fear.change.edu

January 13th, 2012 | Posted in Analysis

As I enjoy this time of professional and personal transition, I have spent much time reflecting on my 15 years of experience with digital communications and marketing. I have grown up with the industry: from taking every HTML class offered at Indiana University during my senior year of college, to developing basic websites for agency clients, to leading top-notch teams and creating long-term digital strategies for world-recognized brands in higher ed. For the most part, my professional experience has been creative and fulfilling. Yet, it has for me, and perhaps for many of you, also been filled with a high degree of stress and frustration.

In this post, I want to talk about why. This is not a post about the specific institutions for which I have worked. Instead, this is an article about change.

First, a caveat.

I write this post with some trepidation, perhaps because telling the truth about the more challenging aspects of one’s professional experience entails some degree of risk, especially when those details have more to do with trust and interpersonal relationships than with the issues of, say, writing semantic code. This post is intended to open up conversation about some of the most damaging and least talked about conditions of developing digital communications in higher education.

That is, whether you are a knowledgeable designer, developer, content strategist, or manager, doing the work of digital communications comes easily. It’s GETTING to do the work that is hard. I have found that ignorance, fear, and distrust have at times caused colleagues to engage in behavior that prevents experts, and me, specifically, from doing work that will strengthen and enhance the brand. From an organizational perspective, such behavior weakens an institution because it often allows bad work to persist while preventing good work from getting done. From a personal standpoint, such behavior causes high levels of stress, frustration, and at times, burnout.

In the following, I provide a few examples of how colleagues, consciously and intentionally or not, have obstructed my work, outline the damage such obstruction can do, and talk about how I tried to cope with these situations.

Ignorance

One of the primary causes of obstructive behavior is ignorance. Despite the fact that “Web 2.0” has been around for a decade and social media platforms have gained increasing prominence, many leaders and even communications professionals in higher education still do not understand the basic tenets of solid Web strategy, technology, or design. Although leaders are now beginning to recognize the importance of digital communications to marketing, few truly “know” the culture, and worse, many do not know that they do not know it. Thus, they regard digital marketing as a list of tactics (e.g. make a Facebook fan page, design a prettier institutional site, sign up for a Twitter account) to check off a list, without recognizing the major cultural shifts that must occur to support digital marketing strategies. Only then will day-to-day tactics be meaningful.

For example, many leaders pass over in-house digital marketing experts in favor of high-cost vendors, whose work is often subpar and out of touch with the people who do the work at the heart of an institution’s mission: its faculty. Rather than investing in the staff who have the potential to dynamically interact with and respond to innovators in research and teaching, institutions buy a one-off website “project” or a social media PR strategy that is outdated at the moment of purchase.

I have seen (and still see) this type of ignorance lead to wasteful spending of hundreds of thousands of dollars–money that could have been better spent investing in in-house talent who will support digital marketing efforts for years, rather than for the duration of a solitary project. As someone who cared deeply for the universities who have employed me, such decisions have left me feeling disheartened and dejected.

These circumstances can be impossible to change, given that digital communications experts are often of lower status than the leaders and committees making the decision whether to stay in-house or go outside. The best way I have found to cope is to find those leaders who are aware of their ignorance and thus are willing to learn or delegate, and to invest my time and energy in them.

One of the best professional compliments I received was from one such dean who told me, “Your team’s greatest success has not been in the great websites you’ve built but in the way you’ve changed our culture and how we think about communications.”

Fear

Another cause of obstructive behavior is fear. Unfortunately, in my experience, IT departments are usually the site of this sentiment and resulting poor behavior. This makes intuitive sense, given that in general, one of the IT department’s responsibilities is to mitigate technological risk. They have the important job of protecting constituents’ privacy and identities and must advocate for technological solutions that do no harm. That is respectable.

However, problems arise when IT colleagues presuppose that changing technology or adopting new methods for marketing communications purposes will hurt the institution. In my experience, this assumption results in behaviors that stop, slow down, or marginalize digital communications experts so that their ideas have minimal impact. It is easier to do things the way they’ve always been done than to engage those who have new ideas and more experience in creating adaptable communications.

Since IT departments often have a great deal of power over digital marketing communications efforts, their unwillingness or inability to be agile can hamstring communicators. I have seen IT departments prevent developers from being hired, refuse to consent to open-source projects, and even make it impossible to edit simple websites. Rather than using their time and energy to create novel strategies and deploy fine-tuned tactics, digital teams find themselves jumping through unnecessary hoops to justify their approaches. Projects that will enhance the institution’s brand get sidetracked or halted. And, technology for delivering high-quality web and digital experiences are often then served outside of the university’s infrastructure — at a cost to the organization’s mission — because of an unreasonable unwillingness to experiment or collaborate.

Like behavior grounded in ignorance, fearful behavior causes waste and inefficiency to departments, frustrates employees, and stifles the evolution of the brand. It is also difficult for digital teams to mitigate in day-to-day work. Even if one is a good sport, jumps through hoops, and meets requirements, I have found that some colleagues just do not want to change. In this case, departmental or divisional leadership must attempt to remove roadblocks, and this can be difficult given their lack of technological expertise.

So how have I coped with fear-filled obstruction? I made inroads where I could. And, I had to personally take care of my own stress management. It takes a toll, but it can be assuaged by strengthening your team with confidence and support, sharing your experiences with mentors outside of your industry, and sometimes simply taking a walk around campus to remind yourself why you are there. If that doesn’t work, try counting change or cleaning. Those work for me sometimes.

Distrust

Finally, distrust characterizes many interactions digital communicators have with their leadership, IT personnel, and print-oriented colleagues. I believe this distrust is rooted in the nature of digital communications–their novelty and dynamism–as well as in the demographics of digital communicators. Let’s be honest, for the most part, digital communications experts in higher ed are a younger demographic. We often started off low in the institutional hierarchy. Youthful expertise can often come off as arrogant or off-putting to those older and more powerful than us. It’s almost as if our colleagues look at us and think, “They’re young. What do they know?”

And so we are forced to prove ourselves constantly. This is not a bad thing–if the criteria others use to judge is based on the merits of our work (whether it is sound, attractive, and meaningful) and on its attainment of measurable analytic goals. However, ignorance and fear often mean that colleagues base judgments of a digital teams’ significance on the “value” or “worth” of an arbitrary metric.

The most insidious example of this type of obstruction is the chargeback system, in which digital communicators must account for their time and bill campus “customers” for their work. This system distracts digital employees and managers from their mission, which is to create and deploy high-quality communications strategies and tactics on behalf of the institution. Rather than trusting in-house digital communicators to be experts who must keep up with trends, focus on analytics, and adjust strategies and tactics accordingly, the chargeback system reduces in-house personnel to for-hire workers motivated solely by profit (of which they do not get a share!). It just doesn’t make sense.

I once fell prey to the mandate that if I instituted a system that would allow my team to track its “billable” hours that I would be able to demonstrate the value of my group to the institution. It was wrong. I learned that at a certain point in our growth, the act of accounting and charging for our team’s creativity diminished rather than enhanced our significance. Eventually, leadership required us to focus more on the mechanics of proving ourselves through the arbitrary metrics of time and campus “fun bucks” than on our actual communications products. Chargeback was a system that prevented us from getting to do our work.

If you currently work within a chargeback system, advocate for using other metrics–preferably ones that are analytic and audience-based to demonstrate the importance of your work. And, if you don’t have a chargeback system, be grateful, and be vigilant.

Closing Thoughts

Organizations, especially institutions of higher education, must realize at a leadership level that digital communications marketing teams must be agile and unobstructed. This means investing in staff and dedicated professionals who are committed to the mission of the university, seek to improve their methods on a regular basis, and are open to discussion and change. If organizations are unable to properly equip digital communications teams with dedicated staff, resources and technology, and executive decision-making authority, then its image and brand will suffer unnecessarily. Standards will weaken, great talent will leave, and the institution’s dependency on costly vendors will increase. I worry that some organizations would rather be good at writing checks than thinking and doing great work themselves.

I wrote this post because I believe that we who are currently working as digital communicators in higher education have an obligation to overcome behaviors and cultural practices that are rooted in fear, ignorance, and distrust. We must support each other and the next generation of leaders. While digital communications in general is exciting, and employing digital communications in service of the mission of higher education is fulfilling, I suspect that many of us who work in this industry have experienced stress and frustration caused by the sorts of situations I describe here.

We constantly seek validation and ways to cope with what I call obstructive behavior. We are innovators attempting to be agile, creative, and mobile in a culture that is traditional, stratified, and siloed. We also often feel very alone. This post is to tell you that if you feel alone, you’re not.

What are your experiences? Do you agree or disagree? Email me your thoughts, and I will share them anonymously in a follow-up, or feel free to post comments to Google+

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Matt Klawitter is a higher education and non-profit marketing consultant based out of Chicago. He is the former Executive Director of Digital Communications Marketing at Washington University in St. Louis and also the former Director of the Notre Dame Web Group.
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