Yours truly and CSWD co-author Lance Johnson will be talking about how you can create an effective online web presence. You don’t need to be technically minded at all to get things out of our session. In fact, we aren’t talking about technical things at all – we are talking about the problems, goals, situations, and solutions that you deal with when creating a website for a Catholic school no matter what your role in the process is.

We’ve structured the presentation into a top 10 most important things that Catholic schools should know about building a website.

We hope to see you there!

If you are going it alone in your website development for your school, one thing to seriously consider is using a company that provides web services specifically for schools, like finalsite. Finalsite has been working with independent schools on their web presence and strategy for 12 years, and counts many Catholic schools are clients.

I got a chance to speak with Rob DiMartino, a director at finalsite, about finalsite, working with Catholic schools, and the challenges and technological opportunities facing schools today. Rob is also speaking at NCEA later this month in New Orleans. Check out the interview below, and also make sure to follow Rob on Twitter at @robdimartino.

CSWD: You’ve worked with a lot of schools one on one, and in your finalsite bio it mentions that you work to “maximize the internet experience” for schools. What do you mean by that?

Rob DiMartino: I think it’s a lot more than software and good luck. It’s a lot of mindset to tell you the truth. The internet has only been around for so long and a lot of schools are kind of stuck in the “that’s the way we’ve always done it” mode. So we really try and educate our schools on how to think differently – instead of pushing out messages to their audience, think about what their audiences want to hear. A lot of transparency, a lot of building efficiency, but also long-term planning as well because gone are the days of static view-book websites. It’s an interactive, engagement experience, so how do you embrace your audience, how do you engage them, and how do you add value to their day?

C: What sort of tools does finalsite provide that allows schools to make it an interactive and engaging experience for their audiences?

R: I think at a basic level – we started this about 12 years ago – it’s the content management tools. Was that an innovation before its time? Absolutely. People didn’t want to take control of their own content or control or their own destiny. But now its a must-have for everyone from schools to business to just a singer trying to get their information out on the web. You need to take control of a CMS. And then you talk about the innovation with even this interview with Skype (note: this interview was conducted over Skype) – having global communications to an audience who you don’t know who’s out there. So, using things like iCal feeds and RSS feeds to create your own media station so to speak – to manage your own message and syndicate it throughout the world if you’d like. Or just simple things like media environments; getting video clips, audio clips, pictures up to tell the experience of what a day in the life of your school will be. I those things are definitely key on the marketing side of the fence.

For just communication and trusted communication you get into the iGoogle type of environment where you want one stop shopping for everything from an RSS feed to the Boston Globe to what the weather’s like to your stock quotes. Where schools have an advantage here is you get that one stop shopping with the day in the life of your kids, and I think everybody can agree that our kids are priority number one. I know especially with mine I want to have some insight into a day in their life, so how can we use this technology to enhance that experience?

C: In terms of communication, what tools are being proven most useful for creating that day in the life experience? Is it things like RSS feeds, Twitter, or Facebook? What’s working?

R: I think definitely you look at the iCal feeds (and Apps), of being able to get the lunch menu, your kids sports games, your classes, right on your iPhone or Blackberry. That’s huge, but a lot of schools don’t know how to get there. That’s why they’ve kind of looked to us for our expertise and guidance. You know Facebook obviously is kind of a wild west environment – you don’t know how to use it, you don’t know how to leverage it, you don’t know how to play around with it but you (have) people on Facebook an hour a day and you’re stupid not to at least take a look at how you can engage your younger alumns, your parents maybe, your students, but with that comes a lot of risk as well on acceptable use. How do you teach them digital footprint? How do you teach them what should be up on the site? In terms of just a marketing environment on Facebook you can do a lot of different things with just pages and Facebook ads to get to your target markets. But a lot of our folks are using RSS feeds to post from their website so they do it once and it can go to 18 different places on the web. Public, private, portals, in email blasts, but also link directly up with LinkedIn  and Facebook – the social environments that I think are two of those areas that are really taking off.

Twitter still is kind of an unknown. You get people who get it and you get people who don’t get it, but it is definitely an effective personal learning network tool but it’s also very instrumental in, you know, updating sports games, quarter by quarter updates, connecting people to places of Foursquare. I think the biggest thing is not the tool, it’s the strategy, and how do you look in the mirror and get your team to say “you know what, this isn’t more work, it’s building for better communication and it’s fostering better relationships, and it’s overall good to advance the school mission.”

C: Do you work with any Catholic schools?

R: We work with probably about 100 Catholic schools across the globe, yes.

C: Do you find that there are special challenges that Catholic schools face?

R: Not really, I think the educational industry in general really has some difficulties with change, but if you can get the lightbulb moments with one person on the staff that can then kind of spread the word on how this technology is a friend and not a foe and embrace it and know that we’re teaching our kids for their future and not their past, we’re educating parents about what’s to come in the future and not the way that they’ve learned. A lot has changed educational environment from communication to parenting styles to least of all, the technology, and I think in that way if you can get people to see a value in, you know what, let’s make a budget line item for communications instead of having Uncle Joe do it on a Dreamweaver site that you can’t control. I think that’s the biggest paradigm shift that we’ve tried to change is, “You know what? Your website is either helping you or hurting you. Ask the tough question, and answer it correctly. And then come up with an action plan to move ahead.”

C: You mention that finalsite started with a CMS 12 years ago – can you give us a little history of finalsite and how you guys came to be where you are today.

R: Jon Moser is our President and founder, and he really had a vision of de-centralizing content – giving ownership to many people, and being able to tell your story through the web and connect to passionate users. I was lucky enough to be one of the first four on the director’s team, and again that was a long time ago. Flash forward 12 years and we’re working with about 500 (independent or just leave it schools) –  schools in 40 countries and about 50 states in the US, and it really has been nothing more than a little bit of word of mouth advertising, coming to market with a product that was very awful, but having people that trust us and having people that are  honest with us to say “you know what, this is not good – could you do this, or could you do this?” So as we’ve grown we’ve grown in a controlled growth pattern, so we want to keep our integrity of being in that still startup mentality and really being here to help our schools, to opening offices in Singapore, London, Memphis, San Francisco – and our home office is in East Hartford. We continue to be fortunate to come to work every day and work with a lot of people who are smarter than us and they give us good feedback. I think one of our key assets is that Jon Moser and our team, when hiring people, hired people that had the same passion as we did and had the same vision of helping our schools do better for the future. And it’s a long-term thing – it’s not a quick sale – it’s a relationship, so we practice what we preach. We’re a human company, but we deal with technology, we deal with support, we deal with helping our schools ask the tough questions of “shouldn’t we change our process if we have to do it four different times in four different places” and build efficiencies and build sustainabilities.

And again, I think we’re still at the tip of the ice berg in terms of technology, but in terms of mindset we’re still lagging behind. The schools that have worked with us, I think focus on value. They focus on “we want the best web experience out there possible.” We know that its driving admissions, it’s driving revenue streams in alumni and advancement. How can we maximize that in a two dimensional website or web experience?

C: In your experience, how crucial is the web experience a school creates to the long-term success of the school?

R: You just look at the sustainability models of a lot of schools, and a lot of Catholic schools have unfortunately have had to close doors which is awful. I’ve got three kids that all go to a small Catholic school here in Connecticut – I’m the vice chair of the board, I’m the chair of the advancement committee – and you gotta ask hard questions and you have to be able to adapt but not sell out your mission and just evolve the way the world is evolving in evangelizing through the web. You’re basically selling the experience on the web and that’s where maybe a lot of Catholic schools haven’t done the best job. By nature, we’re humble. We need to start telling people how great Catholic foundation and Catholic education is for our kids and bringing up the next generation of Catholic school leaders as well.

C: Speaking of Catholic education, you’re speaking a few times at NCEA 2011 in New Orleans. What are you talking about?

R: I’m doing a talk on social media, we’ve got a talk on the online experience, so I think those two. Again, this is something that I live and breathe every day in my personal life with my kids and in my professional life with being all around the globe talking with schools and doing things – always striving to do better. With NCEA, it’s close to home to me personally to talk, not just from a finalsite perspective, but also as a parent and an educator as I’ve got an undergrad in education and a master’s in education. My dad was a teacher at the college level, my two sisters, so I’m kind of the black sheep.

I’m presenting with Ed Hardiman as well, who is the newly-named President of St. John’s prep in Amherst Mass, and Ed’s a good friend. He’s got five kids – besides the numbers we’re kind of in the same boat on how can we help NCEA schools understand the power of this, the complacency factor. If you’re not doing something, or if you are not putting it high enough on the priority level, than you are doing yourself a big disservice.

As a person who went to Catholic schools at almost all levels of my education, I get a lot of fundraising material in the mail, and it is always interesting to read through and evaluate.

I went to college at the University of Notre Dame, and as you might expect, they are at the top of the pile when it comes to their fundraising efforts. They raise an unbelievable amount of money (their latest capital campaign raised well over $1 billion), so they must be doing something right!

Yesterday I got an annual fund letter that caught my eye. It was a very plainly-dressed envelope with a plain letter inside. The letter was from a graduating senior named MaryKate Conboy, and the content was her story of how she wanted to go to Notre Dame, but things were financially difficult for her family. Eventually, Notre Dame’s financial aid program allowed her to attend the school through various scholarships and programs. She wrote that the annual fund makes a difference for students like her every day at Notre Dame, and that is it – no “please give” or anything like that. There was a self-addressed envelope and a donation card included.

In our interview with Notre Dame’s Chas Grundy in January, he talked about how Notre Dame’s home page’s was designed to tell stories. Everywhere you look at Notre Dame – they aren’t telling you facts, they are telling you a story. It is a small but crucial difference. I don’t usually read through everything I get in the mail, but I read through this letter because it was a personal, unique, and it told a story.

We know that stories work as a communication tool. Take a look at your website and your outreach – are you giving out facts or are you telling a story? Do you have a lunch calendar on a news feed that dominates your home page, or are you telling the story of your school and the students that go there? The answer to that question is crucial for success in communication both on the web and in other areas.

Catholic high schools are in a constant state of trying to get more contact with their alumni, and for good reason. Making alumni feel connected with the institution that played a large role in their formative years means they are more likely to share some of their success with their high school alma mater later in life. But the big question is how do schools make and keep a connection?

To me, one of the most obvious answers is through sports. Catholic education has a long, storied history with sports. From the CHSAA, to Rudy, there has definitely always been something special about Catholic sports. Basketball and football are the big ones, but soccer, swimming, and even smaller sports like fencing all have great histories when it comes to Catholic education.

So it really amazes me when even Catholic schools that have great sports programs keep them within the walls of the school and instead insist on updating their alumni with SAT scores. For the right audience, providing a feed of information about the comings and goings of a school’s sports program can get people really involved.

Will you have legions of alumni following your programs every move? Well, probably not. However, in the last 3 or so years with the spreading of smart phones, many people (young and old), keep tabs on a dizzying number and variety of sports. They are seeing tons of institutions flow through their sports update stream, so why not your school? And how? Here are some tips to get started:

Start an Athletics Twitter Account

Twitter is especially well-suited to sports updates, where timeliness matters. Starting a school athletics Twitter account and updating it with scores and athletic news is a great start. The timelier the better, as well – see if someone in your athletic department can update the feed with scores at the actual games.

One caveat – be careful not to over-tweet with this account. People don’t need to know about every touchdown, but a rapid-fire sequence of tweets in a close ending to a big game is a good idea.

Start an Athletics Blog

The amount of time people spend reading about sports is staggering. A blog dedicated to your school’s sports program is sure to attract readership, which means you can slip in things like capital campaigns and other school gift opportunities into the sidebar or even into articles.

Try tracking down successful sports alumni and interviewing them for the blog. They’ll usually be more than happy to help, and it’ll have your readers reading an “alumni success story” without them even knowing it.

Look Into an Athletics Website

Many school website packages have an athletic website option. This is a separate site that holds information on schedules and scores. This is great, but make sure you have a plan and the resources to update it.

Get the word out there!

Especially if you are having a good run in a sport, get the word out! Put something on your school’s home page, get the word out on Twitter or other alumni message streams. Your goal is to reach the people who love sports and get them hooked on yours. It’s not too hard – all you need is some sports and some eyeballs!

Remember, when you are selling sports, it is an easy sell! Make it fun, make it interesting, and you’ll find yourself with a portion of your alumni more connected and aware of your school.

Source: XKCD.

Obviously this should be taken with a grain of salt (we still need to communicate to people to “sell” the idea of the school to them), but it makes a very important point: keep your basic information accessible to those who are looking for it.

In other words, you can still have the philosophy statement, but don’t bury the parking information either.

Remember: school websites are jam-packed with information – not just University websites. Even small school websites house abnormally large amounts of info, and every person coming to the site is looking for one small piece of that info, and they want to find it fast.

The process of keeping that info organized doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start with a clear organizational plan and stick to it. As content grows, reference your master information architecture plan, and keep things from spiraling out of control on the content side. That way you can keep your site organized and keep your visitors (including our comic author here) happy and informed.

We got the chance to talk to Chas Grundy, the person leading and setting the strategy for the team that manages and develops Notre Dame’s web presence. As the Director of Interactive Marketing, Chas leads the web team at AgencyND, Notre Dame’s in-house design and media agency.

Chas offered some great insights into what makes ND’s home page work (storytelling), how Notre Dame handles all their web needs through an in-house agency, how marketing for a Catholic school differs from marketing for a secular non-profit, and more. Check out the interview below!

CWSD: How large is the web staff at Notre Dame and what is your team generally tasked with?

Chas Grundy: There are nine of us on our team. It’s made up of me – I’m the director of it – and then I have a project manager, four developers, two designers, and an information architect. We rely on some shared resources: a traffic person to help with scheduling and some account people and project managers elsewhere in our agency. We’re part of a larger agency, so the web is just half of that agency, and there’s a print side and so on.

We’re typically tasked with working on client projects, clients being folks on campus – exclusively within the University – who we charge and they pay us for our services. It’s usually websites although it’s also more recently expanded into presentations, email marketing, social media, analytics. The core and the bread and butter is the website project. We also serve the University proper with larger brand and service type projects, so we also build the campus tour, the University online map, the University home page – we work on those things. And those things are paid for essentially by the University through our department as opposed to considering the University as a client.

CSWD: That seems like a different setup for a University – is that something that is common or is that something that is unique as a relationship?

CG: It has become more common. We are all Notre Dame employees. What’s happening is as Universities have increasingly tighter constraints – funding, financial constraints – they are looking at “how do we recover costs, how do we save money?” And one of the ways you can save money – if you look at it as a pure savings – is to own the resources, so it’s cheaper to pay somebody full time to work for you than it is to pay an hourly rate and have that person outside. It’s sometimes two or three times as expensive to hire an outside consultant full time. And if you have the work to keep them busy, you’d spend a lot more paying an outside consultant. There are tradeoffs – pros and cons – of doing that. Internal groups tend to have a bad name. They tend to have lower talent, and especially since you are paying less than an outside agency would, it’s harder to motive people through conventional agency-type means, so the pay and the environment and the ability to do bonuses, and growth potential is all more constrained within a University.

CSWD: What was the process and thought that went into the 2007 redesign of the Notre Dame home page?

CG: We had been discussing a lot about the increasing promise of video in marketing communications online – broadband and internet connections were getting faster and more prevalent. The formats were getting a little bit more standardized. And so, several people were really interested in video, but then we also recognized that our old website was essentially an internal tool – it didn’t have stories, it didn’t have dynamic content. And I don’t mean “dynamic” as in “flash-bang-whiz”, I mean it more in terms of telling the personality of the University. It didn’t tell any story, and so storytelling is really the driver behind it. We use the carousel – which is what we call the spinning feature on the home page right now – we call that the carousel and it is essentially a collection of stories. So they’re not just PR puff pieces – they’re intended to be mission-focused so we focus on undergraduate education and research and the Catholic identity. Those are the three pillars of mission, and we also have a need for service excellence, you know, to continually improve what you are doing, and then also communicate strategically to both internal and external groups.

So the carousel helps us do that, and then there is also a competition for how do I get my stuff in there? When we first launched, it was something of a wild west. We hadn’t settled that very firmly, and the result was we had 3-5 new stories a week. And they changed out so rapidly that many people missed some of these stories we were investing a lot of time in creating – and then they would disappear before you’d have a chance to really get exposed to them, so we pared that down and now we do one or two a week at most and focus it on core “how do we advance the mission of the University, how do we improve our reputation” type stories. It’s worked out pretty well recently.

Just as an aside, we are in the midst of re-working that section to change how it works so that we would take away the flash – which isn’t accessible. It’s not available on phones, for people with disabilities to access it, it doesn’t work terribly nicely with search engines either. We’re re-working that to be more accessible using just Javascript and, again, just focusing on storytelling, but then even more on driving them to the right place to tell that story rather than trying to tell the whole story within the home page.

CSWD: You blog about non-profit marketing at nonprofitchas.com – what is the difference, in your experience, between secular marketing and marketing for a Catholic school?

CG: There are a couple of key differences that I usually think about. The first one is the pure size of an institution like Notre Dame compared to the other non-profits I’ve worked with which is very small non-profits with very small budgets, very little staff, and a lot more reliance on volunteer work than paying staff to do a job. There are certain concerns and factors – one of them is that Notre Dame is a member of a religious community, although a much, much larger religious community. They want to be a good citizen within the Church, but they also have a lot of other missions and aims to accomplish, and so it’s an advantage to us and a distinction from other schools because was can say “this is how Notre Dame does it. Other schools don’t do it this way.” How would Notre Dame tackle this problem? Where Stanford or Duke might tackle this from a purely secular standpoint, we have a common good or a larger human needs, Catholic character informing all of those efforts, those campaigns, those programs, the kinds of research we do. It puts constraints around us but it also makes us special. When we succeed in that environment I think that’s more substantial than taking, say, an easier, more direct route. Not to demean any other school and the work they do. I compare it to when you have high standards for your student athletes. When you succeed and have high standards for your student athletes, it means more than if you cast those others aside simply in favor of winning on the field.

CSWD: I know that AgencyND has built their own CMS - Conductor. Is that what nd.edu runs off of, and what was the thought process behind creating a CMS to run internal sites off of?

CG: Nd.edu does not currently run on any CMS - it is manually hand-coded and updated. That’s not an ideal situation because of how often you want to be updating your site and the fact that it requires that we have people doing that. They did that because they didn’t want dependencies on things like databases and server environments that they weren’t comfortable controlling. Our IT department wanted at the time to minimize dependencies in case one thing goes down it takes down a lot more. I think we’ve grown a lot more comfortable with that idea, but at the same time Notre Dame didn’t have an institutional CMS - content management system – to offer to departments and it made for very slow innovation, very difficult to maintain and update websites, and we have looked at a couple of CMSs over the years and done some reviews and did not come to a solid decision point about any of those. And when we were faced with redesigning the Notre Dame law school and the many, many pages that it contains, we realized we needed a CMS for this, and some of our team at the time decided we could build a simple CMS to manage this. We had been building these one-off CMSs for other clients off and on. They needed one feature or this feature or that and it needed a database behind it – it needed a CMS, and we’d already had quite a bit of practice doing that. So when it came to it we went ahead and tried to build a CMS for the law school, then realized we should just make that work so we could have multiple sites in it.

I would not recommend doing that for any other school or any other institution – to start from scratch and try to invent a CMS. It’s a project that had I known where we would be today and what we’d be getting into, I would not have made that decision then – I wasn’t in charge of that decision then. But it’s certainly one I’m happy that we’re in because we’ve got what we want and we can continue building what we want without being beholden to other companies and vendors and their priorities.

There are many, many CMSs out there. Many of them are perfectly suitable – there are usually multiple CMSs that can suit your needs. So I’m not a fan of “hey, let’s build our own from scratch”, but now that we have one we’re talking about how to make the best of that and so far it seems to be a very good fit for what we’ve got.

———-

You can find more of Chas Grundy on his home page, his non-profit blog, and his Twitter account.

This post isn’t about basic email etiquette (like not hitting reply all to a message to 200 people) – it’s about the need for Catholic schools to more professionally manage their email marketing using the proper (and legal) techniques that are in standard usage in the rest of the industry. Many schools are doing this already, but a surprisingly large portion are doing it in a way that violates laws and annoys subscribers.

A Tale of Email List Woe

A few months ago I had a conversation with a development member of a Catholic school, and then several weeks later I realized something: I was on her development email list. This was actually fine, but I was getting emails on a regular basis about development projects that in no way remotely applied to me, and there was no way to unsubscribe. These emails were coming directly from this development officer and BCCed to this list. Short of being rude and emailing them directly, I was stuck.

Obviously this isn’t the end of the world. We all get forwards and things from friends and relatives that are mildly annoying, but we put up with them. The problem here is that this is indicative of a larger problem in some Catholic schools: a lack of knowledge of modern email standards. Not only are these standards just good practice and professional, many of them are mandated by the US government’s CAN-SPAM act, which specifics rules for email marketing.

There are E-mail Rules

When you have a list of people you are emailing to, there are specific good practices and rules to follow when conducting email outreach. Let’s take a quick tour of a few of these.

Provide an Opt-Out

This is probably the single-biggest rule and single biggest issue for Catholic school email campaigns: there absolutely must be an easy and readily available way for the recipient of the email to “opt-out” of receiving emails from you.

You Must Have Basic “Permission” Beforehand

This is a little hazier than the above rule, but to send an email campaign to someone they must have in some way opted-in, either through adding themselves to a mailing list or by dealing with your entity directly. So, parents at your school can be considered okay to email.

For more information on permission, see this article.

Always Include Your Physical Address

This may seem odd, but remember that people getting this email may need to think a minute before they know who it is from. An address, as well as identifying yourself as your school, is important and legally mandated. Writing “from, Deb” at the bottom of your marketing email won’t cut it.

See? That wasn’t so bad!

Using an Email Service

Don’t want to handle subscriber lists and unsubscribes yourself? There are plenty of services out there where you can create and send campaigns for a small fee. They handle the unsubscribes and make it easy to see who in your list has opt-ed out, and even who open your email, and who clicked on a link.

We have had great experiences with Campaign Monitor and highly recommend it, but there are other services available too such as Constant Contact.

Following Guidelines is Good for Everyone

People are used to getting marketing emails nowadays, and they are used to scrolling to the bottom and simply unsubscribing from the list should they feel they do not want any further emails. You can’t stop this from happening, and your recipients have the right to say “no thanks”. Offering them the choice to unsubscribe and following good email etiqette (and laws) shows that your school is up to date and mindful of how you are presented to others through your marketing.

One thing you notice when looking at a lot of Catholic school websites is the fact that they are all very different, but they all have very distinctive repeating patterns.

For instance, one of my favorite patterns to spot is the types of images used to show students. There are a lot of students playing music, a lot of them just smiling at the camera, but there is a bizarrely high number of images of students with test tubes in the school’s science lab.

A lot of them.

I know the thought that is going on behind these images: “we need to show how students are using facilities through learning.” That is a perfectly valid and important thing to communicate on a school’s website, especially for potential donors. Seems perfectly understandable – we need a science image – get those kids gathered around some equipment doing science stuff and we are on our way.

Here’s the problem though: I don’t think this really engages anyone in the way that we need it to. These images area always very passive; they are unnamed students doing something recognizable but not in any sort of context.

Then I clicked over to a site I like a lot, nd.edu, and I took a look at what is front and center: stories. Here is a University that must have hundreds of thousands of images to choose from of students doing all sorts of appealing things at Notre Dame, and the first thing we are hit with are specific stories about what is going on at Notre Dame accompanying images that are in a clear context.

When you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. Visitors are going to engage with a personal story where the images have context more than something they recognize as posed stock photography, even if it is your school’s students in your school.

Yes, it is more work. A simple picture is much easier to put up there than a story that needs to engage and needs to be replaced when it is stale. However, the payoff is more visitor engagement, and can yield much better results than the test tube kids can.

The most important stage, to me, is the stage where you build everything custom. From the ground up. I was and still am a huge fan of CodeIgniter as a basic code framework, but I still liked building the things that managed the sites I built.

One of the reasons for this is it is part of the learning process of coding. Coding a blog sounds fun, so why use someone else’s blog they coded and integrate it? That’s where you learn how things fit together and how great code is born. If you never try your hat at building something like your own content management system, you can miss out on some great learning experiences as a developer. You learn to appreciate how great systems are put together.

That’s really where my coding education took place, and after some time I learned to appreciate the benefits of using other code and other solutions to build something.

Why am I mentioning this? Because very often, the idea will be floated within a Catholic school that a portal or CMS should be built from the ground up to suit their needs. We’re not saying that this is an idea floated by novice developers or web pros, but I’d like to argue that this is the wrong way to go, for several reasons.

Don’t Spend Money Solving Old Problems

There are hundreds of web content management systems out there with dedicated teams working on them – bug fixing, keeping up with new features on the web, creating new features, etc. These content management systems have solved all the problems already. Even if your web team doesn’t feel like the problems of a particular solution have been solved they way they want them to, there is definitely a solution out there for them that has.

Existing Solutions Come with a Community

Having a department build a CMS leaves you in a tricky situation when it comes to support: there is a very limited number of resources available to you. If the person who coded something moves on, then there are no forums or communities available to help solve your problem. The only one who knows the system is the person or team that built it.

Additionally, 10 years down the road, the CMS that was built for your school’s site might not even work. We may be into PHP 10 (we’re on 5 now), or another language altogether, and your site running PHP5 may be too ancient to keep up. A community or company behind a solution means you won’t be left in the dark to start all over.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Open Source

We have a favorite CMS that we use that is – gasp! - not open source. We purchase a license each time we build a site using it. It’s called ExpressionEngine, and for us, there is nothing better for building websites anywhere. And believe me, we’ve looked everywhere.

ExpressionEngine costs $150 for a non-commercial license (a commercial one is $300). Yes, there are content management systems that cost $0, but when we need support, there is a dedicated team in the ExpressionEngine forums there who are paid to answer questions and solve problems. For an organization, that can be well worth a few hundred dollars.

Adopt a System, not a Frankenstein

The real power of a great CMS is its ability to organize and structure pieces in a modular way. ExpressionEngine does this through a series of code APIs to create field types, modules, and plugins that hook into the core system in a standard way. WordPress has a standard plugin structure. Nearly every well-done CMS has something like this.

The benefit behind this is custom functionality – developers can create custom addons that hook into the system, adding to the code in an organized way. You can get a Calendar plugin for WordPress or write one on your own. ExpressionEngine has one built in, but you can choose from hundreds of free and commercial plugins available or build your own. There is a standard, organized way of doing things.

The alternative to this is bringing together the best of several CMSs and trying to make those work together. For example, WordPress for a blog, and ModX for the teacher’s sections, and Drupal for the main site. The result is a ton of redundancy, and a conflicting and unmanageable creation. Working with one system will help organize and standardize things on the back end for continuity down the road.

Conclusions

We’re not saying anyone who wants to build something custom is a beginning coder or naive. Catholic schools have a myriad of demands in terms of functionality and structure, and it can often times seem to be an easier route to just start from scratch.

What we’re saying is that adopting and sticking with a system has a lot of benefits that include support, a community, upgrades, and continuity after the people who coded it have moved on. So when in doubt, find a system that works for your organization.

I think a big part of it has to do with a loss of control of what information reaches them and when. You expect people you know and are expecting calls from to be calling you, but a call from a telemarketer is an unwanted interruption in a medium where you want to control how you interact with it.

So when you are thinking about your social media outreach, take a moment to consider the need for the people you are reaching to control the message. People love control, so why not give it to them? Let’s look at a few examples.

Example: School News Alerts

Parents need information about important things like snow days. This info needs to be timely and accurate, so let’s think about our approach here: where can we get this information out?

• Email List – Email is quick, easy, and many parents are checking it in the morning. Create a school news alert email list and allow for parents to opt out.
• SMS and Phone – Automated texts and telephone calls are not easy to miss and are great for parents who are running around in the morning occupied with things other than the internet. If you can allow for your parents to choose between and text and a call, that’s even better.
• Twitter – Twitter is a good way to reach younger, more tech savvy parents, and if they want to get their news this way, it’s a good idea to provide it to them. Create a school news and alert Twitter account just for this to keep your public-oriented account clean of day to day operation material.

Rather than saying “you’ll get an email” or “we’ll call you”, we’ve created three streams that will have a solution for every parent that gives them the feeling of control over how your information is going to enter their lives. We now fit into a parent’s morning in the way they want us to, and that makes for happy parents.

Example: Alumni News

This one is a little trickier, because we are dealing with a wide range of people and content. The goal of our strategy is to provide various avenues for alumni to stay in touch with the school, so let’s list some possible content avenues.

• Facebook and Twitter – These are the two classic tools that allow alumni a lot of control over how they get their alumni news. It shows up in their Twitter stream, or Facebook news feed, and are perfect ways to connect with young alumni.
• Email – Once again, email is a way that a lot of middle-age alumni might want to receive information. Make sure you do it right with an unsubscribe option.
• Newsletter – Many alumni outreach programs have a newsletter, but they don’t let alumni easily unsubscribe from it in favor of their digital counterparts. Allow alumni to stop getting a paper newsletter, and you’ll offer an even greater degree of control.
• Alumni Blog – This one is somewhat uncommon, but is a great tool for alumni who take in content via feed readers. These alumni are probably more likely to sit down and read a blog post, as I know many feed readers save up content to sit down and thumb through at a later date.

Now, if I am an alumni at the school with this social media platform strategy, I can pick the way that I want to connect. For me, it would be Twitter, because I like having things I am personally involved with in my personal Twitter stream. I don’t need a newsletter or an email. But that’s just me, for an alum 10 years older than me, he might love the newsletter.

Don’t be Afraid of Repeating Content

One issue that I can see arising is that most of these channels will have the same content. A post on the alumni Facebook page will also be on Twitter and an item in an email digest. However, the idea behind the plan is that our users can control how it comes into their lives, so they are going to pick 1 or 2 of these channels and know that they are getting all the information that they should be getting. This strategy fails to make sense once we have content that is just on Facebook or just in a newsletter.

Let People Know the Choices

Finally, it is futile to provide choices without knowing your target audiences know what the choices are. Communicate them clearly to alumni and let them know where content is. You could have an alumni ignoring your emails and newsletter who would be very engaged on Twitter, or the other way around.