MMP6: Online Brand Development in a Decentralized World

Jamie Ceman: Hi, I'm Jamie Ceman from the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the project we've had at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh to re-brand not only our Web presence but our overall integrated marketing presence. So, I'm going to talk a little bit how we established a need on our campus for some consistency, what an online brand is for us, what our definition of that is. I want to talk a little bit about the process that we went through to redesign our website. But I mostly want to focus on where we are today and how we are continuing to roll out our brand with the limited resources that we have. And I want to leave enough time for questions.

What the university figured out about five years ago was that we had a real problem with our identity. There was no consistency at all across any of our channels of communication. There was no guideline around how to use our logo or wordmark. It was just the Wild West. People were doing whatever it is they wanted to do with our logo. They were changing the colors. They were taking bits and pieces of it. They were creating their own logos. At one point, we had done an inventory and there was over 140 different variations of our logo or different logos that had been established.

There was a real problem there when you looked at any of the publications that were going out the door. These are three of our main publications that came out of our university publications office or our colleges offices. In some cases, you couldn't even tell that they were coming from our university.

So, our leadership had decided that it was time to start getting control over our image and our identity. They had decided to put together an integrated marketing and communications office, formally known as our university relations. They chose to take on an integrated marketing model, which takes all of your communication across the board and looks at it from a strategic and consistent way. So, not only your marketing and communications but how we were doing advertising and promotion, our external relations, our government relations, our media relations, our public relations and then Web and social media to look at all of our communication as a whole and find some strategic ways, some key messaging, a consistent identity across all of our communication.

One of the areas that they had decided early, the problem, was our Web presence. We had a very fragmented approach to doing Web development. From a resource standpoint, we had really limited resources. There was really nobody on our campus that had in their job description to do Web development.

So, because of that, we had different areas of campus that popped up and they were doing Web development. They were supporting different areas of campus. But there was again no consistency between them and it was coming out of our IT Department. So, they were focused on the technology more so than any of the content that was going into it.

And again, there was no consistency from a look-and-feel perspective because again we didn't really have a strong identity for them to even use. But if you look at this slide, this shows our main university home page and our four colleges. Some of them didn't mention that they were part of our university, which was kind of a problem.

I was brought on campus to overhaul our Web presence. My title now is assistant director of multichannel marketing Web development. So, what we've been able to do is not only look at our print but our Web together. One of the funniest moments I had when I was brought on campus, I was on campus for probably about a month. One of the areas of IT that at that point had been doing the primary amount of our Web development had decided to take me to coffee and explained to me what my role was going to be. What he told me was that I was there to design the banner that was going across all of our websites and that he would just take it from there.

It was an indicator to me that there was some education that was going to have to happen about what an effective website is, what an online brand is and that it's more than putting your logo at the upper left corner and having a nice image across the top, that a brand consists of content, a messaging strategy, the visuals that support that and then it has to fall within the strategic operations of your university and your unit. People didn't understand the depth and breadth of what your brand had to be, what your Web strategy had to be.

We were looking at it up to that point, again, it was from a technology perspective. What we had to say over and over again is that your CMS is not your website. It's what you put into it. It's how your site is structured. It's how you're communicating with the audiences that you're trying to communicate with. There was some significant education that needed to happen.

We went about that in a pretty methodical way. I spent a lot of time just meeting with a lot of different units on campus. I had to spend a good deal of my time just getting people to trust me. I was a new person on campus. They had the perception of me that I was going to be the website Nazi and I was going to be coming in to tell you what to do with your site. I had to overcome that. But I also had a lot of work to do when it came to educating people about what their website could and should be to help that.

It was meeting after meeting after meeting after meeting with different areas on campus. We started with the leadership. While I don't necessarily advocate a top-down approach, you do have to at least have leadership support in this so that when you're working with the campus community, their leadership is also communicating the same message to them, " This is important to you, that this isn't the Integrated Marketing Department Nazis telling you what to do. They're teaching us how to make our communication more effective." So, building the trust of the leadership was really critical for us when we are moving through the process.

But every step of the way that we could, we would try to collaborate and pull campus in. And what we are saying over and over again was that while I understand Web, I understand marketing, what I don't understand is your area of campus, what you do. I don't understand admissions and you have that expertise. I have Web expertise. So, together we can come up with a really effective site. The more we communicate those messages with units, the more people would start to trust us.

Another area, again every step of the way we will try to collaborate. When we came up with what our final designs were going to be, for example, of our website, we did focused group testing. Again, we went to every one of our deans. We went to our faculty staff. We went to our academic staff. We went to all of the major areas on campus. We did focus group testing with current students and prospective students.

We got as much data as we could and as much collaboration as we could so that when we launched the site, people would be able to feel like they had a voice in it and they were a part of it. So, that became a really important step then and today, as we continue to roll it out, because we really needed to have that grassroots level support and we really needed to have that buy-in.

Long story short, it took us about a year and a half and we finally launched the main university website. It opened up then the problem of we have hundreds of websites on campus. We have a very small team of people. So, how do we continue the momentum? How do we keep rolling out our website?

We decided to prioritize all the lists of sites that we had. We took our 300 sites and we put them on a big spreadsheet. We started prioritizing them based on the audience that they were reaching and how large of an audience that was and based on the fact that our university has made a commitment to recruitment, retention and outreach. I hear those three words daily, recruitment, retention and outreach. We had to prioritize our project list based on those key factors.

So, we did that. We actually decided to have again our leadership take ownership over that list so that later on, when someone said, "Why am I a priority 5?" I can explain, "I didn't do it." But we published the list and we began working through the development. Our Web team consists of me, a designer, a content writer and a programmer. So, we just work through project after project. We're just pushing through and creating all of the sites that were on our priority list.

We've worked through all of the priority ones now. But it wasn't doing any good to those people that were either a priority 2, 3, 4, 5. We had probably 150 that didn't even make the list. We had to come up with a solution for those people. We certainly understood that we couldn't just leave them out in the cold. But we also didn't have the resources to help them.

That's what I wanted to talk with you about today. It's the program that we put in place to help those people who needed to be able to move forward with their Web presence but they couldn't do it with us. So, we established what we now call our self-service option. Thinking back to the fact that we put a priority on our online brand and what that means and that content is the most important part of what your website is and the visuals that support that, we couldn't just go back to the days of us handling newer site and teaching you how to use our CMS and letting you go.

What we've put together is a workshop system. If you want to build your own website, all you have to do is go to our workshop. It's about a three-hour training class. It's a significant commitment. What you get is an hour and a half of me explaining to you the best approach to doing research and defining your strategy for your website.

So, instead of us again just training you on our CMS, you understand all the stuff that are involved with that. Identify your target audience, who are they, and try thinking externally, not just internally. While current students are obviously important, you have some sort of a recruitment aspect to you. Any college department that exists out there has some obligation to recruit new students. It's amazing to me how people don't necessarily understand that.

We spent a lot of time explaining to them identify who your audience is. If you say prospective students, well, drill deeper into that "What are our prospective students?" Are they typical undergraduates, 17-year-old high school students, who are deciding where to go to school? Is it an adult, nontraditional student who has very different circumstances? Do they fit it into their crazy lives? Is it a transfer student? We've had a significant shift in the amount of transfer students we have coming. So, that's an important target audience for us. When you start to peel away the layers of just the simple question of who's my audience, these are questions that people weren't typically thinking of when they were looking at their website.

Going through that explanation, it's as simple as going into a room and whiteboard this. Who are your audiences? Who are your sub-audiences within that? And then, once you identify those, what actions do you want them to take once they're on your site? If I'm a prospective student, do I want to request information? What are the tasks that you want them to do when they're on that site?

What they leave from there then, after an hour and a half, then they actually get the hands-on training for our CMS. When they leave that training class, they have everything they need to do to actually build their site. But what we preach usually is have your whole site figured out completely, outlined, content written, before you even log into the CMS. You are months away from logging into the CMS. That's the most important message that we leave people with.

The concerns that we had early on with that program was, (A), we had to deal with the perception of people who got stuck either not making the list or they were priority 5. So, why are they stuck doing their own site? We heard that a lot once we published that list, that they didn't feel valued because they were stuck doing it themselves.

We had a lot of conversations with different units, explaining to them, "It's not that we don't value you. We certainly do. We have a team of three people and we can only do what we can do." Once again, understand that we put this system in place to give people the tools to do it themselves because we do value them. They started to get it a little bit then they started to appreciate it a little bit more.

We had a lot of discussion about why every site is going to look the same. While it is the concern, we gave them a template. Each template looked exactly the same. What we're doing is taking a photo and putting it on top of them. So, really the only thing that made their site different was this photo that was put at the top. But again, with the limited resources at the time, it was the best we could do.

How am I going to get this done on my own? I can barely do my own job and now I have to do my own website? What's the cost going to be to me? The reality, though, once we started going through these workshops, the feedback was just phenomenal. At this point, we've had over 150 people attending the actual workshop. In the last year, we've launched over 50 sites of people that did not need to use the Web staff at all. So, it's 50 more sites that we got outdoors without us even touching them. And now we've got another 20 that are still in development right now.

For me, this is just a phenomenal success because we are keeping the momentum of our brand rollout going. We're chipping away at this enormous list of websites that we've got going on. But our team is not the one that's doing them all. And it's also pushing out again that constant message of what makes a site effective and it's not just your CMS.

So, that's where we are at with the self-service program. That has been in place for over a year now. What we have continued to do, though, is roll out now the next steps of our online branding. In February we launched our university brand guidelines. That doesn't just include Web. That's brand guidelines across the board, how do you use your font and those sorts of things. The Web aspect of that is actually pretty minimal. It just explains to you what the shell of the site is that you can't change. But the CMS makes it really easy for them to use our required fonts and all of that stuff.

The approach that we took when it came to rolling out guidelines because this is a really new concept for our campus and again at campus we're decentralized. People are doing their own thing and they have them for years. So, for us it was really important to softly launch this in a way that isn't going to be again us being Nazis telling you what to do.

We took a lighthearted approach to it. First, we communicated across the board this message of "We discovered this brand together. From all of you, we found out what our brand was." That messaging helped us a lot when we started to roll this out. This wasn't again us hiring an external agency or the marketing department just on their own deciding who the university was. Because there was so much collaboration all along, it was really easy for us to say the words, "You told us what the brand was."

What we did within the guidelines themselves is we created this group of people called "brand champions". We had this constant message going out, "We are all responsible for the university brand. It's all of our obligation to keep our identity where it needs to be." You can see in that website people within the guidelines that are brand champions.

And we have ongoing workshops for our overall brand, where we make people brand champions. We give them a certificate "Our Champs" and make a big deal out of it. It gives them their certificate and they become then official brand champions. So, they are the ones that are out there doing it every day, either marketing or Web or whatever. They are supporting and enhancing our brand.

One of the things that we did is this cute little video. It's just an example of how we've tried to keep things pretty lighthearted. There is a statement in here about Titan Crunch. Just so you know, one of our alumni, the founders of Culver's, he gave us a Titan Crunch flavor, just so you know what that means.

[Start Video]

Speaker 1: I wanted to be able to use the university's brand but I just don't know where to start. Who are you?

Speaker 2: I'm the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Brand Champion. How may I help you, Citizen?

Speaker 1: I'm trying to create a poster for an upcoming event. I know there are brand guidelines but I just don't know where to begin. Can you help me?

Speaker 2: I'm glad to hear that you want to do the right thing, Citizen. Fortunately for you, the Integrated Marketing and Communications has created a Web resource. Check out the UW Oshkosh Brand Guidelines website. You'll find all sorts of tools, including how to use the new wordmark, when to use the university logo, typeface options and much more. You'll even find the stock photo library and flexible templates for common projects such as posters and brochures.

Speaker 1: Wow! That's great, so much information. But what if I still have questions or if I needed Integrated Marketing and Communications to help me with my project?

Speaker 2: Fear not, Citizen. Each unit on campus has a liaison with Integrated Marketing and Communications, who will be happy to help you with your marketing communications endeavors.

Speaker 1: Thank you, Brand Champion. I now have the confidence to create a marketing project that will support the image of the university and use my unit's resources most effectively.

Speaker 2: All in a day's work. Oh, no, someone is trying to use Comic Sans on brochure. I must be off.

Speaker 1: I got to lay off the Titan Crunch at lunch.

[End Video]

Jamie Ceman: So, the point of that video was again we're trying to keep things as lighthearted as possible. We didn't want people to ever feel like this is being forced on them. We wanted them to feel like not only were they a part in creating it but it's intended to help you and it's a good thing. And so, taking the approach of the brand champion's "We discovered this brand together" and in keeping things like that really light has helped us enormously and the brand rollout in general.

As we continue to evolve with our website processes, we're trying to find more and more tools that we can provide to campus for people because again we're decentralized. We want to give people tools to make their sites better for them. Photography is a really important part of probably every university branch. Showing people what it's actually like to be on campus, the student and faculty collaboration, how wonderful your university is, we wholeheartedly believe in that.

Right now, a small tool that we put out there is a photo library. It has about 75 photos right now that people can pick from. It's all very general campus photos that people can use and download the high-res versions of it. We're going to roll out probably in the next three months a much more substantial, searchable photo database. We're just going to make this an enormous stock library so that you can download events, very specific photos, a much more comprehensive photo library so that people have again photography that represents the university. It has proper photo release forms on it and it's a good tool for them to get the high res.

What we also then wanted to do instead of giving people these really basic templates than just taking a photo and shoving it on top, what we've now been able to do is within our own unit, our integrated marketing office, is train the designers who were formerly just doing print to do design. So, it opened up the door from having just one Web designer, we now have four people who can do Web design.

And because we now have this skill set that has been trained across the department, we can offer more services to the self-service people. So, we've been designing a lot of Web banners for departments. It's taking these sites that were really plain before and all of the same and we've been able to customize them a lot more for people. Again, we're not able to help them with the building of the site and the content. But at very minimum, we're trying to give them some visual identity that separates them. It's making these sites again look a lot more polished for them and for us.

Again, we're just continuing to build and build on our strategy. We've put together now what we call our Web advisory group. So, I co-chair that that with an assistant vice-chancellor out of our provost office. And so, what this group has been formed to do is to make sure that the Web presence is consistent across campus. We've been charged to support the recruitment, retention and outreach. It's this constant reminder, this constant benchmark of "Here's what the Web presence is for." So, our job is to keep that going across campus.

What we've done up to this point is really focused on the websites that have been coming out of our shop or the IT resources that we've pulled together. But there are still all these other areas on campus that are doing Web development within the colleges, within RSlite. We have still very fragmented Web development going on. So, while we're giving them tools and we're giving them guidelines, we still need to make sure that their websites reflect the university brand and that they're focusing on our key areas of recruitment, retention and outreach. You now are now starting to hear that as often as I do.

But the biggest thing that we're working on currently is a new Web policy, which I don't know if anyone has gone through this process but it's not all that fun. Our current policy has been in place and hasn't changed since 2001. It references departments that no longer exist. But one of the things that make me cringe a little bit was that there is language in there that says, "There will be no effort to curtail the creative and experimental efforts of departments and programs that publish an official Web page. You can do whatever you want. We are not going to stop you." That was in our official Web policy.

So, that keeps me up a little bit at night. We're working on that. We now have very established, detailed guidelines that people follow. Because we've done such a huge effort in communicating to people that these guidelines are helping you by having our university logo on your Web pages beneficial to you, that you're not just the college of Nursing, you're UW Oshkosh College of Nursing. We keep saying these things to people over and over again. They're starting to really understand that this stuff is benefiting them.

So, because we've put in over the last couple of years such an enormous amount of effort to get people on board with why we have done these things, I'm quite confident when we roll out this Web policy, people will be really excited about it. It must reference our current processes and departmental roles.

One of the processes that we have put in place, especially for these self-service sites, is that we do what's called a brand review on them before they go live. We give them the template. Typically now we're helping them design the banners that go on it. But what I consider more of a value-added service is that before the site goes live, someone from the Web team takes a really thorough look at it.

We look for some of the stuff like, "Are you using any logos that no longer exist? Have you taken anything and torn it apart? Have you modified the CSS in a way that is no longer compliant with guidelines?" But that stuff isn't happening or really helping them with this, looking at it from a site structure standpoint. So, while we can't do the work for them, we're taking the time to see what they have done and give them suggestions to make it better or just tell them that they did a great job because that's happening. That has been a huge value-added. And I think that people seem to appreciate the fact that we're at least taking the time to review their work and give them some suggestions because most people are really out of their comfort zone when it comes to building websites.

The thing that our Web policy does now need to address is platforms that didn't exist in 2001 like Facebook and Twitter and that people need to understand what those are and that we need to have some guidelines around how people use those. So, where we are going next is we are trying to expand the self-service option even more.

In hindsight, we should have spent a lot more time in the early days understanding what was going to happen with these departments that we weren't going to be able to focus on early on. When we put together that priority list, there were people realistically we're going to be three or four years out. We couldn't possibly have not put some sort of solution in place for these people. I mean, there are sites that were out there from 1999 that people were still using FrontPage to update and we had to be able to help them.

So, now what we're doing is putting a lot more time and effort into enhancing our self-service program. We're doing the workshops every six weeks. We're trying to do that even more but every six weeks is a lot for me. We're starting to put together additional templates so that people can then pick from that only just this plain one with the blue bar and we'll help them design it. But some of the main functions of this site, like if someone needs a site, our music department wants a site that's really focused on their upcoming events. So, we're going to create a template that's much more events-focused versus one that's really text heavy.

We're trying to survey our campus communities, do the sorts of things that they want so we can keep building more and more template options for them so when they go through the workshop, they can choose which template they want and we'll help them design something. They're much happier that way.

Then, our next big initiative also is mobile application development. We're working collaboratively on campus with defining what that means for us and how that's going to fit into not only our technology group but our communications because anything that we do with mobile needs to follow then our brand guidelines as well. But it also needs to follow along with our IT infrastructure guidelines. That's our next big initiative. That's actually collaborative initiative with some of our UW schools as well. That's really fun and exciting.

In parallel with that, then we need to start looking at our websites from a more mobile-friendly aspect right now, the way our CSS on our CMS isn't very mobile-friendly at all. So, we need to figure that mess as well.

Another initiative that we were really looking at is resource partnerships on campus. We have established a model with one of our colleges that has worked out phenomenally well, where the college has hired a Web person who physically sits in our office and works with us. So, as we're working through their marketing efforts, we're also managing their Web resource so that those are in better sync with each other. The college doesn't have to manage the Web resource and they're physically sitting with us so that we can help them through their Web work.

So, that's working phenomenally well. We want to start rolling out that model with other campuses. At the very minimum we train these resources when they get hired for awhile so that they're at least familiar with how we're structured and how we are set up. The CMS that we use is Plone and that was on campus prior to my arrival. And so, there was already some early adoption of that before I got there. So, we just ended up sticking with that. It's doing what it needs to do for us right now.

They go hand in hand. They have to go hand in hand. As we roll out any new site, we're putting in the CMS. We haven't made a dictatorial statement that you will be in the CMS. But between that and any other option, people find that it's easy to use so they want to be in it versus us even having to tell them.

Because again we're fragmented, so we do have people who have taken our CSS and put it around their existing sites. So, people will have static HTML sites that look pretty. We're not forcing them into the CMS at this point. But the ultimate goal in our minds is that, yeah, we'll have everyone on the same platform. It just makes it easier from an IT support perspective.

Actually, if you leave me a card, I can get you a log into it. There's just a lot of proprietary information in there that we decided not just to make open to the general public, not to mention, why would you other than if your not around our campus, why would you need any of that information. And we have EPS files and we have stuff that people can modify and we just decided to keep it to campus. But if you step afterwards, I can get you a guest login, get stuff in there.

Within our brand guidelines, we do have a logo library. We have our logo and our wordmark. But we have a very clear explanation of what you can and can't do with those. We don't allow people to modify it but they are the working files; they could if they wanted to. But because we have a brand review process in place, we're comfortable that we can give them the files because anything that they either put online or send out, we're going to see it before it goes out. So, we make sure that they're staying within it. But we don't allow units to create their own logos anymore.

Again, that's just from a consistency standpoint. It just starts to water down our brand as people modify it. The first slide I had just shows you people were making it yellow and green and putting rainbows on it. It just waters down your identity so much that you just start to lose any effect that your brand has. People don't like to hear that.

When our chancellor tells the story, she says it was his brainchild. He spent a full summer reading up on integrated marketing and other different sorts of marketing models and he came back and he pulled a team together and charged it. I think it was a little bit more grassroots than that. I mean, when you look at how bad things were, our campus community as a whole pulled together and decided we needed to do something.

But people do not like to hear the words, "Chancellor is telling you to do this." And that's why we spent so much time thinking through how to roll out this brand and create the brand in the first place in a way that allowed people to be a part of it. We put it everything, when we were rolling out the brand, stuff that was that, "Great brands aren't created; they're discovered."

And so, because it was such a collaborative effort across campus and everybody had a say in it, they really did, to identify what made us distinctive, who we are and what makes us unique, because people told us that, it was easier to say that we created this and people were more part of it.

We struggled with the idea of ever using an external agency because you don't have the power then of being able to say, "We figured this out on our own. We ourselves decided who we are." When an agency does it, then you have this feeling, "Someone has now told us who we are and we have to live with that." But, yeah, people don't like hearing the words, "Chancellor said so." So, we try not to say that.

Yeah?

Audience 1: [32:53 Unintelligible]?

Jamie Ceman: Yeah. Well, especially since we only have 75 out there. That's why we're trying to get a much larger library out there. We take a lot of custom photography, though. Right now, we have three photographers, one full-time and two students. So, when people need photography, we typically take something for them. We don't have a ton of people using that small library right now because, again, those photos are starting to get overused. So, yeah, we are trying to make it much bigger.

Yeah?

Audience 2: [33:27 Unintelligible]?

Jamie Ceman: The photos?

Audience 2: Yeah. Do you have a process for that?

Jamie Ceman: We're going to use what's called a PhotoBase. The user has to log in and then it allows us to track who's downloading what. We had an incident a long time ago that we had a photo that had been used in a lot of different places and someone ended up getting arrested for something unseemly. We had to figure out where that photo was. We had no idea because it was in so many different places. But it had been put in a couple of different print publications. So, it just raised the idea for us that as best as we can, we'd like to be able to track who's downloading these photos. So, PhotoBase allows us to do that.

Yeah?

Audience 3: To what degree can you plug in and activate the system...?

Jamie Ceman: I don't know who that is. We didn't. They had little-to-no oversight in our brand efforts. I mean, the schools themselves, and there are some people in here, they were pretty independent. The UW system doesn't have much oversight when it comes to our identity. So, we didn't necessarily need to include them in our process.

Is that it? Well, thank you.

[Applause]