to make their pages really nice, you can show it to others, and they get excited/competitive in a good way.

[Charlie Triplett]

Hey Peter- can you tell more about your Word Doc? I've tried that with limited success. I always seem to get it back incomplete— like I'm going be able to fill in the blanks about a nanotech research facility...

[Peter Mentzer]

What worked for me was to collaborate with the Dean's Assistants on the project. That way, the Dean's Assistants were the ones working with the individual departments to enforce timeline, sell the importance of it, and do "version management" to make sure everything was complete and ready to web-ize. At our school, that meant getting only three people to accept the importance of it. Then those three in turn work with their departments to get it done. Since the academic departments already have a strong working relationship with their Dean's Assistants, everything went smoothly. It didn't happen overnight, though. I think it took about a year before all departments had completed their responsibilities.