The CASE-Huron-mStoner Social Media Presentation for Higher Education 2013

7/30/2019 The CASE-Huron-mStoner Social Media Presentation for Higher Education 2013

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Social Media &Advancement:

Results 2013

Thursday, 18 April 2013


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mStoner.com

HuronConsultingGroup.com

CASE.org



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Overview

Fourth annual survey Sponsors: CASE, Huron Consulting, mStoner

Method: survey mailed to 18,144 CASE members;tweeted by Michael Stoner and other mStoner team

members

1,080 response (a 6% response rate)



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Demographics

National origin

US/Canada 89%International 11%

Institutional type

Private 54%

Public 45%

(U.S. only) What type of institution do you work at?

Doctoral/research university 32%

Baccalaureate (four-year) college 23%

Masters college or university 17%

Independent elementary/secondary school 16%

Associates (two-year) college 4%

Other 8%

Which best describes your unit (immediate department r division?Communications 45%

Alumni Relations 38%

Development (including Annual Fund) 36%

Marketing 26%

Advancement Services 22%

Enrollment/Admissions 4%

Other 10%



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Social media traditions

Top goals: engage alumni, strengthen brand image.

Most commonly used channels: Facebook, Twitter,

LinkedIn, and YouTube. But: year-over-year growth has

flattened, except for LinkedIn.

Management diversity: social media is centralized atsome institutions & highly dispersed at others. This

diversity of management shows no sign of diminishing.

Most (83%) departments handle their own social media

activities, usually with input from others. Comms/PR depts. most likely responsible for creating,

monitoring compliance with, & enforcing, institutional

SM policies (73%).



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Whats new in 2013

SM is increasingly woven into campaigns,particularly for alumni engagement and brand/

marketing campaigns.

The majorityof respondents say their institution

uses SM for fundraising & development, often to

update donors on institutional news, solicit annual

fund donations, and thank donors. Facebook

predominates. We use SM more commonly to connect with

current students & their parents, prospective

students & their parents, and faculty & staff.



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Facebook still predominates, but the SM landscapeis diversifying, with channels such as Instagram and

Pinterest gaining share of voice.

Use of Flickr and blogs declined, as did the use of an

institutional website that aggregates social content.

More institutions are investing in SM as a

communication tool for higher education, as

evidenced by increasing average FTE in this area.

Whats new in 2013



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Audiences

2013

Growth or

shrinkage

Alumni 97% 2%

Current Students 89% 20%Faculty and Staff 86% 20%

Friends and Supporters 82% 1%

Prospective Students 74% 18%

Donors 72% 2%

Parents of Current Students 67% 16%Parents of Prospective Students 58% 13%

Media 51% -2%

Employers 42% 2%

High School Guidance Counselors 31% 8%

Government Organizations 25% 2%

Use of social media is growing quickly for outreach tocertain audiences but its flat for others



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Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

YouTube

Blogs

Flickr

Web.edu

Vendor community

Home-built community

Geosocial

Pinterest

Instagram

Google+

Tumblr

-25 0 25 50 75 100

% Use % Growth

Channel use/growth



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Responding to options

Many recommend a thoughtful approach about whether to adoptnew social media channels:

Attempting to be everywhere by jumping on the latest platform without a clear

sense of purpose is wasted effort. This is a case where more is notbetter.

A sense of how the platform connects with your audiences is key:

Research where your audience is, and survey where they want to see you! If no

one is on Google+, then it is a waste of time to add this to your efforts.

Targeting platform to audiencei.e. current students via Facebook, alumni via

LinkedIn and Twitter, integrating strategy and selecting what platforms makesense and what platforms not to utilize, don't be on all platforms in small ways,

strategically select key platforms and focus resources on those few.



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Responding to options

Respondents also caution that new tools mean a need for morededicated human resources:

Don't bite offmore than you can chew. If you can't dedicate personnel to manage

the tool properly (e.g. answering @-replies on Twitter) then don't use the tool.

However, one quick action may be necessary when a new channelappears:

Across four of our platformsFacebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest

someone else owned our name. Our lesson learned is squat on your name on all

platforms. Even if you don't plan to do anything with it, you should own your

name.

But: If you reserve it, you'd better be ready for followers. We signed up for [our

name] on Twitter to hold it and suddenly found ourselves with 1200 followers

without marketing our presence at all. We had to get a communication strategy

together, quickly.



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For instance: Instagram

Early institutional adopters of Instagram report good results:

Students love our use of Instagram and love when we regram their photos.

We had a very successful Instagram scavenger hunt as part of homecoming. Our goal

was 10 teams, but we had 22 teams of students and staffupload over 1500 photos to

Instagram and generate a huge buzz on campus. This was the first time we leaned heavily

on Instagram, and found that it was welcomed by the campus community as a new social

platform on which to engage.

Careful planning helps to capitalize on a new channels inherent buzz:

When deploying a new platform/tool, think before you act. And pick your launch time

wisely. For example: we launched Instagram with the beginning of the school year. This

was a great time to garner followers as the first years began and people were in the fresh

start mindset.

Respondents also note advantages in the way Instagram fits in with existing tools:

Just try it! Last year, we launched our Instagram channel. To date, we have not

promoted it anywhere on our institutional website. It has only been promoted

organically via Twitter integration. However, our follower count has spiked and, more

importantly, it has become one of our most engaging channels with an average

engagement rate of more than 7% per post.



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Website 90%

Email 88%

Social media 79%

Blogging 27%

SEO or search engine marketing 24%

Internal publications 68%

Direct print mail 54%

External publications (not your institutions pubs) 22%

Outreach and marketing at events 59%

Radio 7%

TV 5%

Other 3%

Promotion & marketing

We use mostly online tools to promote your socialmedia initiatives, but also many offline ones.

Up 7%

from 2012

Up 4%from 2012



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Social woven into campaigns

2013

2012

Roughly what percentage of your campaigns*included social channels?

*campaign defined as a focused effort to achieve goals using a variety of channels

appropriate to the results sought



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Social use in fundraising

For which types of development and fundraisingactivities does your institution use social media?

Keeping donors up to date on institution news 77%

Annual fund solicitations 58%

Thanking donors for their contributions 52%

Keeping donors up to date on campaign or

fundraising news

49%

Inviting donors to donor events 48%

Annual fund follow-up reminders 30%

Referring to or reminding about solicitations

received through non-social channels

25%

Capital campaign solicitations 14%

Other 6%



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Most successful channels

Most successful forfundraising efforts

Most successful for yourunit's goals overall

Facebook 80% 90%

Twitter 34% 49%

YouTube 18% 22%

LinkedIn 15% 31%



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Funds raised are small ...

Approximately how much money did your institutionraise through social media channels in FY12?

Up to $10,000 67%$10,001 $50,000 21%

$50,001 $100,000 6%$100,001 or more 6%



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Measuring ROI

It is difficult to measure return on investment fromthe use of social media

2010

2011

2012

2013



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The benefit of metrics

Many of those who reported their social media initiatives havenot been successful noted that metrics were lacking.

By contrast, those who report their social media use has been verysuccessful also say they have robust tracking mechanisms:

Weve created a weekly dashboard of target metrics for all of our social

platforms and our main websites that shows changes and topics that

resonated. This has greatly elevated awareness of our efforts among

university leadership.

We dont think, we know. Calculations and reports are submitted monthlyon SoMe successes and returns, both subjective and objective. Weve

boosted ticket sales to events, recruited students, and increased awareness

about many different things.



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And of multiple metrics

Respondents note that having a wide array of measures, beyondnumber of followers or likes, is helpful to seeing the bigger

picture. In particular, achieving a true conversation can be hard

to measure:

Due to the changing nature of technology and the preferences for its use, goals

for social media often feel like moving targets. What's important in terms ofmetrics one day, may not be the case the following day. Ex. One of our department

goals is related to direct engagement with posts. We've seen actual typed

feedback fall away in favor of the one click likes. Is direct engagement via typed

feedback becoming a thing of the past, or are there new methods/suggestions

(beyond open ended questions) that truly prompt dialogue?

When students start using your page for their own conversations ... you know

you've hit success!

In the last two years, social media has been overhauled from stagnant and

sporadic event promotion to planned content planning with plenty of time for

listening. It has really become a conversationkey for alumni relations.



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Greater time investment

More work hours are being devoted to social mediathan last year. But: the change in number of employees

working on social media was flat this year.

At the institution level:

34% have social media FTE between 0 and 1, up from 24%last year.

The proportion with 0 FTE is down to 5% from 9% lastyear.

At the unit level:

62% have social media FTE between 0 and 1, up from 45%last year.

The proportion with 0 FTE is down to 7% from 17% lastyear.



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Barriers to success persist

% who see this barrier in their unit quite a bit or extensively 2013 2012

Staffing for day-to-day content management 55% 49%

Staffing for site development 44% 42%

Lack of relevant human resources in my unit 40% 37%

Slow pace of change 31% 22%

Expertise in how to implement it 25% 23%

Funding 26% 22%

Lack of IT resources 22% 20%

Lack of institutional clarity about who is responsible

for social media initiatives

22% 20%

Concerns about loss of control over content and tone

of postings by others19% 17%

Lack of commitment by decision-makers 19% 17%



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Need for experienced staff

Many believe that lack of staff

devoted to social media hampers theirsuccess and that they could improve with help from ... Dedicated staff

person(s). Currently this responsibility is an add-on to current staff

positions and responsibilities . . . .

There are advantages to concentrating social media duties in fewerstaffpeople with greater expertise and sense of the big picture:

I think we could do more to collaborate with other campus departments. In addition,

our small staff . . . does not allow for social media to be an explicit part of someone's job

description. If someone was able to focus on it day in day out, we would be pretty

amazing at it. As it stands now, we all collectively try to post when we can.

We do not have in-house expertise to help establish strategic initiatives or to ensure ourmessages are consistent and aligned with other University messaging.

At our level (a college within a large university) we have been very successful because

we hired someone with solid social media experience who is in charge of all of our social

media outlets. This person has set clear goals and has integrated social media into the

majority of our campaigns.



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Harmonizing, if not centralizing

While the survey responses did not indicate that social media has become morecentralized in its institutional use, some think that it should be. They advise:

Centralize efforts instead of individual development units/officers creating their own Facebook

pages and campaigns.

Do not allow unlimited numbers of entities on a social media channel (in our case Facebook) to

dilute your brand. External audiences need to be able to find the official institutional page quickly.

We also see suggestions of other ways to reduce fragmentation without makingsocial media usage highly centralized or top-down:

We would like for more cross promotion throughout the university, from other areas/units than

our own, and also from the central administration. It would also be useful with closer teamwork

with other units in terms of promoting and/or creating relevant content.

We are a decentralized university and all 12 schools, as well as most of the 24 departments, all are

managing a social media strategy. We have done an outstanding job of centralizing an otherwise

decentralized voice. Our most effective tool has been using Facebook Groups as a vehicle for

driving messaging from all of the disparate groups, upward to the main university profile

managers. Every day, anyone within the university can post their top stories to the internal group

and have a very strong chance of having their story posted that day, or the next on the universities

main profiles.



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Champion, expertise key tosuccess

2010

2011

2012

2013

80

A champion is essential to the successful implementation of socialmedia in our institution

Expertise to help our social media efforts is readily available

2010

2011

2012

2013



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Campaigns



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www.bluevblue.com/

#goetownblue

mstnr.me/HGJb3H

http://www.bluevblue.com/http://www.bluevblue.com/


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https://secureportal.exeter.edu/supportexeter/exeterfund/Pages/BigRedDormChallenge.aspxhttps://secureportal.exeter.edu/supportexeter/exeterfund/Pages/BigRedDormChallenge.aspx


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mstnr.me/X53Tzz

http://mstnr.me/X53Tzzhttp://mstnr.me/X53Tzz


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FSU Great Gifts by info source



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Cheryl Slover-Linett and Michael Stoner

#SOCIALMEDIA

AND ADVANCEMENT:

INSIGHTS FROM

THREE YEARS OF DATA

White Paper, 2012: #SocialMedia & Advancement

mstnr.me/TpQPTv



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Social Works

mstnr.me/TkXwLu

Sample Chapter

[FSU Great Give]

mstnr.me/X53Tzz

http://mstnr.me/X53Tzzhttp://mstnr.me/X53Tzzhttp://mstnr.me/TkXwLuhttp://mstnr.me/TkXwLu


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Michael Stoner

president, [email protected]

@mstonerblog

mStoner.com/EDUniverse.org

Cheryl Slover-LinettConsultant

Higher Education Constituent Research

Huron Consulting

[email protected]+1 505.820.7256

Contact
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]

Documents

The CASE-Huron-mStoner Social Media Presentation for Higher Education 2013