Faculty Experts in Higher Education
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Keynote Presentation February 17, 2016
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Transcript of Faculty Experts in Higher Education
Keynote Presentation
February 17, 2016
Faculty Experts Webinar
2
An Inside View:
Faculty Bios, Expert
Centers, and
Content Strategy
Some Housekeeping• 45 minute webinar + 15 minutes for Q&A • Ask questions through the Q+A function in the Zoom Control Panel. • Tweet during the webinar with #mStonerNow • Fill out the post-webinar evaluation • Check your inbox next week for the webinar recordings and slide decks
Who Am I?Fran ZablockimStoner Strategist
@Zablocki
TopicsI. The Value of Faculty Expertise
II. Anatomy of a Faculty Profile
III. Faculty Expert Centers
IV. Integrating Expertise
For the Media
For Internal Communications Staff For Prospective Graduate Students
For Prospective Faculty For Faculty Themselves
The Value of Faculty Expertise
Faculty expertise is one of the most valuable assets that any
institution has.
Faculty are prolific content creators (it’s their job). They are:
• Publishing papers, books and journal articles • Writing blogs • Speaking at conferences • Recording class videos • Winning awards • Appearing on television, radio and panels.
The Problem• Information often isn’t being captured or shared where it can add
value. • Information quality typically ranges from poor to average. • Existing faculty directories aren’t always complete and can be hard to
use. • Sometimes there isn’t any faculty information at all.
Your faculty are some of the most knowledgeable and accomplished
individuals in their respective fields.
That knowledge and accomplishment are valuable to a number of people and
for a number of reasons.
For the Media• University faculty are a primary source for interviews, articles and
quotes. • Journalists are busier than ever, and always in need of experts to speak
on current news topics. • The better your faculty content, the more likely your faculty will be
tapped for media spots and the more content you’ll have for your online news pools.
For Internal Communications Staff
• Every college and university is trying to tell better stories, and in particular, stories that show tangible, positive outcomes.
• Faculty accomplishment is a primary content pool for outcomes storytelling
• Quality, well-maintained faculty expert content makes the jobs of public relations and marketing staff at your institution that much easier.
For Prospective Graduate Students• In the last few years, mStoner surveyed graduate students from several
institutions. • The most interesting finding is how critically important the faculty connection is
for enrollment. • We confirmed what many admission officers know firsthand: Many graduate
students identify the faculty member they want to work with first, before any decision on school is made.
• Prospective graduates look for shared research interests, current publications, upcoming speaking engagements, and ways to contact or meet that faculty member.
For Prospective Faculty• Individuals looking for faculty positions follow a similar process as graduate
students, and want to know: • Who their colleagues will be. • What research they may collaborate on. • What opportunities they will have to improve their own standing once hired.
For Faculty Themselves• Faculty need a space to show the world what they have accomplished
and record their interests and work. • Faculty want to be able to recruit graduate students and colleagues.
Content Blueprint Minimum Viable Content Optional Content Case Study: Harvard GSE
Anatomy of a Faculty Profile
Faculty ContentBlueprintMinimum Viable vs.Optional
Tom & David Kelly,Creative Brothers at IDEO
Source: Will Scullin
Minimum Viable Content• Faculty Name: Clearly. • Title: This needs to include room for multiple titles, such as
distinguished named chairs. • Contact Information: This could be one or more of the following,
depending on the expert’s comfort with degrees of availability: email, phone, social media, office location and number.
Minimum Viable Content• Profile Picture: Putting a face to a name is critical to establish your experts as
real people and personalities. These should be head shots of smiling faces. • Education: A listing of professional credentials is a must. This should include
the institution, the degree granted, and the year. • Areas of Expertise: Ideally you’ll be using some kind of tagging to represent
these areas, so that visitors can filter on a particular area of expertise and see all experts who can speak to that particular topic. These also act as keywords for search engines, so make sure the terms being used include those most commonly understood by the media and the public at large.
Optional Content• Biography: Though a short biography with a history of the expert’s
schooling and teaching is undoubtably important if available, this isn’t strictly required.
• Published Works: Books, articles, white papers, blogs — all of them are important to feature in their own subsections, but only if available.
• Affiliations: If there are professional associations, boards of directors, and volunteer activities, list them here. A space for their logos is a plus.
Optional Content• Event Appearances: Speaking engagements, seminars, and news
appearances can all live here. Further separation into past and upcoming events, with a link to more detailed event information, is a plus.
• Courses Taught: This is nice to have, but won’t always be sustainable depending on your level of maintenance frequency.
• Languages Spoken: Great for international news inquiries, but only if applicable.
Case Study: Harvard Graduate School of Education
Definition
Case Study: ExpertFile Case Study: Loyola Marymount
Faculty Expert Centers
Definition• An expert center acts as a central hub for internal and external access
to expertise. • It includes a subset of the faculty directory. • It relocates information that is often decentralized across many
different sites and pages. • It syndicates the most important faculty accomplishments to critical
areas of the website such as academic programs and admissions.
Benefits: More Responsive• The media is always hungry for expert sources of information to offer
insight and perspective on the topics of the day • The real-time news cycle demands access to those sources within a very
short window of opportunity. • An experts center can help public relations and marketing staff connect
their institution’s faculty members to journalists and media professionals quickly, when they are needed most.
Benefits: More Proactive• Managing distributed content is difficult and time-consuming. • Information is typically spread out over several locations and websites
— some of which may not even be associated with your institution. • Providing a central location helps content managers and faculty update
quickly and easily.
Analytics are only valuable if you use
them to make strategic decisions.
Benefits: More MeasurableAn experts center can help you answer questions such as:
• What are the most important topics to the media? • What expertise do we have on campus to match those topics? • What faculty are most popular for specific topics? • Where are media requests coming from? • How effective is our expert content? What areas are most important to focus
on for improvement
You may have great faculty, and even great
faculty content — but are people actually finding it?
Benefits: More Discoverable• As good as a local faculty experts center might be, the scale of
ExpertFile’s database makes it a more attractive destination for Google search results.
• Built-in search indexing helps make sure that your faculty show up when keywords for their expertise area are used.
Case Study: Loyola Marymount University
Information Ecosystem Case Study: Columbia College Chicago
Governance Content Strategy
Integrating Expertise
Your ultimate goal should be an information ecosystem, with all the parts working
together in harmony.
Information Ecosystem• Faculty directory • Faculty experts center • Faculty profiles • Academic Program Pages • Home and Top Level Pages
Case Study: Columbia College Chicago
The desire to make things better is shared by faculty and campus communicators — but the process and platform often
stymie the best intentions.
Lack of Resources
Not enough staff are dedicated to talking to faculty enough.
Lack of Trust
Academic and marketing areas may not have the best relationship.
Lack of Process
Are you reactive instead of proactive?
You need to have a plan to mine content from academic areas on a regular basis.
We frequently hear from communications staff that it’s
difficult to get information from faculty on what they
have been working on.
We also hear from faculty that they’d love to share
more, but don’t have time to put it together themselves.
OneSolution?The Beat ReporterModel
Source:startupstockphotos.com
A Few ‘Do Today’ Content Ideas…
Provide Context For Coursework and Curriculum
Consider asking faculty to provide a bit of context about what they are teaching, how they teach it, and why they are passionate about the subject.
Supplementing a dry course description with a short sentence or two about the person behind the course can help prospective students better imagine what their real learning experience will be like.
Embed Faculty Social Media Feeds
If faculty members are particularly active on social media, consider pulling their feed onto the website, or hand-picking a key tweet or two to give visitors a sense of their personalities and what currently interests them.
Move Beyond the Standard Headshot Photo
Let’s be honest — nobody likes sitting for the requisite staff photo.
Consider using more candid photos of faculty in place of or in addition to the directory bust.
Get pictures of them with their favorite pets, playing their favorite instruments or sports, or at their favorite spots on campus.
These photos won’t tell prospective students anything more about the academic programs, per se, but they will provide a valuable peek into the real people who teach them.
A Content Blueprint for Faculty Profiles: http://www.mstoner.com/blog/content-and-writing/a-content-blueprint-for-faculty-profiles/
Kickstart your redesign:http://mstnr.me/RedesignChecklist2016
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