Anya Woods is the Director of Advancement Communications for Lesley University and has shared her thoughts on a recent Facebook page development project.

I recently collaborated with our friends at Thought Labs – fantastic Facebook gurus – on the creation of a Facebook page for Lesley University. We just launched the page this week and have already seen great results, but the success of the page comes after weeks of hard work to make sure we got it just right. I thought I’d share five things we did that were instrumental in ensuring that the Facebook project wasn’t just something we could say we tried, but instead something with enough planning and strategy that we would see real and tangible success from it.

1. We did our research. In approaching the Facebook project, we started with the idea that we wanted to create a space for our Lesley alumni only. But that was just the beginning… a lot of schools have alumni pages. What was going to make ours special, what was going to make it work and keep our alumni engaged and coming back? We decided we’d need a lot of different kinds of content, not just news and events. So we created a home page with many different functions. It has events, alumni highlights, access to our library resources, photos of alumni, announcements and news, video features, and ways to donate. We give people a range of content to interact with, and a lot of reasons to keep coming back.
2. We researched and developed a strategy around our various audiences. Lesley is unique in that thousands of its alumni graduated from remote programs called cohorts, so many alumni relate to their program, but have never been to our campus in Cambridge, MA. In equal numbers, we’ve got traditional alumni who spent fours years on campus. How do we reach both audiences? How do we give them relevant information? Many schools face similar issues when trying to tie alumni chapters from other states back to the larger university. Others are looking for ways to bridge the young and more adult alumni. In any case, alumni bases are a highly disparate groups for any university.  In our case we focused on the issue of connecting locally, and addressed it by creating tabs for each of our local regions and tied all those tabs to an Alumni Chapters section of our Facebook page.  By doing so, we’ve given alumni a way to communicate with each other directly and locally, while keeping that interaction within the overall alumni page. Alumni are also able to post to the main wall tab, so they can communicate locally or with the larger group depending on preference and topic.
3. We tapped the expertise of people on campus and beyond. To understand what our alumni are looking for, we spoke to alumni, staff who have worked with alumni for years, offsite coordinators from other states who deal with remote programs, and administrators who are looking for specific outcomes from the cultivation of relationships with alumni groups. We even changed, significantly, our original plans and designs for the site based on the advice and input of these various groups. Without their help, we wouldn’t have been able to produce a page that worked for our audience and really served their needs.
4. We used fresh content and update it frequently. The page is not stagnant. And I’m not just talking about the wall. We post new information to the wall, but we also have dynamic pieces in the main landing page that will be updated frequently with new content, creating new reasons for alumni to come back and interact with the site.
5. We promoted our page everywhere, and will continue to do so. Not just because we want people to become fans, but because we hope that the content on the page will be relevant and that by providing a place for our alumni to interact they will see value in their continuing interaction with the institution.  It’s not about numbers, it’s about quality relationships. Nowhere else can our alumni message us directly and publicly and receive a candid reply from a real person quickly and openly. The value in that alone makes our Facebook page an incredibly important part of our communication with alumni. That’s why we didn’t throw up our logo on a page and start posting news items. We did our research, and created something dynamic and interesting, and devoted specifically to our alums.

In the end, we created a unique page that is tailored to the needs and wants of our alumni groups.

To check out the Facebook page, click here. If you’ve got questions about what we did, feel free to get in touch. If you love the page, contact Thought Labs to get your own!

Back in April, we posted up a case study on the use of social media in ACCION USA as part of a panel discussion that I was moderating for TiE Boston on using social media for your social enterprise.

Well, we have an update on their social media program, which seems to be moving along swimmingly.  Great!  Julie Soforenko writes:

At the time of the TiE-SE event I was just starting to learn the concepts and tools of Web 2.0, and ACCION USA had yet to make a dent in the online space. Fast forward two months and the picture looks different. After copious amounts of reading, researching and diving into some of the tools, such as Twitter, the landscape looks different.

Our blog launched a little over a month ago and we’ve had at least two posts a week by rotating staff members of the organization. The blog focuses on domestic microfinance and small business topics and gives a person-to-person tone to the topics. It is currently in the top 15 most viewed pages on our website. Following the blog launch I jumped into the Twitterverse and started growing our following to its present number of 658. Twitter is now one of the top 15 ways to click-through to our website, and steadily growing. Additionally, I’m tracking the analytics from a handful of analytics sources so that we can learn understand the ROI and learn where improvements can be made.

ACCION USA also established an organizational Social Media policy to give the staff guidelines and a framework for how they can participate in the online space as representatives of AUSA. I then presented to the company an introduction to social media. This included how it benefits the organizations, explanations of how to use certain tools like RSS Readers and Google Alerts, and tips on contributing to the blog, Facebook, etc. Everybody is getting excited about these new ways to increase the number of people AUSA is able to serve.

Although things have been going well, we are still in the nascent stages of social media. Through more reading, listening, and experimenting we will continue to find spaces online where our services, both in lending and financial education, resonate.

Generation Progress had some great questions about how to think about quality vs. quantity in a social media program, and how to connect to constituents in a personal way, but still under the auspices of a brand.

Please feel free to give Generation Progress further advice in the comments section!

Specific questions that Generation Progress has:

• We have found it difficult to connect with followers on a personal level through @GP_tweet, and have resorted in several instances to connecting through personal Twitter accounts instead – what recommendations might you have for connecting in a meaningful, valuable way through an organization’s Twitter account?
• How might we foster a more conversational discourse through social media? Our email group, GP-Talk, is a vibrant community that we would be thrilled to share with a larger audience – what might be a better media for such a community?
• Quantity or quality? Should we have a presence on social media platforms that are not ideal for our structure, just so that people can find us? Or, is it best to keep social media limited to the outlets that we can utilize well and are suited to our model?

Panelists:

Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of Community Roundtable
Karen Rubin, Product Owner at HubSpot
Cappy Popp, Co-Founder of Thought Labs
Mike Langford, Founder & Head Tweeter of Tweetworks

If you have any further advice for Generation Progress, feel free to leave them in the comment sections!

Additional Event resources:

Shoestring Magazine has had a fair amount of success using social media while they bootstrap their business.  They ask the panelists a few questions about maximizing their resources (mainly people) and how to best expand into other geographies.  They also get some feedback on their Facebook page.

Please feel free to give Shoestring further advice in the comments section!

Specific Question from Shoestring:

“We know how to best use social media, and are often asked to consult other companies / give tutorials, but the main thing we haven’t been able to figure out is how to maximize our bandwith as a two-person operation. We know social media works, but it can be a full-time job, and to do it really well takes us away from our mission critical day-to-day operations. How can we best streamline or lifehack our social media tasks without losing the genuine, human side of social media interaction, other than using our freelance base?”

Panelists:

Rachel Happe, Co-Founder of Community Roundtable
Karen Rubin, Product Owner at HubSpot
Cappy Popp, Co-Founder of Thought Labs
Mike Langford, Founder & Head Tweeter of Tweetworks

If you have any further advice for Shoestring, feel free to leave them in the comment sections!

Additional Event resources:

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On March 25th and 26th, CollegeWeekLive held it’s fourth virtual college fair through producer PlatformQ.

In their words, “CollegeWeekLive is the world’s biggest virtual college fair, with more than 200 colleges and universities from around the world exhibiting and more than 25,000 attendees. The event revolutionizes college admissions, making the process easier and more cost-effective by bringing together students, parents, counselors and colleges online to interact, transcending time and distance.

From the lobby, attendees can break off into a several areas.  Students are able to talk to admissions experts on a variety of topics – such as financial aid or essay writing – and can also experience various forms of collateral from each participating school to get a better sense of what college is like on their campus.  Within each university’s virtual booth their are live chats with current students, faculty and admissions officers as well as videos and electronic brochures to offer as complete a set of information on the school as possible.  They also have keynotes periodically throughout the day on topics like preparing for the SATs.

A recent survey of college-seeking high school students, conducted by CollegeWeekLive.com, asked for comments about how the college admissions process could be improved. The comments highlighted frustration with paper communication and a preference for online communications: “Use the internet to promote. It’s easier, takes up no paper, and students won’t have to bother with the multitude of brochures from unsolicited schools.”

In a discussion with Martha Collins, VP of Marketing, we gained some insight into the process:

You’ve done a few of these now.  What have you noticed about the technological uptake on the part of the universities?  Did you come across any issues? Has it improved with each one?

We’re seeing more and more schools understand that meeting the students online makes a lot of sense.  They’re online and they need to be there.  The way the connections happen in this setting are a lot more comfortable and casual.  A student can be watching a presentation – live-streaming – and text in a question, which is much easier for a high school student to do in that context.  They’re at the stage of life where they’re still a little timid and they’re much more comfortable in the environment.

In terms of the technology, many colleges have exhibited several times with us, and they’re the ones leading the pack.  The colleges realize how important it is to be there and be present and available in the booth.  For the high school students, the late afternoons and evenings are the most popular times to visit the conference, so the schools have found how important it is to be online in those peak hours and appreciate the students’ schedule.

In the broader context of online admissions, some colleges are recruiting more proactively online than others, and some of them are still going the traditional route.  Frankly, I’ve signed up for some of the services the students go through, and the amount of paper admissions information that students receive is overwhelming. Teens are not only wanting more of a conversation about these things, but they’re also becoming more increasingly green conscious, and this may affect their perception of a college. Whereas online, the students can choose when they want to speak to whom, how much information they want, or how much interaction they want.  The relationship is more accommodating to their desire to gather information, which the universities are realizing as being, in the end, more beneficial to the process.

Were there any large lessons learned on the part of Platform Q?

Don’t underestimate the technology.  From the attendee standpoint, people sometimes don’t appreciate that we’re putting together a virtual tradeshow on an online platform, and it’s pretty darn sophisticated.  We’re getting tens of thousands of kids in there in a 24-hour period, and we’re pushing the envelope in terms of the technology.  I think a lot of people think that it’s a webinar, just a webinar.  It’s a lot more than a webinar.  We’re streaming a ton of content from around the country, and a ton of attendees are viewing it.  There has been a lot of learning in terms of combining the technology over time, and optimizing the best tool set to get the job done.

In general, why do you think people are choosing to use a virtual conference format more now?  What are the pros and cons?

For admissions, it’s transcending time and distance.  It’s an opportunity for colleges to reach a much broader audience geographically.  Over 30% of our attendees are international.  It’s 100% free to the students, and we have several partnerships in place that make it available to socio-economically disadvantaged students, so it really levels the playing field.

On the admissions side, everyone is concerned with budgets, and this is a great opportunity to increase your general reach at a very low cost.  So while there may be technological barriers for some, most are willing to overcome those.

The next college fair will be held on 16 July, everywhere.

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