Link to the keynote speaker's video

I've had a couple of requests for a link to the version of the video Vinay used for his keynote address. Here is the link he provided to me prior to the conference.

Thanks Vinay!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cL9Wu2kWwSY

From Concept to Production: additional resources as promised

Thanks to everyone who attended my session yesterday morning. I appreciated your great questions and, as promised, wanted to provide a link to a site that holds additional materials I made reference to during the presentaiton.

The Web Communications site at the University of Missouri has a number of great tools and resources we openly share with our campus Web Developers and you're more than welcome to use them too. In addition, we produce a practitioners blog called Interface that may provide additional information you can find useful.

If there's additional information I mentioned that may not be in one of these places, please let me know and I'll add it.

Hope you enjoy the rest of your conference experience!

Get your head in the game

If you're stuck in an airport on your way to Seattle or if you have some free time in your hotel room, here's some fun YouTube homework to prep you for the conference and provide a framework for our discussions.

Since most of you work at schools, colleges, or universities, be assured that these videos are Ph.D. approved. They're from the collection of Kansas State's Michael Wesch, a Cultural Anthropology professor whose YouTube videos have more than 11 million views.

As he says in one video, "who knew anthropology could be so much fun?"

The Machine is Us/ing Us
An addictive introduction to user-generated content and Web 2.0. You can’t watch just once!

A Vision of Students Today
A video focusing on "the most important characteristics of students today--how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime."

An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube
A presentation Wesch gave at the Library of Congress in June 2008. Don't be scared by its 55-minute run time; it's interesting ... really.

Networks: It's the People

Over at Alumni Futures, Andy Shaindlin has made a great point about social networks and why we (and alumni, and students, and everyone else) use them - it's about the other people we find there and our interactions with them.

"Networking features can be useful; but people don't want software features — they want other people."

See his post, "Why Walled Gardens Fail: People Matter, Software Doesn't" and find a link to Karine Joly's article "It's the Community, Stupid!" all at http://www.alumnifutures.com.

What do you think? Post a comment here or on Andy's blog with your thoughts.

Sharing war stories

In preparing for my three "Online Strategies" sessions, I’ve had the chance to chat with online fundraisers on five campuses, east, west, and points in between. What a delight!

I look forward to sharing what I learned, things like:

• University of Washington has worked with 110 campus units to "skin" online giving pages with the unit's own branding (an example). The underlying technology is managed by the university's development office. Dartmouth also offers customized branding options to units on campus.
• Dartmouth is considering an e-campaign to promote major campaign giving opportunities, which are cataloged in a searchable "Gift Browser" the college launched last year.
• Ohio State, where the online giving program grew by 45 percent between 2006 and 2007, added a search function to its online giving site in March. Donors can now make contributions to more than 3,000 funds. Previously, OSU offered only the primary dean's discretionary funds as online giving options.
• The University of Iowa's Flood Relief Fund received contributions from 2,605 donors this summer, and 82 percent of those contributors made their gifts online. Online gifts comprised about half of the total dollars raised for the flood fund.
• Dartmouth recently raised its maximum for online gifts to $100,000, after a donor’s attempted to make a $72,000 gift and hit the college’s $50,000 ceiling.
• Cal-Berkeley recently redesigned its giving site to reflect the branding of its separate campaign site. The new giving site focuses exclusively on transactions, rather than making the case for private support because at that point, people "have already been sold on the need." The folks at Berkeley based their assumptions for the site on 22 interviews (90 minutes each!) with donors.

One of the best parts of any conference is learning from other schools. Please come prepared to talk with us and learn from one another. See you next week!

You've Got a Rep to Maintain

Like it or not, people are probably posting things about your institution on the internet. Maybe even right now. While you're reading this. Gasp!

But the real issue is: do you know what they are saying? And where they are saying it?

You can no longer turn a blind eye and disregard anything happening "out there" (where "out there" means "anything happening on the web"). The fact is, learning what others have to say - both good and bad - can be very valuable to you and to your institution. In order to keep up with the latest buzz, you need to be an active community member and monitor your online reputation.

There are several tools available to help you monitor these types of issues. First, the Google Alert. Set up your search criteria, and Google will automatically send you an email with new links to news items, blogs and videos that include that text. A site like Surchur allows you to search multiple online services at once, and even subscribe to an RSS feed of your exact search. Even more sophisticated solutions like Trackur are paid services that specialize in monitoring your brand.

Don't forget - being a "digital native" is yet another way for you to get involved. Don't be a lurker. Create a Facebook profile and use it. Read blogs and post comments. Be an active member of the online community. It makes your interactions there much more authentic. It also gives you the experience and the knowhow for monitoring your online reputation in those spaces.

When policies hurt instead of help

Policy is one of those nasty little words no one likes to bring up in conversations. I, for one, appreciate good, well-thought, solid policies that provide the appropriate parameters for us to do our work well. It's been my experience that most of the people we work with don't go out of their way to do wrong things or a bad job. The fact is, most of them were never told or shown how to do things the right way.

I'm sure you've all heard the line "ignorance of the law is no excuse." While very true, it also occurs to me that if we made our policies more readable and understandable, people would actually read them and understand them. Sounds simple, doesn't it? I wish it were so. In chatting with a lot of people from many areas of our institution, most recently development staff, some of the biggest barriers in moving ahead with online tools in fundraising is outdated and misinterpreted policy. Policies that were written and adopted before the Internet existed. Certainly policies that never anticipated things like social media or e-solicitations. Even procurement policies that block our ability to use University purchasing cards to pay for inexpensive software because it means we have to act as an agent of the institution in order to agree to the terms of use.

Policies can be very frustrating for people on all sides who are trying their best to move our institutions forward. During our time together in Seattle, I'm hoping we'll be able to chat more about this topic during one of our breakfast table top discussions. I'd like to know if any of you have successfully changed policies to more openly include use of new media in your work.

Want to suggest other topics for discussion? You can comment here or fill out a card during the first morning of the conference. See you soon!

Is it Relevant?

Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

As it turns out, this is an important principle of making good decisions about technology.

You may have a student, a volunteer, an alumna or a fellow staff member suggesting that you implement a new tool or technology for your organization. That’s great! But now it’s your job to think about how relevant that tool actually is, who will use it, and why it helps your organization.

Important things to consider:

• Who will use it? How will they find out about it?
• What’s driving the interaction? Why would anyone be motivated to use it?
• Is there an oversight plan in place? Who will administer it?
• How do you define success, and how do you measure it?
• Why is this tool useful?

These are good questions to ask yourself. Feel free to turn those questions on the person making the suggestion too; if there are no good answers, maybe the suggestion is a solution in search of a problem.

College Students and Social Media

eMarketer offered some interesting stats last month on college students' use of social media. Reporting on an Educause survey, they said the number of college students who use social networks every day nearly doubled during the past two years, up from 33 to 59 percent.

And they shared some interesting stats from a Youth Trends survey about how students use those sites. No surprise -- catching up with friends and family topped the list for both men and women.

Keeping Up With Web Trends

One of the questions I hear over and over again when I give talks or meet new colleagues is, "How do you keep up with this stuff?"

In this case, "stuff" is web trends, new tools and technologies, and what's hot and what's not online.

The truth is that keeping up it isn't easy. It takes work. But it isn't as daunting as it may seem. It just takes some time and a willingness to experiment. Lori's Top Web Rule #7, "Make time for learning new things in your work week" is an important part of keeping up to date.

Read, Read, Read
Find blogs and websites that feature posts about the type of content you're researching. Subscribe to their RSS feeds and read the latest as soon as it is posted. Make use of Google searches and articles to find what the experts are saying about new tools. Sites like Mashable are a good place to start.

Try It
When you read about a new tool that interests you, visit their website and learn more about it. Does it seem like it might be useful? Take the plunge and create an account. There's no better way to learn how something works than by just trying it out.

Innovate
Think creatively about how new online tools could be useful for you or your organization. Don't be constrained by what the tool "should" be used for - innovate other ways to put it to good use.

Make Your Own Decisions
In the end, trust your gut. Does the tool seem difficult to use? Is the interface poor? Is it buggy? If you think so, chances are others think so as well.

Repeat
New tools are always coming. Don't rest on your laurels! Keep reading, evaluating and experimenting so you can make informed decisions about these tools and speak intelligently about developing technologies.