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Increasing the Marketing Power of Higher Education Websites

Do you rely on FAQ pages on your website to answer the most "frequently asked questions" about your university or an office within it?

And if you do, are these really, truly the most frequently asked questions?

And if the first questions people see on an FAQ page really are asked frequently, why are those not prominent in the navigation? A true FAQ is a "top task" that deserves a prominent place in the navigation scheme of your site.

When I review websites, two FAQS that often appear at the top of an admissions FAQ page tell me that people are not approaching this from a marketing perspective: "When were you founded?" and "What is your mission?" are questions that I'd bet real money are seldom heard by admissions reps at recruitment events.

Avoid "lucky bag" Solutions

Yesterday my Customer Carewords partners Gerry McGovern and Gord Hopkins presented a webinar on "Web Customer Support Best Practice." That's when I heard Gerry use a phrase that was new to me, "lucky bag," as an apt description of a person's probability of finding the FAQ item of interest when they arrive at most FAQ pages.

Rather than really answering frequent questions, most FAQ pages reflect internal political decisions similar to those that create "Quick Links" or are used as another form of public relations to present what an organization would like people to read about itself. Even when that's not the case, FAQs often grow in length in an unrealistic attempt to include far too many questions that might be asked sometime by somebody, regardless of frequency.

Best to Dump FAQ Pages

In response to a question at the end of the webinar, Gord gave the answer that fits most often: "It is usually better to dump them" than to keep FAQs on a site and risk frustrating visitors who will not find what they need to find on the site.

If you truly know that something is frequently asked about, consider it a top task and change your navigation to reflect the importance it has. The marketing power of your website will improve as a results.

Download the Webinar

If you missed the webinar, you can download the slides and a recording of the wise words at http://www.customercarewords.com/webinar-previous.html

Customer Carewords and Higher Education Marketing: Task Completion = Marketing Success

Just back on Wednesday from two days in Dublin with Gerry McGovern and Customer Carewords partners from Canada, Norway, Holland, Sweden, Ireland, the U.S. and the U.K.

Online communications are fine, but it is always a special pleasure to meet old and new colleagues in person, share Carewords experiences, and learn how to better serve our clients over the next 12 months.

For Bob Johnson Consulting, this was the busiest Carewords year since the partners first met in 2007, with Customer Centric Index (CCI) surveys completed for American University - Cairo, Ball State University, Bemidji State University, Champlain College, East Stroudsburg University, Rider University, and Susquehanna University.

Here are a few points about creating and managing websites with high marketing impact that we reviewed in Dublin:

• Most important: website management is about managing tasks, not content. To do that well, managers must first be sure they know the tasks that people want to complete on their website. Helping people complete tasks should be the driving force behind initial site design and ongoing site management.
• In Carewords surveys in any type of organization (government, private firm, higher education) it is rare for people to complain about the "visual appeal" of the website. In almost every case, the primary complaint is about "confusing menus and links" that prevent task completion.
• It is impossible to create good navigation without knowing the tasks that bring people to the website. It is impossible to know those tasks without asking web visitors what they are. Survey first, design second.
• A CMS is a mixed blessing as it often leads to content proliferation without regard to whether or not the content helps people complete tasks. Too much content is dangerous to effective navigation and search. Content creators should ask themselves a simple question: what task am I helping people complete by creating this content?
• Much content is created but little content is ever reviewed and removed. To start, use Google Analytics or a similar program to identify pages on a website that are seldom if ever visted. Why are they still on the website?

Higher Education Successes

The experience of Carewords partners over the past year makes us optimistic that web management is moving in the right direction. Consider these higher education examples:

• Gerry was "astonished" at the 90 percent positive rating future students and parents gave to the Susquehanna University website this year.
• The University of Manitoba highlights key tasks directly under the primary audience headings on the home page. Alumni, for instance, can get to "transcripts" in one click from the home page.
• The University of Oslo puts 3 primary student life tasks in a "can't miss" spot at the top of the first Student Life page. Everything else is on another page.

In the new year we'll focus even more on identifying priority tasks and improving task completion rates that will make websites friendlier places for the people who use them.

Brand Reputation and Website Experience

Brand reputation depends in no small part on the experience people have on an organization's website. People who can't easily complete the tasks they wish to complete on your site will not hold your brand in high esteem no matter the tagline used or the smiling students pictured or the video success stories told.

CCI Results at 10 Colleges and Universities

Overall CCI Results at 10 colleges and universities are reviewed in my presentation "Rating Higher Education Websites: The Student Experience" from  the J.Boye conference last November in Denmark that's available on SlideShare.

A CCI survey can help you fine tune your website. Results are usually available about 2 weeks after survey invitations are sent. Contact me at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com   

Writing Right for the Web: Carewords Quotes on Font Size and Content Density

We added an option for an open-ended question to Customer Centric Index (CCI) surveys about 9 months ago. That feature has been far more popular than anticipated. At least 50 percent and sometimes over 70 percent of the survey respondents answer this question:

• "If you could change one thing about our website, what would you change and why would you change it?"

And so hundreds of visitors to higher education websites are adding comments that expand on the regular survey statisitics. These web visitors come from a variety of audiences: alumni, future students, current students, faculty and staff, and parents. Whatever the background, their recommendations are remarkably similar.

Dense Blocks of Text Drive People Away

When people first come to a web page, they scan quickly in search of content that interests them. Dense blocks of text make that difficult, often impossible, to do.

You can't force people to read.

Every page on your website... every page... should include subheads and bullet points that quickly communicate the key points of the page in 5-seconds or less. Keep paragraphs to no more than 5 or 6 lines of text. Keep most sentences as simple as possible. Hint: If you have to use semi-colons, your sentence is getting too long.

The first paragraph on a page is an especially bad place to "go long" on content presentation.

In their own words, here are responses from some of our CCI survey takers:

• "Simplify the page content, because I'm coming to learn something in particular, rather than to read a book, per se. I like books, just not on web sites."
• "Easier to read with less paragraphs and more bullets."
• "Some of the pages have too many words on them."
• "There is too much plain text on the home page. It would be better to give brief explanations and have links for further information."

Font Size: Don't Make Them Squint... Give Visitors Control

This might seem really basic but many websites need to pay more attention to the size of the font  used to present content in the center of the page. Of course, different people can reasonably prefer different font sizes. One solution: an easy-to-see tool that lets visitors increase or decrease the font size on whatever page they are reading.

• "Have bigger print, because the print is a little too small right now. It is harder to read with small print."
• "I would make the font size a little bigger because my friends and I have to look close on the screen."
• "Some of the font is too small and should be enlarged."

Especially for Mobile Websites

Everything here about content density and font size is even more important on mobile-friendly websites that people will access from small screens on their smartphones.

That's all for now.

A Note for May, 2011: I'll be doing a presentation complete with screen shots on the Susquehanna website story at the J.BoyePhiladelphia2011 conference, May 3-5.

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Susquehanna University: Visitors Report Very High 90% Satisfaction Level

Websites win awards for different reasons, but seldom for what the people who actually use a website think of their experience with it.

Over the past two years, Customer Carewords partners have completed CCI (Customer Centric Index) surveys at 18 colleges and universities. We've asked future students, current students, faculty and staff, alumni, and parents to tell us the top 3 web characteristics (from a list of 13 positive and 13 negative possibilities) that best represent their experience at the website.

There's a pattern to the results. External users are almost always more satisfied than internal users. And "menus and links" and the "search" function are usually the areas of most dissatisfaction. Relatively few people select the "visual appeal" of a site, but when they do, most are positive about it.

90% Postive Rating from Parents and Future Students

Last week we completed a CCI survey of parents and possible future students at Susquehanna University. The results, compared to other CCI surveys, were indeed amazing. Parents (114 responses) and future students (182 responses) picked one of the 13 positive web elements 90 percent of the time. Susquehanna received the highest ratings we've seen in 8 of the 13 areas and was not far behind the leaders in the others.

The website was launced less than a year ago. Paul Novack, director of web communications, and the entire web team have much to smile about as they continue to plan future improvements.

"Search" and "Menus and Links" Stand Out

The results for "search" were especially impressive. The search function on higher education websites is almost always one of the top two topics selected by users and the selections are much more negative than positive. In this case, 6% of the positive ratings received were about search and only 1% of the few negative ratings.

Similarly, 12% of the positive ratings were for "menus and links" and only 2% were negative. 

Both of those results are equivalent to a "man bites dog" story as the exact opposite of what usually happens. The unusual success in these two areas is what set the Susquehanna website apart from most CCI results.

The "visual appeal" of the site was also quite strong, receiving 19% of the positive votes and only 1% of the negative votes. The difference here from other CCI surveys is that "visual appeal" received more total selections than any of the 13 areas. That's never happened before.

Comments from Real People

We give survey takers the chance to answer this question: "If you could change one thing about this website, what would it be and why" and 164 people did that for the Suspuehanna survey. These two reflect the overall tone:

• Parent: "Nothing--it is the best of all the colleges we have researched for our son this year, who will be coming as a freshman in the fall."
• Future Student: "Sorry, this isn't an improvement - This website is actually one of the best college websites I've come across. Good work!"

Of course, no website is perfect. Changes suggested included: an area for student ratings about their experience after enrolling, more photos and videos of student activities, average test scores and GPAs for entering students, and more information about faculty.

CCI Results at 10 Colleges and Universities

Overall CCI Results at 10 colleges and universities are reviewed in my presentation "Rating Higher Education Websites: The Student Experience" from  the J.Boye conference last November in Denmark that's available on SlideShare.

A CCI survey can help you fine tune your website. Results are usually available about 2 weeks after survey invitations are sent. Contact me at bob@bobjohnsonconsulting.com   

Website visitors... eager to offer improvement advice

Over the past year 16 colleges and universities have done Customer Centric Index surveys with various groups visiting their website here in the United States and in Canada, Sweden, Norway, and the U.K.

Until recently we didn't have an option for adding answers to an open-ended question, but several of the early participants asked us to include that feature. And so in three recent CCI surveys completed at Bemidji State University, Ball State University's School of Extended Education, and Rider University we added a question like this:

• "If there was one improvement you could make to our website, what would you do and why would you do it?"

50 to 75 Percent Response

While we didn't predict a response rate in advance, the actual level was a major surprise. For Bemidji and Ball State, about 50 percent of everyone completing the survey took the time to add a written comment. At Rider, the only one so far to use a prize incentive to encourage responses, the response rate from survey takers jumped to 75 percent.

The message seems clear: ask people to help you improve your website and many will take the time to do just that.

Highest Concerns: Search and Links

Results of these last three surveys continue to confirm that two items are most likely to stand out as needing improvement regardless of who is answering the survey:

• Search... in this age of "Google," people have high expectations that search will work well at their college or university. For most people, it does not.
• Links... dissatisfaction with link structure is a common concern. People often are happy with content when they can find it. But too often, finding what they want is a special challenge.

Nancy Prater, director of marketing and communications at Ball State's School of Extended Education, summed up the value of the CCI survey results: 

• "The CCI survey has helped us identify problems we did not know we had, verify customer service issues we suspected existed, determine what we are doing right, and give us important benchmarks for measuring future improvement. We are using this data to make adjustments to our navigation and Web site copy, especially as it relates to search terms. It is also helping us focus efforts on our most critical needs, so that we are tackling problems impacting the largest number of our Web readers first.
• "We added an open-ended question at the end of the survey to help us understand the "whys" behind some of the responses. This provided us with more helpful and honest feedback than we would have received in a whole series of focus groups.