Washington University in St. Louis

Written September 2011

Fall, 2008. It was a football Friday afternoon in South Bend, Indiana when my office phone rang. It was late in the day and I was on my way out, so I thought about having our office manager send it to voicemail, but instead I asked who it was. She replied that the caller said I wouldn’t know. Intrigued, I decided to have her connect me immediately.

The caller said that he was contacting me regarding an opportunity at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL). Having determined the need to form a new digital team in their Public Affairs division, the team at WUSTL was interested in identifying people who had skills and experience building and managing a digital communications team in higher education. They identified me as someone who had done just that. Impressed by our office’s recent work at Notre Dame, they decided to learn more about me and discovered that I built the team there from scratch.

A couple of months later, I interviewed for the position and discerned that we were a great match. Soon after, in November 2008, I was named the Executive Director of Digital Communications Marketing (a name that I chose) in the Office of Public Affairs. I finished my work at Notre Dame on a Wednesday and started at WUSTL on a Monday.

The challenges and issues facing WUSTL in regard to digital communications had not been confronted by Public Affairs prior to my appointment. There was no strategy, no plan, and no vision. It was a blank slate. Perfect. Needless to say, I am glad that I answered the call that autumn Friday afternoon.

First Impressions

Washington University in St. Louis is a large and amazing institution. For the first three months at WUSTL, I went into discovery mode.

This approach was recommended by the veteran leader of our division, Fred Volkmann, Vice Chancellor of Public Affairs. His impassioned and dedicated leadership was the primary factor that attracted me to the position, and during my first few weeks there he made it possible for me to discuss the university’s digital marketing needs with virtually every leader at WUSTL.

I basically went on a road show tour of campus and met the entire executive leadership team as well as deans and key administrators. WUSTL’s struggle to communicate via digital media did not jibe with the powerful brand I experienced while talking with these visionaries. There were huge gaps between the ability and sophistication of the university and its lackluster digital presence. The leaders recognized this issue and were committed to change.

Clearly, the opportunities to improve were significant. I knew that once I had gained a solid understanding of the institution that our team was going to do so much more to communicate WUSTL’s identity and promise of an experience. I also knew that huge challenges lay ahead.

Breakdown and Build-up

First, it was obvious to me that WUSTL was suffering from a classic case of a large organization not being able to maneuver effectively in the ever-changing (digital marketing) environment. The team assembled for my new department urgently needed to be evaluated and reassembled to become more agile.

I determined that although my teammates had not yet acquired skills in generally accepted methods and standards for the industry, their skill sets and talents were quite superior in the raw. I was optimistic that their talents could be shaped and made solid.

I determined that everyone needed new position descriptions, training, and coaching. Because my evaluation necessitated change, it could have been received negatively by our leadership. However, it was actually met with great support because I did my best to be honest, candid, and compassionate about respecting individuals’ right to truthful communication.

Additionally, the entire staff jumped in because they too recognized that it was time to make a big change. Eventually, and in many instances, they were the ones who led the charge.

The result? In six months, we had completely restructured the department and implemented a new method for working together. We agreed that the history of generalist individualism could not and would not be sustainable. This meant–as I refer to it–that individual acts of heroism would not be tolerated. Correspondingly, we decided that no individual, despite her or his talents, would be greater than our objective to advance the university’s mission.

I championed this mode of working together, and together, we succeeded.

First Strategy. Then Tactics.

As I learned more about WUSTL and began to reorganize the staff, it became apparent to me that our mindset needed to shift toward formulating a specific and detailed strategy. Although I believe that tactics are important and a necessary outcome of research and study, I have found that making tactical maneuvers can be risky and irresponsible unless they are clearly supporting a larger goal with measurable outcomes.

Four months after I had my first day, we began drafting our office’s three-year strategic plan. It built upon an our division’s existing tradition of writing annual plans but more closely focused attention on our digital marketing resources. The strategy not only included staff reorganization and administrative leadership goals, but it also confronted the serious weaknesses and challenges of our team’s ambitions. A critical piece of this document included an exercise performed by our entire team and affiliates that prompted each team member to reflect on and write about their perceptions of our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

The classic SWOT analysis proved that many of the tactics and routines instituted prior to our reorganization were not only immeasurable but threatening and mostly irrelevant to WUSTL’s greatest challenges. Additionally, we found that Digital Communications Marketing was far too limited by poor technological infrastructure. This particular challenge led team members to want to “just get it done” rather than to ask “how can we get it done right?”

Realignment and Redesign

Probably the most important and obvious reason that WUSTL formed our office and chose me to lead it was that University leadership wanted a new homepage.

Before we were able to take on such a challenge, a great deal of research, outreach, and reorganization had to occur. So I decided that we should take a logical and strategic intermediate step before before overhauling the entire site. Thus, in the spring and summer of 2009 we recoded and styled the pre-existing layout, added minor usability improvements, introduced significantly better and real photography on the main page, and methodically cleaned the entire file system and naming conventions. Essentially, we cleaned house. The response was positive when we launched the realigned homepage in summer 2009.

To complement the realignment, we also developed a new branded template and guideline standard for non-academic offices. Our goal was to pull subordinate sites into consistency with the large and influential homepage of the University. Over the next year we developed dozens of websites for departments based on these standards. This effort proved successful as the template began to meld visual design, key content, and subject matter experts more purposefully with the homepage. It was the first step in the execution of a much larger content strategy that led to a significant realignment in August 2010.

All of these in-house efforts led to subsequent and successful realignments of the homepage again in March 2011 and also in July 2011. Each of these upgrades built upon the success of the previous and incrementally improved navigation, technology, content, and design.

A Major Shift

Each time, the achievement of redesigning wustl.edu was completed on schedule and at zero cost to the university. The site now represents a major shift in digital communications for the WUSTL, with an emphasis on rich content, innovative design and dynamic analytics, which the team consults to implement rapid response updates and improvements to the site. With the new homepage, DCM proved itself capable of advanced work that complements and enhances Washington University’s exemplary reputation.

Under DCM, the new wustl.edu represented an amazing improvement in the university’s digital efforts, achieved with the forging of new relationships between DCM and key subject matter experts across both campuses. We opened previously unestablished lines of communication with academic departments, faculty, student life resources, and support areas including libraries, facilities and additional technology departments. The result? We increased recognition of DCM’s abilities to provide thought leadership and renewed interest in tying disparate entities more closely to the university brand.

Other notable accomplishments:

• New wustl.edu
• Emergency website overhaul and management procedures
• Web analytics and event tracking
• Creation of a social media workgroup
• University-wide social media strategy documents and guidelines
• Adoption of web standards
• Webcams
• Brand new “Sights & Sounds” featuring an original video of “life on campus”
• Facebook and Twitter pages with thousands of new followers
• Mobile website with basic tools and common uses
• Overhaul of Athletics, Human Resources, Medical School, Career Services and dozens of others
• Greater independence and agility

Outcomes

New research showed that our tactics, which were based on specific strategies and industry standards, resulted in significant improvement in the users’ satisfaction with WUSTL and its homepage, wustl.edu. As part of a detailed research initiative, our division partnered in 2011 with a major market research firm to analyze our digital marketing communications.

The results were overwhelmingly positive and proved without a doubt that our office’s strategy both satisfied users’ expectation of the homepage and also statistically improved their satisfaction with other pages when they visited the homepage and landing pages first and then clicked on links to other university sites.

This meant that users who first visited the wustl.edu homepage and then went to other pages felt better and more satisfied about their experience of WUSTL than those who linked directly to a sub-site.

The market research proved that the initial research, strategy and tactics that were established by our office had a measurable and positive impact on the University. Not only were we able to see better traffic patterns via event tracking and usage via web analytics, but this third-party research detailed the improvements made to audience’s perception of the university and its offerings — the exact reason why websites and digital marketing communications exist.

During my time at WUSTL, no other single website or office was put under the same intense scrutiny and pressure as ours, and the results speak for themselves.

It was a privilege to work at WUSTL, and I am hopeful that DCM’s success will continue. On July 8, 2011, I stepped down as Executive Director of Digital Communications Marketing at Washington University in St. Louis so that my spouse, Erin, could begin pursuing a doctoral degree at Northwestern University.