What we’re doing, and why we’re doing it.
I’ve added a link on the home page to the online giving form. It links directly to the form — next week Evan’s going to teak the form so that the form provides a link back to the general stuff if that’s what the user wants, but for now they are thrown right into the thick of it:
To get the sapce I removed the University System of New Hampshire link, which isn’t optimal, but is good enough for now.
I’m at the “blogging” workshop. And yes, I hate that term.
We will be upgrading our Wordpress Multi-user software from v1.3 to v1.5.1 sometime next week, probably Monday morning. Upgrading WPMu tends to be a bit of an adventure and sometimes things can happen, so your blog may be down for a bit during the upgrade. This upgrade includes some new features (like a multi-file uploader) and security and bug fixes.
Thanks for your patience.
Admin
We’re soft-launching Keene and After — the new alumni social networking site. We started today by sending out 113 invites to the Class of 1988 and watching closely what happened. So far we have a signup rate of about three percent — which is a little depressing. Since these emails represent alumni that for the most part have volunteered their addresses I was hoping for a higher initial rate — somewhere around 5 or 6%. We’re going to try to vary the message, the delivery, and other factors and see if we can get the rate up. We get higher click-throughs on things like Newsline (12-15%) off that same list, and I think a lot of the differential is trust — when people are asked to “Sign up” for something they leave — whereas reading something like Newsline is low-commitment.
If anybody is reading this post who is an alumnus who hasn’t got an invite, there’s no need to fret. Just shoot us an email at webmaster@keene.edu and we’ll send out an invite right away. The slow-launch is so we can watch the site carefully as it grows and make course corrections, but if you want on *now* we’re glad to have you…
More as our saga as it continues over the next couple of weeks.
Update (May 14): We hit 5% this morning (6 signups). More interestingly, we had two signups through friend invites, which is indicative of how important that viral invite element is: 25% of the users who signed up yesterday were not on the email list. This is one reason why the invite lets people know we won’t use the information to solicit them, or the people they invite. That’s just so incredibly important.
As you may know, we’re gearing up to launch an Alumni site using Ning, a “personal Facebook” type of software. The first email invites are going out today.
Well, not exactly the first invites. And therein lies a story.
See, before I launched this, I tried a little experiment and invited a few of my alumni friends to a prototype site. The site grew by leaps and bounds until it reached 31 members, most of them not invited by me. Many invited by people not invited by me.
There were postings, reconnections, forums. For that period of time people were addicted, clearly stopping by the site obsessively. From February 13 to March 20, it was *the* place to be.
Then suddenly — not so much. I mean *really* not so much. Everybody disappeared, almost overnight.
There’s a number of reasons, I think. One being that initial activity was heavily about reconnecting and once new people stopped coming in, the site died. Another being that at thirty-one members, the site was just too small. The people that post the majority of content in things like these seem to number about one or two in a hundred — at 31 people, the flow of content was too unstable. (At Blue Hampshire we got well over a thousand members, and 600 readers a day, but the site is still dependent on 12 or so regulars who post).
I also think that a lot of times you set it up to have this explosive activity, but after the dust settles if you did it on a large scale you’re left with your regulars. So some amount of contraction is expected.
Still, I can’t help thinking of that Annie Hall quote about the shark (first 10 seconds of this trailer):
Do online social networks have to keep on moving forward or they die? It’s definitely something we’ll be looking at as we launch the alumni site.
To try to mitigate it we’ll be experimenting with how fast we send out the invites, and we’ll be trying to encourage participation by setting up forums and prodding people we know to contribute. I’m sending out 131 emails today to the class of 1988 — and watching closely what happens. Depending on the response we could add people more slowly of quickly than planned…
We have a new addition to our office — Evan Young, who comes to us via the Development Office.
Evan is a generalist who developed expertise in Datatel while working at World Learning in Vermont. While the number of Datatel projects we have going while consume most of his time (especially the Benefactor to Colleague conversion which will consume 50% of his time) we hope use and develop his other skills as well. For the time being, he will be flat out on the remaining elements of the Alumni Services Portal and the Alumni Social Site. More on that shortly…
The latest issue of Newsline is up. Commencement is front and center, but the monthly journal also talks about our student team’s EPA award, LEED certification for Pondside III, the KSC 100 blog… and the sad news of the passing of Kate Phillips, a former professor of mine.
Here she is in a small clip from a 1937 film:
One story I’ll share here about Kate, because she deserves it… I had her as a professor in 1989, during a semester where I was quite lost in terms of what I wanted to do. Or actually, I was lost in terms of college, because I had decided to become a folk singer and move down to Athens, GA — so schoolwork was just not a priority.
Kate asked me why I wasn’t showing up for screenwriting class when I obviously loved screenwriting so much, and I explained that I was quitting college at the end of the semester to pursue my dream. She told me that if I loved music I could do music on the side, and I’d enjoy it as much, or more. She said to trust her — she’d been there and she knew.
And more than anybody, there was just a depth of understanding in the way she said that to me, so cheery on that Spring day a couple weeks before finals.
Everybody I knew tried to talk me out of quitting school. My parents. Many friends. All my professors.
And I did it anyway. But the only person that really made me reconsider going, just for a day, was Kate. As things went from bad to worse in Athens, I’d think back occasionally on that conversation on that day. In fact, I occasionally still do. I can remember the bright room in Morrison, the rustle of the trees, and most of all, the feeling that when she told me that I didn’t have to play life as an all-or-nothing game that she really knew what she was talking about.
Looking at the obituary in The New York Times, and at her IMDb list, it becomes just how apparent that she really did know. She succeeded at being a star and a screenwriter. And then she decided to succeed at being a wife, a mother, and a teacher — and to do that, she voluntarily left her previous success behind her.
She was so incredibly content with the choices she had made in life. She put her heart into what she did, and never stopped laughing.
She will be missed.
I’m a little late on posting this, but the catalog has been launched. There’s no major new online features here, really just a laborious transcription of the paper catalog into HTML, and our standard reimagining of some parts.
It’s interesting — when I first got here we were recoding every catalog from scratch, and it was a process that took a month of effort and was fraught with error. The second year I was here we introduced a “diff-doc” process, which drastically cut production time for the policies and programs sections, and last year we moved the courses out of the db, and into flat pages, because the idiosyncracies of courses being called multiple things and appearing under multiple courses was getting a tad baroque — people thought not in terms of the course database when designing the catalog, but in terms of the paper catalog. So we drop the pretense of that there was some underlying generative structure for this thing, and just went to straight HTML pages — and people loved it.
So now that we have this process *down*, what happens? Well, next year’s catalog will be an online only version — and that’s going to take some serious reworking of the production process.
It’s a classic example of how things work over here — no project or process online is ever really “done” — it’s only awaiting it’s next iteration…
One of the surprise successes of our WordPress initiative has been blogging by residence hall staff. In retrospect, it makes sense — there’s a whole bunch of information residence hall staff have to get out to their residents — this information was distributed through posters and newsletters — now much of that has been transferred to web.
I could go on and on about some really interesting aspects of these (and I will, in the comments, if prodded). But for now I’ll just give you links to Carle Hall’s blog, which is a great example of what these blogs do in terms of customer service for our residents, and how they serve as a vehicle to get information out to the people who need it:
And does it matter when it works so well?
So this is not a mindblowingly new idea, but we’ve started to provide press kit-like functionality to some of the releases on the Media Relations blog.
What do these releases look like? Well, they’re sort of like a normal physical world press kit. It’s focussed on a particular initiative, project, or person, and it brings together multiple resources useful to a reporter writing a story. So rather than Robin sending a reporter multiple links via email to background sources, she can send one link out to the online press kit, which nicely encapsulates resources for the story.
The Biodiesel kit, for example, combines the coverage we’ve received so far into an easy to scan format, and serves to highlight the great coverage we’ve already gotten on the biodiesel project: scanning down the coverage section you see that this is no small story. Additionally, some primary resources, like the 53 minute presentation the students gave on the project, are made available, as is the contact information for key people on the project. This two minute video describes how it’s structured (turn up your audio):
If you’ve spotted the fact that this is not that different from dialing up the web elements on a web-based press release, well, you’re sharp. It’s not. But it’s one more way we’re trying to reduce barriers to turning a great story we know about to a great story the world knows about.
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