Every year, Brainstorm Strategy Group conducts intensive research with 20,000+ university and college students. The goal is to produce insights that will help marketers, recruiters, and enrolment leaders reach prospective and current students with meaningful and impactful messages that will drive desired actions. This includes a better understanding of what drives students’ actions, who influences their decisions, what priorities need to be met, and how they make their choices.

The insights in this presentation will include how they choose their school, why they chose their major, what influences their decisions to stay and graduate, which experiences are most impactful, and how schools can create stronger connections that will lead to strong alumni relationships after they graduate.

Ultimately, we want to students to be successful – to find the right program at the right school and achieve fantastic outcomes. By empowering marketers with the right up-to-date insights, we know they’ll improve the ways they communicate with students and support better decision-making for students and their school.

In a future-student landscape flooded with important information and inspirational content, capturing (and – more importantly – retaining) the attention of prospective students is harder now than ever before.

Join me in this session to discover how Wilfrid Laurier University’s Marketing and Communications team has used authenticity, accessibility, and reassurance to position itself as a trusted advisor and guide along the journey of university bound students.

In this session, we’ll talk about:

• Laurier’s solution to addressing the immediate informational needs of prospective students through our Admissions Top Questions Series.
• Using the Undergraduate Future Student Journey Map to guide communications decision making.
• The best approach to working collaboratively with the admissions and recruitment teams to identify the questions that matter most at each stage of the student journey.
• How we seamlessly integrated this strategy into a successful multimedia email campaign reaching over 5,000 clicks through email and over 10,000 total views on YouTube (and counting).

Don’t miss this chance to explore the power of authentic engagement in shaping the future of student recruitment and gain practical strategies for redefining your approach to organic student outreach.

The Office of the Registrar (RO) is a central hub for student-administration interactions at McMaster University. It plays a pivotal role in shaping processes that impact thousands of students and campus partners each year. In an era where the demand for instant, on-demand services is ever-growing, our ability to thrive depends on our capacity to adapt, communicate with precision and collaborate seamlessly. This session will explore how a survey turned into an internal communications strategy that enhanced relationships and improved performance. We will show you how we moved from receiving feedback like, “We need a much more nimble system and people within who are willing to advocate for change rather than state the constraints” to “Please continue to offer this extremely important event at least yearly. I got so much out of it and took back great information that I immediately put towards my job” in under one year. Our vision transcends mere strategy; it embodies a cultural shift that champions active listening, dismantles silos and nurtures collaboration.

Key takeaways:

Gain actionable insights into transforming survey data into an effective communication strategy
Learn strategies to enhance resilience and adaptability in your department
Recognize the importance of active listening and feedback to craft stakeholder-focused solutions
Walk away with practical tips and tactics to apply to your department’s internal communications strategy

If the last several years have taught us anything, it is that we need to be prepared to handle emergencies and social media is an integral part of that. While I haven’t had to fully implement my plans to date, I feel more secure knowing that I have resources and procedures in place for how we can best use social media in the event of a crisis based on what I’ve learned from others use of social media during difficult times.

I’ll walk you through my channel strategy, what channels I am ready to deploy and the nuances of how I aim to employ each in the event of an emergency or crisis. I will focus on social media, but I’ll also touch on other tools that I am responsible for (website, app) and that I’ve leveraged to enhance my schools plan for an emergency.

I hope that by the end of this session to give you some takeaways that you can implement into your strategy to ensure that if the worst happens, you’re as prepared as possible.

The Université de Saint-Boniface was at a crossroads: it had a high number of applications, a vibrant on-campus community, and personalized services that embodied its value proposition, ‘une université à taille humaine’ – a human-sized university. Yes, students often preferred talking to a real person when trying to find information or accomplish a task, rather than finding the info on the website, but for this institution, that was not necessarily a bad thing; it actually represented a strength that reinforced USB’s messaging, and keeping the website’s positioning as a stepping stone to a person was not something we wanted to ‘optimize’ or change!

Yes, the site needed to be updated, to better integrate user experience and align with the latest accessibility standards. The challenge became: how can we help articulate the university’s identity in its primary digital touchpoint while conserving its essence as a brand that was already working?

This redesign involved threading a delicate line between bringing the online experience for USB up to speed – modern, UX standards, accessibility – while preserving its main strength, its ability to connect people, all from a bilingual perspective. Furthermore, designing a completely bilingual website would not even match the mandate and vision of the institution, which needs to first and foremost promote the French language in a majority anglophone environment. Evolving Web, in collaboration with the University’s web team, tackled this project with a light touch, applying digital best practices but also knowing when to pull back and ensure the new website stayed faithful to a strong brand focused on in-person connection.

Learn how this multi-year ongoing project will transform the website into yet another proof point reinforcing the values of the university, better articulating who they are for current and potential members of the community, with concrete examples of how less can most certainly be more.

What was the last story you wrote that, to your surprise, changed your perspective?

In this session, we’ll explore moments of inspiration from the content creators stomping ground through a group poem exercise. Together, we’ll write the poem “And that made me think” using a series of individual and group activities.

The group poem writing process encourages us to find connections among our different experiences and points of view—an important skill for high ed professionals in the changing cultural landscape of Canada. I hope you’ll enjoy this warm approach to community building here at #PSEWeb!

Audience journey maps help us identify key opportunities to improve our websites and services. Highlighting important touch points, these maps illustrate the thoughts, feelings and actions, experienced as people strive to achieve a goal – such as choosing a program or tracking progress toward graduation. In doing so, they reveal concrete insights into ways we can better support and guide our audiences.

Many of us use these maps to inform our projects, often aimed at improving central sites and services. At McGill, we followed this approach when we began journey mapping in 2018. The many benefits were clear but eventually, we began to consider we might be underutilizing their potential power to transform the ways we work.

In this session, we will explore the missing opportunities journey maps present. We’ll consider not just how to use them to inform and transform your content strategy, but also how to use them as a tool for change management and shifting organizational culture. A resource that can foster empathy, encourage collaboration and maybe even break down those silos!

Attend this session to gain ideas, tools and techniques to supercharge how you use your audience journey maps.

Embark on an exploration into the realm of AI. This presentation will delve into the fundamental principles of AI, its practical applications, and the ethical considerations surrounding its implementation. By the end of the session, I hope you will have gained a comprehensive understanding of AI’s significance and its impact on society, fostering an informed perspective on this cutting-edge technology.

Students on campus tend to leave right after their classes, communications teams can easily find them online where we compete for a small fraction of their attention. We can stay in touch with them that way, but what are we exactly trying to achieve? Is there a way to convert their online engagement into a real-life enriching experience in order to foster a sense of belonging to the institution?

This session will focus on sharing examples how Université de Saint-Boniface have connected online with students in order to have an impact on their on-campus presence.

Sustainable is no longer negotiable.

Our students, staff, and alumni are passionate about sustainability.

Many of our universities are taking steps to reduce paper and printing.

However, our digital content has a carbon footprint too. Websites, emails, and social media are all contributing towards our planet’s climate crisis.

And it’s only getting worse in this increasingly digital age…

In this session, you will:

1. Learn how your university’s digital content is damaging the environment.
2. Understand how to decarbonise your digital content by applying the 5 Rs of the waste hierarchy: refuse, reduce, reuse, repair, retire.
3. Discover a variety of tools and resources to further develop your knowledge about digital sustainability, and lobby for wider change across your campus and sector.

Let’s go green when we go online. 💚

From speaking to customers in Europe and North America, Janus will share how those who are leading digital are thinking differently. Drawing on insights from higher education and beyond, we’ll hear about how (European) regulation is changing the game, how that that thing called AI is more about reading than writing and finally we’ll also cover sustainable digital leadership. Hint: It’s not just about reducing carbon emissions.

Last summer, I signed up to the recruitment email list of (almost) every Canadian university. Over the last recruitment cycle, I have received (and read!) over 400 emails. Now I’m ready to share what I’ve learned.

If you’ve ever wondered what other institutions are doing, if you should change your email marketing strategy, or how you could improve your recruitment emails, this session is for you. We’ll dive into what’s happening across the country (who’s sending emails? How many? How often?), explore what type of content institutions are sending to prospective students, showcase some of the most creative ideas, and evaluate how well we, collectively, are adhering to email best practices and where we can improve. With (disguised) examples galore, this presentation will get your brain buzzing about next years strategy and tactics.

In this presentation, we’ll embark on a journey through the ever-changing landscape of website development. Whether you’re contemplating small improvements or a complete overhaul, we’ll help you decipher the intricate decision between revamping your existing website or opting for a bold redesign.

We’ll walk through these considerations in the context of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. You’ll learn:

• The how to do discovery in the context of a redesign
• Taking advantage of the value you’ve already built
• Navigating institutional blockers to design and brand updates
• Tools for doing technical audits
• Governance concerns
• Taking considerations like accessibility and security into account
• Dealing with institutional toolkits, standards, and CMS’s

Join us as we explore the signs, strategies, and success stories that will empower you to make informed choices and steer your web presence towards a brighter future. Get ready to navigate the crossroads of website evolution with confidence!

Globally, post-secondary school websites suffer from slow loading speeds. Slow websites tank conversion rates, negatively affect search result rankings, hurt brand perception, and are non-inclusive. But making a site faster isn’t just for developers! Sure, some of it is, and we’ll talk about those things, but a good portion of site speed comes down to decision-making. Attendees will come away from this session understanding why fast websites are good, what part they play, and how to talk to their colleagues about improving site speed.

Focusing on the power of empathy in education, this talk will discuss practical approaches for utilizing emotional intelligence to enhance marketing and teaching strategies. Attendees will learn how to effectively communicate and connect with international students, ensuring their academic and personal success.

The viewbook is a stalwart part of student recruitment cycles, printing them since the beginning of time*. However, as the needs and expectations of students have changed, so too have these documents. In this talk, we will explore the history, showcase emerging trends, and explore future possibilities for university viewbooks. Whilst the world has shifted to digital-first everything, prospectuses have stubbornly stayed the same. Is the viewbook still relevant, or is it time for change?

KEY OUTCOMES

1. Understanding the evolution of university viewbooks: Taking a quick trip across the pond for an exploration of the history of UK university prospectuses, attendees will gain an understanding of how these documents have evolved over time. This will include an examination of the changing styles, formats, and content of prospectuses, as well as the factors that have influenced these changes. This knowledge will provide attendees with a solid foundation for considering the future possibilities of university viewbooks.
2. Knowledge of emerging trends and examples: Attendees will learn about emerging trends in university viewbook development and see examples of how universities are reimagining these documents. This will include a look at innovative approaches to viewbook design and the incorporation of new technologies, as well as changes in the types of information that are included in viewbooks. This will inspire attendees to consider new and creative ways to communicate information to prospective students.
3. Insights into future possibilities: The talk will provide insights into the future possibilities of university viewbooks, exploring emerging technologies, changing student expectations, and new ways of delivering information. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of how university viewbooks could continue to evolve in the future, as well as the potential impact this could have on the higher education industry.

*This may be a slight exaggeration 😉

Discover how a partnership between the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and Paper Leaf enhanced critical aspects of the SAIT website. After launching a new website, SAIT identified that students faced difficulties navigating and accessing program information. Desiring improved and ever-evolving student UX, SAIT partnered with Paper Leaf to enhance the website’s usability and effectiveness.

UX research put the spotlight on key issues and ways we could better address student needs. Armed with fresh insights, we overhauled the site navigation, and created a new, purposeful program page experience. The result? A much more satisfying student experience and a significant boost in engagement and site performance for sait.ca!

In this presentation, we’ll reveal how a dynamic partnership transformed the student journey. Expect insights into:

• How we crafted new program info to be compelling, attractive and informative.
• How we used research and student-centric engagement to fuel pivotal changes.
• How we balanced diverse needs to satisfy both users and stakeholders.

Want a deeper understanding of who your prospective students are, and what factors have the greatest impact on their decision to engage with, apply to and (hopefully) enrol at your university/college?

Many possible paths emerge from the moment a prospective student hears about your institution to the moment they decide to apply or accept an offer. Without mapping out your users’ (or in this case – your prospective applicants’) goals, motivations, and pain points at each stage of their decision-making journey, you might not cross their path at all.

In this presentation, I’ll share with you how I led colleagues across the Marketing and Communications team at Wilfrid Laurier University as we embarked on an institution-wide user journey mapping project to build empathy for and understanding of our future undergraduate student audience.

We will traverse topics like:

• A snapshot of the final user journey map and persona deliverables for your own inspiration!
• Our research and project methodology to use as your own framework
• The key stakeholders to involve, as well as how to engage partners across the university to play their part in informing the journey and actioning the learnings
• The key learnings identified of our Gen Z student’s journey, and how we’ve implemented those learnings in our marketing strategies

Canadian universities are increasingly aiming to engage audiences that are abroad and/or international by background. These include not only prospective students and their families, as well as alumni, but also faculty for recruitment and international research collaboration, as well as global organizations that can benefit from our research expertise.

The University of Toronto re-launched its international website, in late 2023, in a highly strategic manner that segmented the very distinct target audiences – (prospective/) students / researchers / organizations – and built a unique click-through-path for each target group. The website is an example of a site that successfully addresses the challenge of marketing to multiple, highly disparate, stakeholders, as well as promoting U of T’s core culture as a global university. In line with the university’s Defy Gravity campaign, it is a tool specifically developed to harness the power of our global community.

The session will showcase how to:

1. how to address the challenge of website development for an international and highly heterogeneous target audience.
2. be strategic about designing a website, including the use of click-through-paths and multiple touch points,
3. to efficiently utilize a website as a marketing tool, rather than an information warehouse, all while elevating and enforcing branding standards, and

Web teams within schools tend to start small with a handful of developers building mostly bespoke websites. As they gain success and attention, demand can begin to outpace capacity. Teams often reach a point where their bespoke site and feature approach becomes overwhelming. Developers and Marketers start to feel underwater, code and content maintenance become unmanageable and customers get frustrated by timelines and cost to add features. Artisanal handcrafted sites can no longer be sustained at this scale.

Establishing WebOps practices can allow your team to manage requests and digital portfolios more efficiently. By organizing your processes and the technology needed to support them, teams can regain focus on core initiatives despite escalating demands.

This will be part session and part support group and will help attendees with the following:

• Discussing how they might maintain site portfolio with less effort
• Defining WebOps frameworks and their usefulness
• Developing a WebOps model for their organization

Imagine a near-future where it is impossible to tell if a piece of writing was produced by a human or a machine. What are the consequences? Since its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has prompted widespread debates about how generative artificial intelligence systems will transform the ways humans communicate and interact with information.

In this session, we will cover the basics of how ChatGPT operates, the benefits and risks of generative AI models, and how these new systems will affect the communications environment.

With the growing demand of short form vertical video it’s important for us to convey our message in a visual and written way that resonates with our target audience.

By capitalizing on trends, we build the bridge between us and our audience to make our content digestible and our message clear. In this session I will talk about trend discovery so finding the right trends and sounds that are relevant and available to you, productive content creation like making the most out of your shoots, your short video strategy (how often you should be posting and where) as well as analytics and reporting.

As a recent grad, I’ll use my fresh student experience to help share with you what students are looking for from their institution and how you can connect with them to provide a message that resonates.

Seneca College is a polytechnic institution with 35,000 full-time students; 60,000 part-time registrants; and 7 campuses in Toronto. Student support was siloed, inconsistent and frustrating. Seneca made organizational changes to create a central hub, transformed organizational culture and a Digital One-Stop Experience. By utilizing Salesforce Service Cloud students can select from 9 virtual and in-person service channels to connect with Seneca; meeting them wherever they are and how they wish to be served.

Going beyond channel management and individual pieces of content to planning and delivering impactful campaigns can be daunting or just something you may feel you just don’t have the time for. In this session, I’ll present my tried and tested 8-step framework for structuring campaigns and explore the challenges, opportunities, and potential pitfalls of each step along the way. Approaching a campaign with a structure and strategy can make it less daunting, waste less time, and lead to impactful results.

When we build a communications calendar for enrollment, we start with: what do we need to tell them? Usually, it’s a long list of facts and accolades about our institutions, and some steps for them to take. We send this information over and over again, hoping for the best.

Yet, how often do we stop and think: what emotions might be coming up for our students this time of year? What else is competing for their attention? What information is actually relevant to them right now?

In this session, we’ll use empathy mapping as the foundation to understand:

• What information we need to send
• When it’s most relevant
• Where your audience is seeing it
• How it should sound and feel

This approach will not only keep your audiences informed about what’s important, but also support them in their journey and begin to build a connection with your institution.

We all know multidisciplinary collaboration leads to better results. For digital products, a strong design-development partnership boosts your team’s:

1. Potential for innovation
2. Commitment to user needs
3. Product quality
4. Overall efficiency
5. Morale

But how do you get from awkward design critiques and endless email threads to true collaboration? At McGill, we bridged the work methods of two separate teams to create a strong design-dev workflow. Together, we’ve produced dozens of strategically important, high-quality projects and updates to our websites. I’ll share the mindset, groundwork, and ongoing tactical activities that make it work, including tips for:

• Scaling up and creating a resilient process
• Identifying a shared mission
• Building compatible processes between traditional and agile teams
• Managing stakeholder input and user data

• Do you want to learn more about user behaviour and how to leverage those findings to inform and optimize strategy?
• Have you ever wondered how others decipher when, and how best, to share important information with primary audience groups and key stakeholders?
• Are you looking to make meaningful change in your organization, but are unsure of where to start?

There is an abundance of information and many ways, and platforms, to share it. Layer in stakeholders and campus partners with their own strategic goals, leading to the inevitable question: where do I begin?

Learn how to centre discussions around creating experiences of connectivity and belonging for future students through leveraging data and being attuned to the deep personal connection linked to selecting where to their post-secondary journey will lead them. The bridges being built will take time, consistency, and a willingness to reflect inwards on how united meaningful change can shape an individual’s perception. There will always be opportunities along the way for small wins, the greatest win of all will be to build, nurture and grow your community of practice.

When we revised our digital standards in 2019, our objective was simple: We wanted to compile our web-related policies and best practices in a concise and well-organized document. In doing so, we hoped to make it easier for our web management community to create better websites.

Since then, this resource has grown to impact more than just the way our sites are built. Our digital standards are a cornerstone of our governance framework, a key reference guiding departmental web strategies and cross-departmental collaborations, and an established mindset by which members of our community – leaders, web managers and site visitors – share a common understanding of what makes an exemplary website. Beyond producing a resource, we’ve established a community of practice for digital standards compliance.

This session’s topics will include:

• Tips for ongoing evaluation and our plans for taking our digital standards to the next level in 2023.
• How we worked with departments and stakeholders across our university to reformat our digital standards to be a user-friendly resource.
• Details about supporting education and outreach initiatives that helped us secure buy-in.
• Recommendations for related resources and support.

Where do your students live? If your answer can be found on a map, you missed the point. Try again: in what environment do your students *really* spend most of their time, feel most comfortable, accomplish their tasks and find what they need? (Psst! The answer is “online”.) Now you get it! But how do you give students the kind of home they really want?

Join corporate communicator Dayan Boyce to learn what Fanshawe did when an unanticipated IT project made College leaders ask this question. Follow along as Dayan outlines the brainstorms, wishlists, surveys, contests, Gantt charts, presentations, workshops, setbacks, mishaps, sleepless nights, tears and coffee that turned an expired contract into a robust, responsive, content-driven intranet dedicated specifically to current students.

In November 2022, Saskatchewan Polytechnic entered new territory—the educational ecotourism sphere. When asked to help promote the first trip, a joint initiative of the School of Natural Resources, the Office of Applied Research and Innovation, and the School of Continuing Education, communication strategist Medbh English jokingly suggested that she could fit in a suitcase to join the trip north to Churchill, Manitoba. The joke ended when her boss suggested that she 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥 go.

Typically, communication professionals interview participants and write stories following an event or project. With the Polar Bear Eco Trip, Communications & Marketing literally jumped on board the train. Acting as a bridge between public participants and the institution to tell stories from the inside, Medbh was able to successfully share the why behind the venture by producing a top-performing three-part blog series for Sask Polytech’s website and social platforms that far exceeded digital engagement goals.

This presentation will demonstrate how engaging early and embedding communications right into a project allows institutions to tell a story in a more authentic and engaging way—especially when promoting new initiatives.

Storytelling is a transferable skill-set, one which is an asset when we need to express complicated or personal ideas. Whether you’re teaching a class, delivering a TED talk, or applying for a job, storytelling is an excellent way to build a strong connection between you and your audience. Beyond just proving your point, a great story serves as a touchstone – both an entry point for your audience, and something to help you stand out in their memory.

In this workshop, we will work on the basics of true life storytelling. We will start by quashing that anxiety that you have no stories worth telling, and move on to finding and structuring the stories that work for you. Whether it’s in the workplace, at a conference or on a date — we’re going to help you to tell your story!

Content governance is the idea that the content strategy you create for your website must stay accountable and not forgotten since your last redesign or content overhaul. In order for your content strategy to succeed long-term, you need a content governance plan.

This all sounds great in theory, but what do content governance plans actually look like and what type of governance makes sense for your institution? Among the many approaches to choose from, there are pros and cons to consider and the best fit depends on your institutional needs.

In this session, we’ll talk through different governance models using real world examples from the education space and rules of thumb that apply to each. And you’ll learn about tools and techniques to implement content governance plan so that it doesn’t just sit in a drawer gathering dust.

This workshop is ideal for content writers, editors, and managers as well as web communications and social media managers who are looking to improve the quality and impact of their content strategy.

Learn how to engage your audience with compelling content by implementing a user-centric content strategy and governance to your website.

You’ll come away from the workshop with knowledge of:

• Content strategy fundamentals and key terms
• Criteria and methods to assess and optimize your content organization
• Applicable strategies to develop and test information architecture
• Content governance crafting, planning, and implementation for the long run
• Best practices for well-written and accessible content

This talk covers strategies for crafting compelling headlines, using persuasive language, and understanding the psychology of your audience. It also includes tips for optimizing your content for search engines and analytics to measure the success of your content marketing efforts. The ultimate goal is to help organizations and marketers create content that resonates with their audience and drives conversions.

Key takeaways:

• How to use persuasive language and attention-grabbing headlines to make your content more compelling
• Using SEO tools and strategies to measure the success of your content
• The importance of understanding your audience and crafting content that resonates with them

Alright folks, get ready to learn how to make those Gen Z-ers double-tap and swipe-up like there’s no tomorrow. John’s presentation explores the latest trends and insights on advertising to Gen Z, a highly influential and digitally-savvy group. We’ll delve into the unique characteristics of this demographic, including their values, behaviors, and preferences when it comes to digital platforms. Through case studies and best practices, we’ll examine successful campaigns that have effectively targeted Gen Z audiences on popular social media channels like TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.

Attendees will walk away with an understanding of how to engage and connect with this key demographic, including tips on creating authentic, relatable, and visually compelling content that resonates with Gen Z. And who knows, maybe you’ll even start using words like ‘yeet’ and ‘lit’ without feeling ‘cheugy’.

We get it: Creating vertical videos is time-consuming and social video production isn’t everyone’s strong suit. Let us let you in on a secret solution: collaborations! Share the workload with other teams, and you can all benefit from the shared labours of video development.

Work smarter not harder with the aid of your academic community through vertical video collaborations. Help increase visibility from all corners of your institution without overstretching your team’s capabilities. Work together with other departments to create informative videos that showcase the diverse community (from academic departments to educational units to campus services). Hear the stories of the community — created and shared by the community.

At the University of Toronto Mississauga, our two-person video team has found this to be a win-win-win-win!

WIN: Give smaller, less-resourced departments fresh content for their social channels.

WIN: Amplify their message on larger channels.

WIN: Keep our own channels freshly updated so we can work on other tasks.

WIN: Fulfill our campus mandate of highlighting all that our diverse campus has to offer.

We’ve successfully worked with 24+ campus teams to create videos through three types of collaborations. We’re here to show how you, too can build bridges and cultivate a collaborative community.

Podcasting is an increasingly popular storytelling tool, with US listenership expected to grow to 160 Million in 2023 and over 66% of those listeners having a college degree. How can you best use podcasts to elevate the voices of your institution and build bridges?

This session covers the following:

• Cultivating a podcast network to elevate diverse voices and your brand
• What podcasts are and when to use them
• What makes a good podcast show
• Providing resources for user-generated content
• Setting guardrails (for consistency with quality and content)

Flop or bop? You decide!

In this interactive session, we’ll dig into the best and worst engaged organic Instagram posts from @UofTalumni in 2022 and discuss why each of them clicked with our audiences—or didn’t. From an audience engagement perspective, expect to see a variety of content types and topics, including Reels, memes, contests, and more. I’ll also explore how these learnings can inform future content planning, by focusing on community building and balancing the Instagram algorithm preferences.

Your programme pages are the shop window of your institution.

But how well do they really showcase your programmes to prospective students? Are the pages based on data and user insight, or have they grown organically over time?

In this session, we’ll explore the lessons learnt from a project which used content design to successfully transform a university’s programme pages – and more. We will look at how you can use data and insight to better understand your users’ needs, to deliver smarter web content and meet your student recruitment goals.

You will leave this session with:

• Practical advice on how to overcome blockers and get buy in from stakeholders
• Insight and advice on how to create user-focused programme pages to drive your recruitment
• An understanding of how you can adopt content design principles to benefit your institution

Audience research done, now what?

Too often personas and other market insight tools are developed but not used effectively as people aren’t sure what to do next.

In this session, we will explore how you can harness the powerful insights from your research and translate them into more personalised, impactful content for your prospective students, students and alumni.

What we’ll cover:

• How to implement a more personalised approach to content
• Troubleshooting getting stuck with your personas and market research summaries
• Where to start with using your insights to improve your content
• Creating a content matrix and other useful tools for translating insights into segmented content

When you think about how social media works in your team or department, how would you describe it?

Reactive? Chaotic? Putting out fires? Telling the story after the fact? Like pulling teeth? An afterthought? A digital poster board?

If any of these descriptors feel like they fit, this session is for you.

Social Media is incredibly fast paced and demanding. Finding the time to actually put together a strategy feels nearly impossible. And if you do find the time, social media is so huge and ever evolving, where do you even begin? It’s easy to get trapped in a whirlwind of thoughts that feel too overwhelming to even begin to sort out.

So that’s what we are going to do, I’m going to walk you through the same strategy and content planning that I run with my team of social media representatives and hopefully, if you’re currently flying by the seat of your pants, by the time you leave this session you’ll have a new framework for your content strategy.

We will talk about your goals and objectives, your audiences, your always gonna happens and help you put together a plan that will allow you to be more proactive where you can be and more flexible to be effectively reactive.

Trust me when I say you’re going to want to have a notebook or computer, tablet or phone for this session and if you’re really into this, choose a project management tool. I think you’ll surprise yourself with what you leave with.

Great project management tools to explore: Planner (if you’re a Microsoft 365 campus), Trello, AirTable, Asana, Click-up, Excel or Google sheets.

In this crash course, I will explore with you the new Google Analytics 4 tools, and show what you can and cannot compare between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4.

Website managers and editors are expected to wear many hats in order to create, manage, and maintain content. From writing to formatting to accessibility, the user’s experience (UX) must always be at the forefront. So how can we lean into UX thinking while dealing with different kinds of content?

I’ll lead a non-technical, interactive session geared toward website admins and editors to troubleshoot content and get tips to maximize usability, including:

• Best practices for non-technical content design
• How to plan for a usability test that provides valuable UX insights about your site
• Essential UX writing tips for buttons, links, lists, and menu items

As digital transformation continues to reshape businesses, higher ed marketers need to analyze their future students’ behavior, monitor ROI, and devise effective higher ed marketing strategies.

How universities collect, analyze and consume data has drastically changed since the inception of Google Analytics (UA) in 2012, one of the most-used tracking tools by higher ed marketers. The shifts in student behavior, privacy regulations, Big Data and AI, has created new horizons for performance tracking.

This session will help higher ed marketing to better transition from UA to GA4, how to set up conversion tracking [properly] from lead to admission to enrollment, real-life examples from universities & colleges and how they are using GA’s and integrations like Big Query to measure and improve the success of their marketing initiatives.

Today, Artificial intelligence is one of the most discussed topics around the world, especially about the unimaginable opportunities presented by technology, its accelerated pace in integrating into every part of our lives, and even more about the risks, biases, and threats posed by its misuse.

In this keynote, we will discuss the real-world applications of AI, the recent developments in the generative AI space, the opportunities, challenges, and risks presented by them, and how we can embrace the opportunities by being responsible in every stage of building these AI systems.

Have you ever introduced a carefully crafted digital strategy only to feel like an order taker in the face of faculty and leadership?

When we create content to represent research and academic programs, our own well-honed professional skills and knowledge can clash with the domain-specific expertise of our colleagues.

In this session, we’ll discuss techniques to use with our stakeholders in consultations and feedback sessions to preserve your strategic positioning and processes that support your goals.

Looking to level-up your website? MORE responsiveness, MORE speed, MORE accessibility, MORE results?

We discuss how Georgian College, a medium-sized community college in Central Ontario became one of the best performing PSE websites in Canada.

This session will detail the journey of adopting a Headless Content Management Platform. I will share (and compare) some of our results around Pagespeed Insights, Core Web Vitals and Page Experience scores and also give you a summary of the overall benefits of going “headless”.

Have you inherited an old and outdated website? Or have a section of a website you manage that you can’t bring yourself to look at?

While web projects like these may seem a little daunting, you can take advantage of this opportunity by building bridges between you and your user.

We recently got in tune with Gen Z to refresh a student-facing section of our Co-operative Education website. We learned a lot in this project and have fresh insights to share with you!

In this session, we’ll talk about tips for:

• Developing content for a student audience.
• Developing personas through user interviews.
• Auditing your content while working with various stakeholders.
• Building the information architecture from a user-focused lens using online visual collaboration tools such as Miro.
• Designing low-fidelity wireframes, mood boards and mock-ups.

In multiple surveys, McGill’s community of site managers and editors expressed an eager interest in ensuring our digital spaces support and align with McGill’s equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI)-related strategic goals. They’ve also told us they’re not sure what steps to take to make that happen.

To encourage an actionable understanding of what equity, diversity and inclusion means in digital spaces, McGill’s Equity Office collaborated with the unified Web Services team (Communications and External Relations partnered with IT Services) to produce resources and training for our 1400+ site managers and editors. Come learn about our process and outcomes and get tips to:

• Help your community understand how EDI considerations can influence website management.
• Foster skills for applying EDI concepts to websites.
• Promote familiarity with your institution’s equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) strategies – at McGill, these strategies are outlined in the following documents:
  • Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) Strategic Plan 2020-2025
  • Action Plan to Address Anti-Black Racism 2020-2025
  • Provost Task Force on Indigenous Studies and Indigenous Education’s 52 Calls to Action

We’ll also touch on our related initiatives for improving web accessibility, see A grassroots approach to web accessibility, #PSEWEB 2020.

Reels get 22% more interaction on Instagram than standard video postings, making them an effective tool for reaching your audience. In this session, we will outline how a small team with limited video experience produced a series of Instagram Reels for future U of T students, reaching more than 200K users.

We will share a step-by-step guide to how we did it, from developing our communications goals to engaging student ambassadors to tracking our results. Through this case study, you will learn how to:

• Engage stakeholders and student collaborators for maximum visibility
• Develop a content plan that aligns with your brand’s strategic objectives
• Film and edit videos on a budget with limited videography experience

Any experienced social media manager will tell you, be ready to take the good with the bad. Have you ever had a seemingly harmless social media post suddenly become the chat board for a raging topic on campus? Has a tweet about impactful research been dragged into a sphere of conspiracy theories you didn’t even know existed? How do you know when to respond to what and how? Or do you respond?

Using some recent case studies at the University of Victoria, we will talk about how to tackle issues on social media, how to be proactive and how to help understand your audience’s current sentiment so your content and channels don’t go awry.

In recent years, science, scientists and their institutions have come under attack. We’ve seen disinformation campaigns launched on big topics like climate change and vaccines, and, on a smaller scale, we’ve heard people’s frustrations with scientific findings that leave them perplexed about what to do next (So now XYZ causes cancer, too? Should I or shouldn’t I buy that zero-emission electric car that relies on harmful lithium mining?).

As communicators, we help get the evidence-based information into the public realm. We’re skilled at translating specialist language and scientific jargon into layperson terms and clear storytelling. But are we missing something? Do we need to also interweave the story that science is a way of knowing?

In this session, we’ll explore approaches and strategies to tell the stories of research findings that integrates scientific understanding.

Learning objectives include:

• How to anticipate, preempt and counter misinformation and disinformation
• How to provide adequate context when telling the story of a research study, on social media posts and longer form web posts
• How to ask the right questions about the science in interviews with researchers
• Getting the right balance between too much information and too little

Today, recruitment happens online. Prospective students rely heavily on your website and the resources you make available online. But without detailed analytics, it’s hard to know how exactly these assets are engaging visitors, and whether you could be getting even better results.

Analytics dashboards give teams and departments valuable insights when properly tied to specific goals and objectives.

In this session, you’ll learn how to build an analytics dashboard using Google’s free tool – Looker Studio. This will help you track and communicate website performance to your leadership team and other departments within your organization.

We’ll also share Looker Studio templates that you can easily connect up to your Google Analytics account and put to work.

Agenda:

• How to set goals and objectives (with different use cases)
• Define key metrics to track like engagement rate and make sense of them
• Using events to understand actions your visitors are taking
• How to set up a Looker Studio dashboard
• How to interpret data and identify areas of improvement
• How to communicate and distribute insights throughout the organization

Measurement is the first step towards improvement. Whether you’re in marketing, recruitment, or faculties, analytics dashboards can deliver valuable insights and help you make informed decisions.

September 2022 was U of T’s biggest back to school year ever. The largest cohort of students, staff and faculty returned after the pandemic, including thousands of 2nd and 3rd year students accessing our three campuses for the very first time. Guidance and orientation were part of the overall “UTogether” strategy to welcome our audiences back to campus. With this goal in mind, U of T’s social media team developed a video campaign to introduce our community to places, spaces and services that could be found at U of T’s three campuses. The #UTogether campaign involved integrated map links, web content and a scavenger hunt to tie in the content from our videos produced and hosted by work study students.

In this session, attendees will learn:

• A look into our engagement and community outreach strategy with the campaign beyond our social media posts
• How U of T ideated, created, and measured the success of our #UTogether videos on Instagram Reels and TikTok
• How we adapted our strategy to include other existing platforms to increase the reach of the videos
• What collaborations took place to ensure a seamless transition from video to map to website content

In this session we are going to demystify the video filming and editing processes to show how you don’t need to break the bank or have a lot of experience to create effective video content. We will be using examples from our social media channels to help illustrate our message. We will also discuss the physical tools, video editing software/apps, challenges, and insights we learned along the way. As communicators in the University of Toronto’s University Admissions and Outreach department, we will be focussing our talk on video for recruitment, and we’ll discuss our target audience’s (teens/16-18 years old) preferences for consuming video content, which helped shaped our aim to create more authentic stories.

If you’re looking at accessibility as supporting only a limited audience, you’re totally missing the point.
Embracing accessibility principles in your design, code, and content makes your opportunity easier to find – and easier to act upon – for all audiences. Better findability? Better SEO? Better mobile development? And better alignment to how people actually talk, use the web, and consume information? Learn why accessibility should be the foundation upon which all your efforts are built.

Session will include working towards 3.0, alignment to section 508 and ADA compliances.

Do people read emails anymore? Yes—they do. But not the way you think. This talk will show you exactly how to write subject lines and email copy that is guaranteed to get read (and acted on!).

In this session, you’ll learn:

• A quick way to test if your email will get read
• How to write good subject lines that increase open rates
• Typical email reading patterns and how to use them to your advantage
• How to appropriately use formatting and white space
• Recommendations on sentence structure and reading level
• How to use links and buttons to guarantee click-through

Many of us view accessibility as a digital dark art – a technical aspect of web development best left to developers. In practice, there’s a lot that content creators and editors could – and should – do to help all users, especially those with disabilities.

Session takeaways:

• How to write descriptive link text
• How screen reader users experience the web
• How to provide structure with correct heading levels
• Alt text – best practices and when to leave it blank

Planning an integrated marketing campaign can be tough. Between internal and external newsletters, organic and paid social media and keeping the website updated, there are a lot of moving parts. Learn how the small marketing team at the Michigan State University College of Nursing undertook one of the most ambitious marketing campaigns in school history to build awareness and drive a 72% increase in traffic to the website and over half a million impressions in paid social media alone with its “Neighborhood Nurses” campaign. We’ll take you through the research, planning, implementation and evaluation used to create the series that people at MSU are still taking about months later, as well as some of the tools we’ve used in Neighborhood Nurses and our successful follow-up campaigns.

In 2018, the team from the Global Institute for Water Security decided the urgent message about our planet’s changing water realities was not being heard: floods, droughts, fires, migration, border conflicts, crop failure, energy production, even the cup of coffee you’re drinking, was all being affected at urgent speed by climate change. While this all sounds a bit doom and gloom, the great news is that there are solutions and there are people making a difference.

That is why the What About Water podcast was born… It hasn’t all been smooth sailing, but after 3 complete seasons, there are tremendous lessons to share about how other organizations can get their message out — through podcasts, outreach, education, film, and other forms of science and media literacy.

In 2021 I presented Moving from the Wild West to Collaboration City at #PSEWeb and this year I hope to dive more into how we have trained and empowered our 90+ social media representative team to develop content for brand channels.

This year, I along with a few colleagues, will share how to onboard new social media representatives and the support we provide to them as they get started. We will show you how we manage tools like Adobe Express to create consistent branding across our college. We will also talk about how we approach content institutionally, to provide SMR’s with the support they need to focus on creating content for which they are the content experts. Finally we will look at how our institution makes use of tools like Hootsuite’s Content Library and Microsoft 365’s Planner.

Email is one of the most effective tools to reach an audience. But it’s often treated as an afterthought. Learn how to build an effective email content strategy, based on data, that will attract students to your institution, support them through the application process, convince them to accept an offer of admission, and keep them engaged until their first day.

You’ll learn to:

• Make email your secret weapon
• Understand what email is best for
• Turn data insights into an email messaging strategy
• Create a framework for email messages that aligns with the student journey

a11y-media-player is a video player with accessibility features such as a searchable, printable, and downloadable transcript in a modern responsive interface. In this session, you will learn about the accessibility features of the player as well as how you can use it on your own sites.

The stress of a global pandemic brought into focus our human need for empathy and kindness. And while we recognized these needs deeply in ourselves, do we extend this level of care to everyone who interacts with our websites? In this keynote, Joel Goodman speaks to ways our sector can holistically improve the hospitality of our web properties through accessibility, better user experience design, research, and feedback loops.

There are so many things that go into an effective recruitment strategy. From a strong brand presence to social media and lead generation techniques. But one element that’s clearly a pillar of any successful recruitment campaign are program pages. Program pages are likely the place where many potential applicants make their decision of whether or not to apply.

While some potential students select an institution to apply to, and then research the available programs, many do the reverse. A high school student might have decided to study pre-med when they’re in grade 10, and then start the search for institutions offering that program in grade 11.

In this session, we’ll look at what makes an effective program page and cover the following topics:

• Program pages as part of the user journey
• Highlighting a program’s key selling points
• Showcasing the student experience and school differentiators
• Balancing visuals and text
• Presenting program requirements
• Building SEO value into program pages

“We Believe: Emily Solomon” is a video created to support Capilano University’s annual “We Believe” breakfast fundraiser event.

This event is based loosely on the benevon fundraising model ask event – a focused one hour event featuring speakers, beneficiaries of charitable support and most importantly, a video story. The purpose of the video story is to create an emotional connection with the audience and inspire them to give generously.

In the video, Emily speaks about overcoming an intergenerational lack of access to education, and how scholarships and bursaries gave her the opportunity to provide a better life for her daughter.

In this talk, find out how Capilano University’s Philanthropy & Alumni Relations and Marketing & Digital Experience teams worked together to raise funds for an important initiative and helped build the University’s brand.

We all have a role to play in creating accessible, diverse, and inclusive environments at the universities and colleges where we work. But what does this mean for us as communicators and marketers? How does this apply to our work practices in both digital and in-person environments?

This interactive session focuses on building habits that help you and your team grow, learn, and inspire each other to do better, more inclusive work. We’ll connect you with tangible strategies and discuss emerging practices that you can adapt to your own environment.

The session will focus on Liberatory Design Mindsets, a framework that helps practitioners in any discipline take steps to be more self-aware, equitable, collaborative, and creative. We’ll explore Liberatory Design values, ways of working, and participants’ own experiences to gain concrete insights applicable to our unique work contexts. We’ll also experiment with the session format itself, investigating how we might learn and collaborate better together in our post-Covid model(s) of work.

Over the last 15 years I have worked with 17 post secondary institutions to improve the user experience on their websites. Now, I am the user.

My daughter and I spent several hours looking at over a dozen websites. We needed answers to 3 questions:

Do you have the program I want?
If yes, what are the admission requirements?
What is the application deadline?

Arguably, this is the most important task flow for prospective students.

And yet it was a painful process on almost all websites. This presentation identifies the roadblocks we ran into in areas of:

• Program search
• Navigation usability
• Content readability and accessibility

And I’ll provide recommendations for how to improve the user experience and ultimately encourage more students to apply.

As a result of the sudden & drastic changes brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the #PSEWEB community—North America’s top college and university marketing professionals—were forced to contend with increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Nearly three years later, finally emerging from chaos, this dynamic group faces yet another challenge: navigating a fast-approaching future of work—an always-on “new abnormal” characterized by hybrid work, endless disruption, and constantly shifting audience behaviours & expectations.

According to Boston Consulting Group, in order to survive, thrive, and compete successfully, organizations—especially higher education institutions—now have only two years (or less) to get to where they might otherwise have hoped to be in five. To meet this challenge, #PSEWEB 2022 attendees require a new approach to constant change. To succeed in the face of uncertainty, multi-award winning marketing professional Hamza Khan argues that we must lean into uniquely human qualities that are difficult, if not impossible, to automate. For anything that can be automated will be automated. However, that which is left will become disproportionately more valuable.

In this talk, the #PSEWEB community will…

• Become inspired to transition their departments and institutions from survival-mode to a change-friendly state of automatic renewal
• Familiarize themselves with the top 3 reasons why organizations fail to navigate change
• Understand how to operationalize & maximize 3 change-friendly attributes as a way to future-proof their careers

Interested in telling authentic and vulnerable stories? Sounds terrifying? Get started in the process with inspiration from storytelling podcaster, Shannon Cason.

In What’s Your Story?, you will learn:

• The basics of storytelling.
• Why do stories connect us?
• Using honest storytelling for personal and professional empowerment.
• Purposes of personal narrative storytelling.
• Participants will leave the session with elements for their own original story.

Shannon Cason has shared his stories all over the country. Shannon hosts three podcasts – Homemade Stories, The Trouble, and In Good Company Detroit. Shannon is a host, MainStage storyteller, and GrandSlam champion with The Moth. He is a regular on NPR’s Snap Judgment; awarded their Best Performance Award. He has appeared on countless podcasts and storytelling stages, including TEDx, RISK!, Third Coast Festival, Podcast Movement, and upcoming film projects.

A look at how Fanshawe (and higher education) took advantage of a social gaming platform (Discord) to build community during a time when students needed it most.

I will share my experience in building a Discord server from the ground up and managing the server through growing pains, an unexpected raid and general COVID times.

This talk will include:

• Why I believe Discord will be an important part of our strategy moving forward
• General server set-up and organization
• Adding and programming bots
• Troubleshooting a raid
• Empowering students to shape their community and to support each other

Give a content author a tool made for developers, and you’ll confuse them for a lifetime. Give them a tool made for them, and you’ll never have to explain why their link has a WCAG false positive that does not need to be addressed using techniques H33 or ARIA7… What? Exactly.

We’ve seen your accessibility programs. Trainings, audits, browser plugins, crawlers, dashboards, spreadsheets…still getting complaints, re-trainings, re-audits…well here’s a little secret: a lot of our pain comes from handing our content creators old tools that directly encourage bad decisions. Let’s stop blaming the users and start fixing the tools.

We will present several ways to redesign editor-facing interfaces to create more accessible content by default, and provide some history and integration tips for Editoria11y and Sa11y: open-source “accessibility spellcheckers” built to help content creators write meaningful links, better text alternatives, logical heading structures and so much more.

The presentation will explore how Editoria11y and Sa11y:

• Share the same vision, with slightly different emphases and features
• Focus on content-related issues
• Make web accessibility straightforward for non-technical website editors
• Present customizable and scalable solutions that go beyond your expensive cloud-based service

All are welcome to join us for this lunch hour keynote by UBC President and Chair of the U15 Group of Universities, Santa Ono (@ubcprez).

Named America’s most notable university president by Inside Higher Education in 2015. Dr. Ono has attained a level of engagement with the community that few of his peers have achieved.

Tune in to hear Dr. Ono share his social media journey and how he built up his social media and the University’s brand by connecting directly with students.

Following Dr. Ono’s keynote, take part in our Twitter chat @psewebconf.

COVID-19 has accelerated multiple years of change into two years in the education sector. More than two years into the pandemic:

• Online classes have become more available
• Job satisfaction has dropped
• Middle class disposable income has increased

What does that mean for Canadian Universities and colleges? How should they adjust their marketing to speak to the Canadians who are storming to upskill and re-skill? Our latest research answers some of the most pressing questions on the topic.

In our quest to better serve the needs to our audiences, identifying processes and best practices for producing bilingual content has never seemed so critical…and yet so elusive. It’s an undertaking rife with challenges. Keeping translations in sync and the impact of translated content on design choices are just the beginning.

What different approaches have we tried? What specific challenges have we encountered? What solutions have we found?

Hear how marketing and communications leaders across the country respond to these questions. Is it really a case of deux poids, deux mesures?

Our work environment has undergone significant changes over the past years. For some of us, these changes began even before the arrival of the pandemic.

What new models and methods are surfacing? What lessons have we learned so far? What challenges are we encountering?

Our panel of leaders share insights on emerging best practices and innovative solutions that are redefining the way we work.

With pandemic closures and lower student engagement, the International Student Experience team at the University of Waterloo’s Student Success Office was feeling the pressure of delivering high impact programs. In November 2020, they took a chance and incorporated a pen pal component into UWinterloo; a program to help international students feel connected to Canada and to other Waterloo Warriors during the month of December. They launched the pilot project with a modest goal of reaching 100 student participants and were blown away to see 600 people sign up! The new approach helped the team realize their goal of connecting students in a brand-new way and has continued to do so for the past year and a half – making pen-pals a re-emerging tactic for student engagement at Waterloo and, in our opinion, a pandemic comeback story.

This presentation will share:

• How the program has evolved as the pandemic has shifted and the University has adapted to a hybrid service model
• Best practices and lessons learned from a coordination and communications perspective
• Why we believe the program was successful and is not a passing fad
• How we leveraged the pen pal program model across other initiatives to connect students across faculties and new student transition

Accessibility is a common priority when building websites and webpages. But have you considered how individuals with disabilities are engaging with your brand on social media? Are they experiencing accessibility barriers in your content? This workshop will outline the easy practices you can implement to ensure the content you produce and the way you deliver it on social media is accessible for everyone and will include a hands-on alt text writing exercise.

After more than a decade of content proliferation, the challenge of creating captivating news feeds, while simultaneously combating online controversy, has become crucial to continued social media success. In this 2-hour session, we will explore the current state of social media and engage in an in-depth discussion regarding best practices for measuring success and mitigating institutional risk.

Participants will walk away with proven strategies for immediate implementation, and a renewed sense of how best to leverage a variety of tools to address organizational goals and objectives.

Topics and Tactics will include:

• How to create captivating video
• Proactively shaping your social media story
• Nikki’s rules of engagement
• Re-establishing trust through transparency and authenticity
• Elevating understanding with animation
• Leveraging trends to educate consumers
• Increasing outreach by communicating impact

Analytics and data-driven decision making have a distinct appeal in today’s digital landscape. We have more information than ever before about how people engage with our social media posts, our digital ads, and our website. And yet, every website redesign project starts with a list of user pain points, and everyone wants to design a human-centric experience. And sometimes a single stakeholder comes along and makes a decision that isn’t related to either data science or user research.

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to gather a range of inputs and the types of questions to ask people and from the data. We’ll walk through different scenarios and together, figure out which metrics or stakeholder priorities to focus on.

You’ll see how these decisions can impact information architecture and content priorities for your own projects. This workshop will be interactive, using realistic use cases from the higher education context, and giving you a chance to collaborate with others in small groups.

In this workshop, you’ll learn:

• How to get the most value out of stakeholder input and the dangers of design by committee
• User research techniques – how much testing and interviewing do we need to inform decisions?
• The benefits and pitfalls of allowing analytics to dictate design and content decisions
• Examples of KPIs to focus on, to make using your analytics data less overwhelming

We all have a role to play in creating accessible, diverse, and inclusive environments at the universities and colleges where we work. But what does this mean for us as communicators and marketers? How does this apply to our work practices in both digital and in-person environments?

This interactive session focuses on building habits that help you and your team grow, learn, and inspire each other to do better, more inclusive work. We’ll connect you with tangible strategies and discuss emerging practices that you can adapt to your own environment.

The session will focus on Liberatory Design Mindsets, a framework that helps practitioners in any discipline take steps to be more self-aware, equitable, collaborative, and creative. We’ll explore Liberatory Design values, ways of working, and participants’ own experiences to gain concrete insights applicable to our unique work contexts. We’ll also experiment with the session format itself, investigating how we might learn and collaborate better together in our post-Covid model(s) of work.

Once upon a time, our communications and web development teams had a somewhat strained relationship. Conversations went unresolved, collaborations were few, and mutual appreciation was…limited. Then we made a shared commitment to turning a new page. Some were skeptical of success, but that was then.

Find out how our two teams came to work closely together to present a unified service and in turn foster a better web ecosystem for our entire community.

A few of our shared projects that we’ll touch upon include:

• Web governance and web accessibility initiatives
• The redesign of McGill’s homepage and undergraduate admissions program finder
• Improvements to our search tool
• Development and beta launch of our Digital Design system

In this talk, we explore what goes into a content strategy that generates more traffic and revenue for any business. Too often, businesses create content without any specific goals in mind, which makes it difficult to determine whether or not the content is successful. Additionally, if you don’t know who your target audience is, it’s difficult to create content that will be appealing to them. Taking these ideas one step further, we will take a step-by-step look at what goes into choosing topics, building your calendar, and how to write and optimize your article.

Key takeaways:

• How to write compelling and optimized content
• How to define your goals and audience
• How to research topics + build your calendar

Whether you manage a single platform or work with hundreds of editors on hundreds of websites, your digital ecosystem requires governance. Documenting the processes, policies, and people involved can help provide clarity, streamline decision making, and illuminate areas that are ripe for change. Through case studies and practical advice, this session will address different approaches to governance, formats for documentation, and the steps that will lead you down the path to a more sustainable, more successful approach to work.

Brands love to talk about themselves. “We’re the best ____ in the country!” We always think we’re the protagonist. But we’re wrong. In fact, your target audience is actually the main character — the hero of the brand’s story. In this session, you’ll learn how your brand fits into the hero’s journey, clarify your message, and ultimately increase engagement with your main characters: students, faculty and alumni.

Stayci will bring her background as a Broadcast video producer turned marketing consultant, now VP marketing at Willis College & CBBC Career college, to give insights and suggestions to others looking to use more video in their marketing. Or for some, even where to start!

Based on my experience as a website editor and manager at McGill University, I will give 3 tips on how to improve an outdated and neglected institutional website. Through “before” and “after” images, anecdotes from user experience testing, and examples on how to cross-pollinate traffic from social media, I will discuss how I migrated and populated content into a more visually-pleasing, user-focused, and accessible institutional website.

What if the real problem with Content Management Systems (CMSs) is the Content Management System itself, or rather that the interface for content authors tries to teach them to think like a CMS? In this session, we’ll discuss how the user experience for content authors is broken, workarounds I’ve used to improve the experience, and where I think the future of content authoring will be.

As social media practitioners, we’re often searching for engagement on our platforms related to our products, services and overall brand. We sometimes are desperate for engagement that is user-generated content, appropriate to share and more importantly, able to respond. This session will focus on how through the application of the Theory/Law of Reciprocity allows brands on social media to be able to influence and increase engagement through interacting with followers and relevant content with the brand. Additionally, the session will showcase the ways University Housing and Dining at the University of Texas at Austin applies the law of reciprocity to create a shift from negative messages to positive messages around the brand.

Your institution probably has a dedicated section of its website, or a stand-alone website that helps recruit new students and guide them through the admissions process. Sometimes a faculty or School will have a similar section of the website that describes the application process and all the programs and requirements.
These sections and websites often play the role of the digital front door of your institution. The first touch-point that a potential student has when they’re researching which school to attend. And while higher education websites also need to speak to current students, faculty, and staff, more and more we expect the primary goal of this type of site to be to attract potential students.

But it’s an oversimplification to imagine that you can design a website with only one target persona. You’re likely looking at two very distinct user journeys with this type of website: potential students who know about your institution from its reputation and want to apply, and students who have never heard of your institution.

With Canadian universities and colleges trying to attract a more international audience, we are further trying to speak to that second group. We can’t necessarily assume that potential students know about our institution and why they would want to attend.

In this session, we’ll talk about:

• The difference between a one-time campaign to achieve a goal vs building content that builds long-term awareness
• The goal of the website and how it serves the purpose
• Web governance over content and navigation
• How to create web content that creates awareness and builds reputation
• The role of lead-generation content in your admissions website
• How to speak to the target audience like Millennials end and Generation Z and the difference in techniques and platforms
• How to adapt lead-generation techniques to the higher education context
• Efficient ways of creating and improving on your evergreen content, and its role in reputation building and converting potential applicants to applicants

According to the 2020 HTTP Archive State of the Web report, a typical web page uses only 25% of available HTML elements. Two of the most common elements in use include the non-semantic <div> and <span>, leaving these two web development instructors in a state of despair.

We decided to create a 30-day HTML education course targeted at professional web developers. This course would be delivered by email and feature one or two elements per day. Unlike most HTML education, we instead created a course in HTML vocabulary and accessibility, rather than in HTML coding.

Furthermore, we decided to run the course through email using Substack, an email platform that also creates blog posts. We found email to be a highly effective delivery method for the course materials, as registration was easy, lesson delivery was automated, and developers could work through materials at their own pace.

Similar to other universities, McGill University’s websites are managed by a large, decentralized network of site mangers, many of whom have competing priorities to juggle and only a fraction of their work week to spend making web updates. Unsurprisingly, many have difficulty prioritizing tasks, including taking time to improve site accessibility.

To empower staff to treat accessibility-related improvements as must-do updates, we realized an institution-wide understanding of the importance of these requirements was needed.

So we planned and launched an education and outreach strategy that places a strong emphasis on community. This includes a number of grassroots initiatives, like our community info-sessions, accessibility hackathon, our team of accessibility auditors managed and staffed by students, and numerous connected working groups. Attend our presentation to hear about our efforts, the outcomes, and lessons learned.

With the pandemic moving us online, we had to rethink our recruitment strategy at Ontario Tech University and dive into digital recruitment advertising for the first time. We learned a lot in this past year about advertising to Gen Z and focused our efforts on meeting them where they’re at virtually: TikTok and Snapchat. In this session, we’ll share our experiences with the following:

• What we found in our research about Gen Z’s communication and advertising preferences.
• Generating ideas and creating content for our audience on TikTok and Snapchat.
• Navigating relationships with key university stakeholders to get approval and content submissions for the types of content we wanted to put out.
• Creating content in a virtual environment that didn’t allow for in-person video production.

We’ll also share examples of the content we created as we present the challenges and successes of our first year of digital recruitment efforts and what we learned along the way.

Don’t forget about the digital magazine! A refrain we have repeated many times over the years. At the outset of every issue of the magazine we ask, what can we do for the online version? How are we going to make the online version as compelling as the print version?

UofTMed is an alumni magazine like no other. Bold, ambitious and lively, we dive into medicine’s most pressing topics.

Produced largely in-house, the magazine is published twice a year and goes out to approximately 35,000 graduates.

Diversity and inclusion are more and more top of mind, and incoming students are looking at potential schools not just in terms of the programs they offer, but also their values and the makeup of their student body. Your brand is partly defined by the people who make up your community, and student recruitment is one place where inclusive design is increasingly important. Admissions is the gateway to your institution, so it’s important to think about who you’re speaking to through your digital channels. In this presentation, we’ll present ideas about:

• Usability testing to represent diverse voices
• Creating a digital recruitment strategy that truly promotes inclusion
• How to use personas without denying the diversity of your users
• Reflecting diversity through digital storytelling
• The importance of content accessibility and plain language in inclusive design

Emails, push notifications, text messages, phone calls, our lives are filled with distractions from every angle. For some, the solution is as simple as unplugging for a bit and focusing. But what about those of us whose job requires us to live online? For social media managers, turning off distractions might seem like an impossibility. However, finding distraction-free time is absolutely vital for both our work and our mental health. In this session, we will discuss methods of cutting distractions, increasing focus, and managing to get work done when we work in an industry that constantly has new demands for our attention.

The world was already changing, and COVID-19 accelerated things. Last year, we were all forced to move our enrollment activities online quickly. This shift allowed us to pull off things we never thought possible. Now that there is a light at the end of the tunnel (🤞🏼), simply going back to the way things were before won’t work. So, what comes next?

This talk will look at how other industries have handled the shift from brick-and-mortar to online while keeping their in-person operations engaging—and make parallels to the higher education sector. After you finish watching, you’ll have at least one idea to incorporate into your new normal.

We love workshops for collecting user data and engaging project participants, whether remotely or in person. Here’s why:

1. Workshops help get feedback from more diverse groups (not just the ones who are physically available or “good at meetings”)
2. Workshops can effortlessly manage contributions from big groups (because the only thing worse than a 30-person “meeting” is trying to reconcile contradictions from a bajillion individual interviews)
3. Workshops are participant-driven (so it’s easy to avoid automatic yesses and interviewer bias)
4. Workshops are memorable (by exploring and deciding things collaboratively, participants remember big decisions and the logic behind them)

Ready to learn more? In this presentation, we’ll…

• Give you tried-and-true tips for a successful session (whether it’s online or in-person)
• Help you figure out when to have a workshop instead of a meeting
• Explore workshop formats for collecting user, stakeholder, and expert input
• Give you tried-and-true tips for a successful session (whether it’s online or in-person)

You’ve got a problem. No, really, you do.

Sure, it’s an innocent, easy-to-overlook one, but it’s costing your institution tens, hundreds – possibly even thousands of your best-fit students each and every year.

That problem is the Insight Gap – the chasm between what it’s really like to be part of your institution and what a prospective student perceives it to be like from your current website and communications channels.

Regardless of how good your versions of these channels are, none of them truly capture the magic moments that happen on campus. None of them can authentically replicate the feeling, sense of identity, or inclusiveness that makes your institution unique.

See? Told you it was a problem.

In this session, you’ll appreciate why the experience of being part of your institution is what makes you stand-out, you’ll understand why the Insight Gap is potentially a huge problem for you (even if you’ve only just heard of it), and you’ll discover a brand new strategy to enable your community of students, staff, and alumni to safely and efficiently share their experiences and close that gap; Experience Communications Management (XCM).

If you want to help your prospects make more informed, confident, and smarter decisions about their education, this is the session for you!

The social media team launched a campaign on Instagram “Tell us what you streamed in 2020, and we’ll tell you which courses to take”. The goal of the campaign was to engage with students, while promoting a variety of Laurier courses that students might not know we offer. We used the question box feature from Instagram on Stories, and we expected anywhere from 10-30 responses based on other user-generated campaigns. We received 173 submissions from our Laurier community, primarily students. Because of the success, we turned the social campaign into a roundup article on the student’s homepage, which featured some of the most interesting responses and connections to Laurier courses. “Tell us what you streamed” is especially interesting because we normally take web articles and stories and push them out on social — not the other way around, where social campaigns influence stories on the web.

Further, to help maximize the article’s potential, we used a new web template called “All The Things”, which allows for more web content blocks, images, and GIFs; ultimately appealing to our student population.

The campaign was so successful on both web and social, that the local media picked it up without being pitched the story. As a team, we were then able to promote the media attention via social, giving this campaign legs for an entire month. “Tell us what you streamed” shows the importance of meeting students where they are, speaking their language, and appealing to their interests.

Recent employee surveys reveal staff members with flexible work environments are happier in their jobs. As a remote employee for the last seven years, Ashley knows the benefits and challenges. When you’re working remotely, team success is dependent on strong project management and communication skills. Ashley will share what she has learned about building teams, leveraging tools, and staying connected from a distance.

When McMaster University announced an online term for Fall 2020, our website redevelopment went from being a “nice to have” to one of our most important and urgent projects of the year.

Developing a new website while simultaneously maintaining the current website in the middle of a pandemic is like renovating your home while living in it — and working in it — during quarantine. Unexpected needs from leadership, staff and students resulted in adjustments to goals, timelines, and project deliverables.

The website redevelopment project was a complex, unpredictable, but deeply satisfying project worth every bit of TLC put into it. Even launching at 70% complete, we delivered a build-your-own-home-page experience and 100+ student stories and publications accessible through traditional and holistic navigation options. Then, in Fall 2020, we integrated a new “virtual front desk” live chat operated by staff and students resulting in an 86% increase in page views within the first six months of launching.

How did we do it? Attend this session, and we’ll share it all, including our most valuable research, our strategies towards engaging staff and students in the build, and a template of our full process from research to launch (should you ever wish to do it yourself!).

In this session we would share the approach we’ve taken to bring cohesion and collaboration to a fragmented social media presence at our college. We will discuss the strategies, training and tools that we’ve put in place to support a network of more than 75 social media managers across our institution. Further we will discuss how this work has helped foster a consistent sense of branding across our more than 200 social media channels and how it is now starting to create a level of participation and collaboration not seen before.

We hope you will leave feeling inspired to end your social media isolation and connect with others at your institution to build a stronger voice for your college or university.

Have you considered creating a newsletter for your internal department? Are you thinking of one for your external communities?

In this session I will share how I created my first newsletter for our internal staff to increase engagement with library news, contribute to community building amongst colleagues, and the types of content that performed well.

I will take you through my newsletter platform of choice, design choices and also how it inspired newsletter ideas for additional audiences.

Join this session for newsletter development inspiration and conversation!

Accessibility is a common priority for web development but often overlooked when it comes to content creation for social media. As social media professionals, there are easy things we can do to make sure the content we produce and the way we deliver it is accessible for everyone, including disabled users.

Topics of discussion will include:

• Tips for copywriting and hashtags
• Strategic emoji usages
• Best practices for writing alt text
• Easy ways to captions videos

And other ways to easily make your social media presence more accessible.

Every generation the classics make a comeback. Frameworks are what all of the cool kids have been doing these last few years, but as of January all modern browsers support web components. It’s time for HTML to make a comeback. Web components are about to rock your world whether you’re a web developer or a user of the web. In this session you’ll learn what web components are, why your institution should use them, why dynamic imports allow them to load faster than any framework, and how anyone, ANYONE can use them with just a little bit of HTML knowledge.

It’s a challenge to build a user experience that works for every student. As students go through the journey of researching schools, applying, and accepting, and finally attending a school, their needs change.

Starting college or university is exciting but scary. There are so many things to consider and so many programs being offered, that the process can be overwhelming for potential students. Meanwhile, returning students want easy access to resources and services from across campus at their fingertips.

While designing a great navigation, clear calls to action, and engaging landing pages is incredibly important, a great search experience can make or break the experience. If users don’t find what they’re looking for, they might assume that it doesn’t exist.

An effective search experience is especially important as universities and colleges often have large, content-heavy websites, that have to support a search experience across multiple websites, with more advanced search features for programs and courses content.

In this session, we’ll walk through the process of designing a successful search experience that delivers on user expectations. We’ll talk about:

• Ensuring that the search experience is accessible
• Mapping out search experience pathways
• Inviting users to search
• Creating highly searchable content with metadata and taxonomy
• Designing engaging search results
• Selecting the search features that users actually need

A guide to Google’s latest ranking signal, Page experience. Mike will cover the components of the new ranking signal, how it will affect you and how you can prepare for it.

Key takeaways you’ll learn –

• How to test and optimise your website for the new page experience ranking signal
• A guide to Google’s latest algorithm update
• Understand who it will affect and how – designers, developers and marketers

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, universities are working hard to keep their communities informed about the continually changing situation. Our participants from last year’s COVID-19 Communications Panel return to discuss their experiences and the impact on how we communicate with our audiences.

How have the communications challenges we encounter evolved over the past year? What tools and strategies have we developed? What lessons have we learned?

Attend our panel discussion to hear communications leaders from across the country discuss these topics and more.

Six in 10 students say that, of all companies they engage with online, their college is the furthest behind in personalizing their experience. And less than one in three see their college providing clear career pathways. Modern learners want a highly personalized, “right for me” digital experience with their institution, and one that provides highly relevant information to help them understand what programs and courses they should take to meet their career goals. Join us to learn how to use your website to drive engagement and enrollment growth, and in the process engage modern learners for a lifetime.

We all know we need to ask people before taking their picture or shooting a video. But… do we?

Starting from legislation and looking at actual legal cases, a drilling-down into why consent is important (even when your subject is “in public”), shocking truths about consent practices on campuses across Canada, and a report on a pilot project to reinvent how consent is managed and stored.

Can you believe Facebook and Twitter are already teenagers at 17 and 15 years each? With that much time and evolution, it can be tough to know whether you’re still putting in the right effort and time to reach the right audience. This workshop will use the framework of Dr. Josie Ahlquist’s Digital Community Building Cohort to showcase how you can build community on Facebook and Twitter. Get ready to do a deep dive on the guiding principles of creating platforms with purpose, including key functions, ways to tap into demographics, pros and cons to the channels now and how to make your digital engagement intentional, inclusive, interactive and impactful.

Participants will walk away with:

• Examples of community engagement across post-secondary education and outside of our industry to inspire your content ideas beyond this workshop
• A new perspective on platform-specific community building
• A better understanding of platform key functionality and the evolution of what’s available to reach your audiences now
• The chance to ask questions in a group setting to collaborate on your own framework to build community on Twitter and Facebook

Convincing content is essential to the success of your digital strategy and your website. Your content needs to speak to your target audiences, follow your brand’s tone of voice, and comply with accessibility standards and SEO best practices. And because new content is constantly being written, you need a content governance plan. But if you want to improve your content, where do you start? How can you effectively assess your content and start making the most high-impact improvements? In this workshop, we’ll delve into tools and techniques that will help you revamp your content strategy.

Topics will include:

• Putting in place a content governance plan
• Running a content audit (high-level and granular)
• Tools for assessing your content to improve style, accessibility, SEO, and inclusiveness
• Content revamp toolkit
• How to make your content more engaging

When the Pandemic hit last year, some of us decided to have a little bit of fun with the Zoom background feature. That one small feature set me on an adventure through time, space, and pop culture that kept me connected and coping. Journey with me as I share what I learned about how one small technology feature can impact us and how we can impact others through our own small explorations.

In this session we will share how Fanshawe College (Canada’s Top Music School, Canadian Music and Broadcast Industry Awards) has leveraged Spotify as part of our social media strategy.

Included in this session will be a case study on our “Quaran-tunes playlist” multi-platform campaign (www.fanshawec.ca/blog/quaran-tunes) and other components of our Spotify strategy (past and future).

The “Quaran-tunes” playlist was created to positively mark the one year anniversary of the the first pandemic lockdown in Ontario. Fanshawe wanted to create something our community could enjoy, while also supporting alumni and students whose musical endeavours were upended by the pandemic.

In this session you will hear how we created this playlist and the social and traditional media campaign around it. You will also get insight into the other collaborative components of our Spotify strategy that rely on support and engagement from colleagues, students and alumni.

Neurodiversity is important and is not as often included in accessibility conversations. As many as one in five users will be neurodiverse. In fact, I’m neurodiverse and receive disability accommodations because I have ADHD.

From autism to ADHD, dyspraxia to OCD, the range of experiences can be vast, varying from issues with reading, understanding instructions, and executive functioning. This can affect how neurodiverse users experience elements such as workflows, complex information, time limit requirements, and task completion.

By designing your content and user experiences to be mindful of the neurodiverse, you make your products and applications more accessible to all.

Learning objectives:

• How to advocate for user across the spectrum
• Understand the neurodiverse spectrum and cognitive accessibility
• Examples of common content patterns that challenge neurodiverse users and how to address them
• How to include neurodiversity in user research and testing

How do you get 1700 staff members who manage 900 websites on the same page when it comes to web strategy and standards compliance? When we, the Digital Communications team at McGill University, asked ourselves this question, one obvious answer was improved web governance. But the journey to effective web governance at a large, decentralized institution isn’t an easy one.

In 2020 we took our first step towards improved web governance with the launch of our revamped Digital Standards – our project to reposition and promote our established web policies, best practices and requirements in a concise, user-friendly format.

With this first phase now active, we’ve begun to roll out initiatives to help us manage adherence to our standards on an institution-wide level. These initiatives involve changes to wide-ranging elements of our web presence – from platform updates, to the introduction of new practices, to redefining, and in some cases introducing, roles and responsibilities. In all cases, we’ve stuck to our goal to keep our resulting processes and documentation as simple and user-friendly as possible.
Attend our presentation to hear about our progress, from research and planning to implementation and the lessons we’ve learned along the way.

Results from a recent LinkedIn survey in partnership with SimpsonScarborough understanding the new and current student mindset post-COVID. During the session we will explore:

• How the interest of Canadians pursuing Higher Ed has changed
• How prospective students wish to pursue further education (in-person, hybrid, online)
• Which factors are most important to prospective students when selecting a Higher Ed Institution
• The impact of COVID-19 on their desired education outcomes

Attendees will learn how to craft their marketing strategy to communicate to the new wave of students.

How do you create a smooth, persuasive journey from exploration to application…when that journey passes through seven different teams spread across four functional silos (not counting 20ish faculties and schools)?

Through structured collaboration, skillful delegation, user data, and a lot of elbow grease! Our small, multidisciplinary team replaced two overgrown websites with a concise, user-focused resource and a completely revamped program finding tool (including new content for over 250 programs). In the process, we became a unifying force across disparate marketing and recruitment activities like online ads, email marketing, support services, and events.

In this presentation, we share the project management techniques and data points we used to make it happen.

Google is updating its search ranking algorithm in May 2021 to include page experience signals. These signals include core web vitals (largest contentful paint, first input delay, cumulative layout shift), mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines (popups).

What does this mean for your website? If your website provides a fantastic user experience, Google will reward you with higher rankings (=more organic traffic), and vice versa.

What does this mean for you as a web professional? It’s a fantastic opportunity for you to push harder for the updates to web content and design that your higher ed institution has been slow to get around to, because the increase or decrease in organic traffic can affect your bottom line.

In this presentation, I will provide an overview of each page experience signal, how to measure and take stock of your current state, and what you can do to optimize your page experience.

Some of us go to great lengths to understand and truly get to know our audiences. Through community management and regular engagement, to audience research and user testing. There are many ways that we can – and already do – seek to know them better and empathise with them through our content.

But what don’t we know about them? What are the mysteries yet to be uncovered that might actually hold the key that will take our engagement strategies from great to outstanding. What are they not saying? What are they not sharing? What’s hidden from plain sight, and leading us on a path of assumption and belief, instead of truly knowing and fully understanding?

In this session we’ll explore the power of supercharging your curiosity to really have you sniff out the truth about your audiences. We’ll take an ontological approach that will help us to see what’s beneath the surface, or right under your nose that you might not be seeing or might be afraid to explore.

Our students are people first. How do we create social content that recognizes and celebrates this?

York University’s CASE Circle of Excellence award-winning 2019 Mother’s Day video project tapped into an emotional and very-real celebration of three young mothers, who also just happen to be York students.

In this session we will explore the planning and execution of this video, with a particular lens on how to create and foster personal, authentic, and emotional social content that supports your brand story, reputation and values.

Are you a marketing/communications team of one to a mid-large sized department? Have you considered forming a communications working group to reach more of your organization goals?

In this session, I will share how I work with a team of librarians and staff to coordinate communications tools and initiatives focused on our communities.

I will take you through the formation of this group, it’s purpose, some examples of what we’ve accomplished so far (from managing the storm of COVID-19 communications requests to reassessing and organizing our wealth of communication channels), and professional development lessons I’ve learned along the way.

Since its launch in 2014, the #RoadToRyerson campaign has been redefining digital new student engagement by making the incoming students themselves the storytellers.

For 5 years, #RoadToRyerson chose 5 incoming students to document their transition to university during the summer leading up to their first year at Ryerson. The campaign has always been a big hit, but Ryerson’s Storytelling team knew that in digital media, stagnant = death.

So in 2019, we asked ourselves a very important question…

What if… it was time for a change? What if we took a risk this year? We wanted to hear from more than just 5 incoming students. We wanted more stories and we wanted more ways to tell those stories.

This past summer, for the first time in history, Ryerson’s @RUStudentLife Storytelling team collaborated with its entire incoming class to generate digital content to create a successful campaign to build up to new student orientation!

In this session, we will cover what inspired this change, how we made it work, and show plenty of examples of the unbelievable student-generated content.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put communications at the forefront of our day-to-day experience. Ongoing developments concerning methods for learning and working, physical distancing measures, university operations, and countless policies and procedures have resulted in an endless stream of announcements, supporting documents and resources.

What unique communications challenges have we encountered during this time? What lessons have we learned? What lasting impact will this experience have on how we communicate with our audiences?

Attend our panel discussion to hear communications leaders from across the country discuss these topics and more.

For most of us, there are few decisions in life more complex, expensive, or impactful than the college choice.

The process is highly emotional, fraught with anxiety, and influenced by many sources of information. As digital marketing and web professionals, we must understand the factors that drive this important choice — as well as the thoughts and emotions our target audiences experience — in order to develop empathy for the groups that we serve.

Enter the prospective student experience map — an effective tool that represents the interactions prospects have with your institution during their college choice and selection.

During this session, you’ll learn: the basics of experience mapping, the seven benefits of an experience map, and how it can impact your digital marketing strategy. We’ll showcase examples from institutions that uncovered major process and content gaps as a result of experience mapping, causing them to lose their top applicants. We promise — the results will shock you.

No time to measure? No time to be strategic about measurement? You’re not alone!

Time is the most precious commodity for higher ed digital professionals with so many (added) responsibilities on their plate. But, if you don’t take the time to consider and implement strategic measurement, one of the best time management tool you can use, you will never get out of this infernal “cycle of more.”

In this presentation, you will see how you can reclaim your time, sanity and ultimately your creativity by adopting and adapting a sound measurement strategic process for your work. The simple framework, success stories and best practices shared in this session will get you ready to play a fun and engaging measurement strategy game.

Post-secondary institutions are made up of teams whose priorities and tasks can overlap without the other knowing. Breaking down barriers is key to improving communication, efficiency and output.

Hear how Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC) aligned our Marketing and Communications, Recruitment and Alumni Relations teams for better content creation and distribution.

Learn how NSCC:

• measures and shares success within the College to build internal engagement and continuous participation
• defines roles, assigns ownership and clarifies expectations (without offending anyone)
• leverages online tools (i.e. Trello) to make the content creation process more efficient
• creates a college-wide content calendar with continuous input from multiple departments across 14 campuses
• identifies opportunities for content collaboration

When confronted with the reality of overhauling a public website with over 17000 pages, built on an out-of-date CMS, filled with customized functionality, and managed by hundreds of manual processes, NAIT’s small Web Team realized that it needed to start thinking differently.

Rather than approaching the project as a website redesign, they focused on building an ecosystem with modular components, automatic systems integrations, and content syndication to enable rapid development for their public website (and the unexpected projects that came up along the way).

Your audience makes the choice to follow your content  …but what if you could take that choice and turn it into an interactive adventure that builds community, encourages engagement, and builds your brand identity?

In October 2019, I hosted a Halloween-themed Choose Your Own Adventure via Instagram Stories that allowed students to vote each day to progress the story of a deadly zombie apocalypse on campus. 11 days and over 3000 votes later, we had a campus wide story that had students eager to participate in our content daily.

The tools available to us as digital creators can be bent in novel ways to foster a community of students who are driven to engage in our content and to identify with our brand. This session focuses on how to successfully execute this type of long-form engagement by understanding your audience, embracing their uniqueness (young, energetic students: we are a lucky bunch!), and creating content that reflects this audience.

Our monthly newsletter was a pain in the butt. Its purpose of letting people know about the stories we’d written and the events we were planning was noble. But the process of sending it was tedious.

Our content expert would pick articles and events to include from our website. That makes sense. But then someone had to cobble together the summaries, images, and links into an HTML template that would (hopefully) look professional and (hopefully) not break the internet.

Technical and administrative issues like this get in the way of the core, strategic communication work our teams do. If we take the time to improve our processes and develop tools to take care of those tasks we can put our communications experts back in the driving seat where they belong.

In the case of our newsletter, those bad times are behind us. We taught our CMS (WordPress) how to generate the code for the newsletter on its own. Now our content expert can quickly pick the articles and events they want to include, click a button or two, and then copy the finished message’s code into our email campaign manager. It’s a small tweak that makes a big difference.

We’ll show you how we did it, and how it helps us focus on what’s important. Come for the specific example, stay for the bigger picture of working together to find ways to break down roadblocks and supercharge the important communications work we do.

This session will show how communications teams working in an ever-changing environment with constantly shifting requirements and priorities can achieve the following:

• Reliable and faster delivery
• Minimizing wasted time and effort, while maintaining an environment for reliable quality
• Empowering teams to improve their processes on a regular basis
  Thoughtful prioritization of tasks

During this presentation, I’ll share details of our experience assisting small communication teams (3-9 members) that are experimenting with adopting ‘Agile’.

Although primarily used in software development, Agile has also been successfully adopted by other industries including the communications field, notably at NPR.

Supporting article: Agile isn’t only for IT

Content strategy at universities is hard. As higher ed marketers, we have the seemingly impossible task of pulling together cohesive brand stories in siloed environments with many stakeholders, multiple competing priorities, unforeseen issues, and lean budgets.

In this presentation, Houston White, UBC’s Digital Marketing Strategist, will share wins and lessons from the first year of UBC’s new content strategy. With specific content examples and real data, he’ll walk through what worked (and what didn’t) and look ahead at what’s to come. You’ll leave inspired to try something new and armed with insights that you can incorporate into your own content planning.

Starting a restaurant with no menu and no recipes in mind would be quite a challenge. The same thing applies when you build a website: before sending orders to the kitchen, you need to write your website’s recipe. This session is about how user research and content strategy will help you create a good recipe that your users will like!

Ouvrir un restaurant sans menu et sans recette n’est peut-être pas la meilleure idée. C’est la même chose lorsqu’on tente de créer un site Web : avant de commencer à cuisiner nos contenus, il est important d’avoir une recette de base. Cette présentation portera sur comment la recherche utilisateur et la stratégie de contenu vous aidera à créer de meilleures recettes que vos utilisateurs aimeront!

Have you ever felt stymied trying to narrow down and articulate your core messages, key benefits and features of your courses and programs? Are you unsure how to position your offerings, and the best way to communicate these benefits to your audiences?

With the help of plenty of examples from UBC Extended Learning, learn frameworks and approaches to bringing “voice of student” into your marketing communications. Learn step-by-step how to craft messages that resonate with students, and which channels and content are the best way to deliver these messages.

Imagine someone gifts you a generous budget for digital and social media ads to support three new priorities.

Sounds awesome, right?

But what if:

• You’re already halfway through the recruitment cycle?
• Your clients don’t understand the basics of Search Engine Optimization (hello mobile responsive websites!)?
• Their tolerance for risk taking was low?
• The product you’re promoting is totally untested (or incomplete!)?
• Your web environment isn’t set up for successful analytics?

It happened to us! But, we took away three important lessons about digital and social media marketing in our small corner of the university that we’re using to make continued improvements.

1. Data is your friend (especially if you’re working with mathematicians!)
2. Incremental change can better than none at all – even if it’s relationship building, not results.
3. Find your champions!

The wins were small, but important for us as a new and growing team. I’m excited to share, and to hear about the lessons others have learned from their failed experiments!

Over the past few months, Higher Education has experienced unprecedented challenges with events, recruitment and online learning. During this session, the LinkedIn Higher Education team will use platform insights to provide marketing recommendations to overcome these challenges.

The session will focus on:

• How to build relationships & recruit prospective students through virtual events
• How to cope with international student deferrals & dropouts by nurturing domestic student applications
• How to capitalize on the trends towards online learning relative to the new student experience

This short presentation is a small glimpse into the library of LinkedIn Higher Education insights available. Want more? Every month we host a webinar as part of the LinkedINsider series. Register for our next session where we discuss how to leverage your faculty as Thought Leaders: https://higheredlinkedinsiderseriesep2.splashthat.com/

At McGill University, 1700 staff manage 900 sites that generate 10 million page views per month.

McGill’s new digital standards define our criteria for building sites in areas such as usability, accessibility, brand adherence, security and more, condensed in a succinct, user-friendly format.

These nine standards are aimed at helping staff build better sites that provide positive experiences for site visitors. Find out how we produced and launched this initiative and the results.

Redesigning the homepage of a major institution is tricky. McGill’s last few redesigns had been +/-6 years apart, and in 2018, we were past due. So for 2019, we redesigned (and launched!) our homepage TWICE.

We learned a lot, and we got to test our assumptions: about collaboration, about stakeholder management, about user needs, and about what the heck a University homepage is really for. Now we can share those nuggets of wisdom!

You might think that you don’t have time to do user testing. You’re scared what you’ll see if you watch people use your website, think you already know how your users behave based on analytics, or believe that you don’t have time for UX research. In fact, there are lots of easy ways to use UX techniques to improve your digital experience and the user journey.

In this presentation, I’ll guide you through a toolbox of lean UX research techniques: Identifying personas, user testing, mapping user journeys. We’ll use real-life case studies from our work with Princeton University and McGill University to show you how we mapped out how students select their top school and pick the program that’s right for them. You’ll also learn how user research can guide how your approach to personalization.

As the University of Waterloo’s international student population grows, our new student transition strategy has evolved to go beyond relaying traditional new student information to focusing on answering Canadian lifestyle questions and cultivating community.

Even during COVID-19, it’s not just about applying for study permits and academic
preparedness, it’s also about learning Canadian currency, grocery shopping and getting your driver’s license. But, what’s the value? In the session, I’ll share why we chose this approach, what the effects have been, and what we’ve learned from integrating it into two key projects:

1. International Student Guide
2. International Live Chats

Spoiler alert! The result has been high engagement from students and staff, as well as a Case District II Award.

In a world of endless digital content and platforms, how do we, as post secondary institutions, break through the noise, engage our audiences, and ultimately drive conversions?

In this presentation, we will show you how you can identify your audiences most in need of digital engagement, present ways to develop content that best speaks to them, and discuss digital dissemination tactics so you can meet them where they are.

We will walk you through the case study of McGill24, McGill’s annual day of giving. This year, after surveying past donors and reviewing four years of data and trends, we set out to build targeted campaigns for four key audiences under the umbrella of the global McGill24 campaign. We used video, email and social to speak to our four key audiences authentically and developed segmented promotional strategies to meet them where they were. 12 videos, several emails and one integrated digital advertising campaign later, the strategy paid off with our best day of giving results to date.

You will leave this session with new strategies to break through the myriad of digital noise, equipped with tactics to identify, reach and authentically speak to your people.

In 2019, McGill University’s Research + Innovation (R+I) unit launched an ambitious plan to revitalize the University’s signature public talk, the 65-year old Beatty Lecture. With audiences in sharp decline, we decided to use the powerful story of the lecture’s origins and roster of iconic speakers to renew the brand and strengthen its reputation among target audiences.

In this presentation, you will learn how to use your institution’s heritage and one-of-a-kind stories to raise brand awareness and engagement as we walk you through R+I’s award winning Beatty Lecture Revitalization Project, which culminated in a sold-out lecture delivered by conservation icon Jane Goodall.

Robin Koning, R+I’s Digital Marketing & Outreach Associate, who is also a trained archivist, will share insights into how to create valuable digital assets out of untapped, content-rich material held in institutional archives and use them in your digital marketing efforts. Gregory Houston, New Media & Digitization Administrator in McGill Library’s Digital Initiatives unit, and a project partner, will delve into the tech side and explain how his unit provided resources for interactive digital exhibition development that helped make content come alive.

Specific topics covered during the session will include: collaboration, story development, website redesign, video production, digitization of photographic and audiovisual material, digital touch tables (e.g. Intuiface) and dealing with copyright/access/privacy laws.

In post-secondary marketing, we’re often looking for the newest digital marketing tool and trending social media platform to reach prospective students, but what if your target market isn’t 18-24 urban youth? Who are we unintentionally omitting with this technology-based approach? At North West College, our average student is a 27-year-old Indigenous single mother of 1-3 children coming from a community of 500-1000 people. How do you reach her?

This session explores learner-centered marketing based on quantitative analyses of historical student data and how — as a public institution — to effectively employ an Indigenous worldview to optimize post-secondary marketing and the critical role of community engagement in successful student conversion.

The higher ed digital experience is becoming an increasingly complicated space. With website features competing for scarce resources, finding a way to understand the value each offers is a challenging and mission-critical task.

This session is about a technique where you monetize behavioural metrics to understand how each bit of functionality is contributing to the business of your institution. It’s based on the configuration and customization of Google Analytics data displayed in Google Data Studio.

Social influencers are one of the top trends in social media marketing! But being able to successfully execute an influencer campaign can come with a hefty price tag that forces many to let it be.

Learn how York University was able to come together to leverage micro-influencers in a budget-friendly way to achieve macro results.

In this session, you will learn the strategy, coordination, execution, key findings and results from York’s campaign to help you navigate the long winding road and supply the ticket to ride a similar campaign at your institution.

This session will explore the art of good storytelling and the various ways a story can be shared with your audience. Using video, photography, photo essays, digital illustrations, student profiles, animation – and for some exceptional stories, the combination of these methods – to create a multimedia experience, allows and encourages consumers to reflect and feel, creating connections that makes your content memorable and fosters community across campus.

The creation of digital media projects that help your audience to engage with their own narratives – past, current or future – humanizes content that can otherwise appear tailored or corporatized. Of course, not every school, faculty, department or one-stop-shop communication extraordinaire can support high-budget, cinematic productions: these projects can be executed in many different ways, video is not the only way to engage with your target audience.

The purpose of this session is to prove that you can do powerful, low-budget storytelling yourself – building on the resources and talents that you already have access to. Find some students. Listen to what they have to say! Our campuses are alive with stories that are inspiring, powerful, funny and relatable – might I even say, emotion-inducing? – they just need the right person to come along and tell them. Harness the power of multimedia storytelling and you can be that person.

Drupal is a powerful tool for building rich digital experiences. Drupal projects often revolve around producing, displaying and organizing content effectively. This course will walk you through the process of creating an effective user experience and content strategy, and planning out how to implement that strategy in Drupal. Whether you’re creating a brand new website, migrating to Drupal, or improving on an existing project, you’ll learn techniques that will help you build a solid content strategy and a user experience that speaks to your audiences.

You’ll come away from the course with knowledge of:

• Defining your audiences and their objectives
• Content inventories and audits
• Analyzing content from a Drupal perspective
• Translating client and business needs into an information architecture
• Strategies for using taxonomies and landing pages effectively
• Creating a great experience for content editor

Trainer: Suzanne Dergacheva

Suzanne is passionate about helping organizations adopt Drupal and making it easy to use. She enjoys opening people’s minds to what they can build with Drupal, whether their background is in web, marketing or elsewhere. She has given Drupal training to teams across North America and around the world, including teams at the University of Toronto, Georgia Tech, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Government of Canada, and numerous web agencies.

Suzanne is an elected member of the Drupal Association Board and frequently makes presentations at professional events about development best practices and user experience. Suzanne is also the co-founder and Drupal Practice Lead at Evolving Web, a digital agency in Montreal. She loves travelling around helping teams learn Drupal, and making friends and exploring new cities in the process.

The McGill Office for Science and Society (OSS) is celebrating its 20th year. The office has always been one with a mandate to “separate sense from nonsense” on the scientific stage, but with the advent of social media and “fake news” now a regular part of our existence, our work has now become an inevitable component of any organization.

As such, our content has to be topical, (both reactive and proactive to what is covered in the news), factual, and far-reaching. While the OSS is still small in number, over the last decade we have completely changed our web presence, branding, and created social media platforms that we now rely upon to channel activity on our site.

Emily, Communications and Public Affairs Director of the OSS, will discuss this “evolution” and also present some of our current data and trends demonstrating what does best and (perhaps) why in today’s media and social landscape.

Oh the post-it; perfect, yellow, beloved tool of facilitators, designers, and stationary enthusiasts alike! How could such a simple sticky piece of paper be improved upon?

At a time when most of us are working remotely, how can we find a substitute for this transformative instrument? In this practical how-to session, I’ll show you the case for leveraging digital post-it software such as Google’s Jamboard to ideate, iterate, and move your projects forward in meaningful ways. By the end of this session, you’ll learn how to use Jamboard with your teams for UX mapping, design sprints, and collaborative projects, and how to convert even your most diehard post-it lovers to this digital platform. As a bonus, you’ll also learn a few facilitation games to turn those “To Dos” into “Ta Dahs”!

(Julia Beltrano est bilingue, cette session peut aussi être offerte en Français)

From a marketing perspective, how much authenticity about the challenges of student mental health is too much? In this session, a panel of three postsecondary communications professionals will share examples of student work that provoked discussion; debate the pros and cons of curating this type of sensitive content; and consider how the positioning of our specific institutions and departments affects how we make these decisions. We will also open up the floor for questions and discussion amongst the room.

For many universities, engaging alumni can be a challenge. Alumni care about their alma mater, but they lead busy lives, have their own social and professional networks, and may live thousands of kilometres away.

As stewards of the University of Toronto’s alumni social media channels, we’re tasked with finding creative ways to cut through the clutter and connect with more than 600,000 grads in 190+ countries – while upholding the University’s brand.

In this session, we will share our strategy for successfully leveraging trends, memes and lifestyle content to boost alumni engagement on social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter) within an institutional setting.

It’s one thing to have a great accessibility checklist, but checklists and testing tools often miss the mark on user experience. There are lots of subjective decisions to make when building an accessible website.

In this training, you’ll get hands-on experience using assistive technology and browser-based tools to understand how our decisions effect the user experience of those using assistive technologies.

Learn how to apply accessibility standards at the level of design, content, and code. Start developing the instincts to create more semantic websites throughout the lifecycle of a web project.

This talk will cover the following topics:

• Incorporating accessibility best practices into your workflow
• Accessibility terminology and concepts
• Understanding the relationship between web accessibility and user experience
• Design and content considerations for accessibility
• Identifying common accessibility issues at the code level
• Accessibility testing tools and assistive technologies

In early 2014, Fanshawe College realized that they needed to improve how they engaged with prospective students online. By completing extensive user experience (UX) research, including stakeholder interviews, surveys and focus groups, the Fanshawe team launched the second iteration of their current CMS driven website.

With a new iteration launching this year, we look back at how our online properties and our audience needs have evolved over the last six years. As marketers, we feel that we have a strong understanding of our audiences, however, nothing is more valuable than speaking to them directly and incorporating their feedback. The marriage between user feedback and user data helps us stay ahead of the changing technology landscape. Our team has built-in processes to accommodate shifts in online trends, platforms, and audience expectations.

In this session, you’ll hear about the surprising things that we learned along the way and how we are continuously improving our online interactions through the use of data.

Key Takeaways

• Practical tools and processes that your team can use to make better data-driven decisions.
• UX tactics you should use to gain a true understanding of your various audiences
• Using data (Google Tag Manager and Analytics) to continuously iterate and make improvements to your online properties

Who better to tell stories about your university than the students who live and breathe it? Students can be the university’s best communicators and relationship builders. They have the ability to talk about the university in an honest, authentic way that allows us to better connect with our community.

In this session, I will share how I work with a team of student content creators to develop digital initiatives focused on engaging our community.

I’ll lead you through examples of campaigns we’ve developed in the last year that had students (and staff) talking, increased our engagement on social media, and drove traffic to our student-driven website. Some examples will include:

• That time we made the school’s mascot disappear.
• That other time that we inspired the creation of student memes.

I will share how these ideas came about, the authorization and work required to make them happen, and the results they brought.

Move over omnichannel UX and augmented reality: content modelling is the hottest thing in website design at the moment, and for good reason.

It’s not a fad. It’s not particularly sexy. And it’s been around for ages. But content modelling has never been more vital to the digital services of our universities.

This session looks at what content modelling is, why it’s so important, and how to get started.

Most of our university content is in undifferentiated blobs in web pages and documents. By breaking it out into constituent, meaningful parts and defining the relationships between them, you have the foundations for everything that you want to do digitally (omnichannel UX and augmented reality included).

Prepare yourself to build services that are flexible, user-centric, efficient, scalable and future-proof. Your content can be accessible and compatible with any device in any context. Your teams will feel empowered, your content can evolve faster, and your designers will love you forever.

Learn how to get started, no matter where your content is currently at and what systems you are using. Whether it raises your temperature or not, content modelling will raise your game by laying the foundation for all your digital services, now and into the future.

Writing web content, planning events, creating handouts, brochures or posters? Content and details should be inclusive, but how do you consider various perspectives, make sure it is free from discriminatory language and consider equity and accessibility needs all at once?

The good news is you don’t have to be an inclusion expert to start incorporating inclusive language into your communications.

As a self-declared, ‘not an inclusion expert’, you’ll hear how working as a communications coordinator that supports departments like Student Equity, Student Accessibility, and Indigenous Education has taught me how to bringing inclusion into content.

This presentation will provide tools you can start to implement:

• How to correctly use content for Indigenous Peoples terminology
• Basic accessibility principles
• Gender-inclusive language

Delivering an outstanding student experience can be a challenge in a large, complex organization. Staff in different units are responsible for separate aspects of the experience and decision making is often a local activity.

A journey map is a design tool that can shift the conversation away from resources, constraints, and territory towards a student-centered discussion about experiences.

The map itself is a high level overview of a particular path a student may follow as they interact with different university offices and touchpoints. Seeing those interactions from the perspective of a student can empower staff to find opportunities to support students at the right time and in a good way. Building empathy across silos is of increasing importance as our institutions and student bodies become more diverse.

At the University of Saskatchewan, we took a group of 15 staff through a series of journey mapping workshops focusing on the incoming international graduate student experience. We will share key learnings from this exercise and in the course of this session, participants will:

• Learn about the role of journey maps in culture building and process improvement
• Create a simple journey map in a small group
• Reflect on the nature of change in higher education

At the University of Saskatchewan, the journey map approach was used in support of Strategic Enrolment Management goals, to build understanding amongst staff of a particular student demographic. The process itself is agnostic of the application however, and could be used to support retention efforts, inform service delivery, or in any instance where humanizing the experience and building consensus across units is of value.

In January 2017 I launched a monthly podcast at U of T Mississauga (UTM): VIEW to the U, An Eye on UTM Research.

At its most basic level, the mission for this podcast is to cover UTM research and profile UTM researchers. Our office wanted to provide new and fresh content, with a bit of a departure from print but also something slightly less involved than video.

The podcast genre has become an incredibly popular medium that can be accessed anywhere, and showcasing research and researchers in this way has the potential to attract students, trainees, and possible collaborators, it can keep alumni connected, as well as elicit outside attention from funders or media looking for a new story.

Is a podcast project in your future? I can speak to some of the surprises, snags and successes I’ve encountered along the way.