One Site or a Thousand? Optimizing Content Discovery Through Search and Governance for Higher Ed

JEFF DILLON: 

We are going to kick this off. I want to first thank Inside Higher Ed for facilitating the logistics of this webinar. 

We should have about 15 minutes or more for questions and answers at the end. Feel free to type your questions into the Q&A section as we go. We probably won’t answer those questions until the end, but keep them coming as we go. 

I will start by introducing our panelists. Kenton Doyl is the director of Web Publishing at Harvard University information technology. He’s been shaping the web — landscape of university IT since 2004, bringing extensive expertise in strategy, consulting, service delivery and project management. 

In its early days, he honed his skills in hands-on work through building digital solutions and building inventories to collaborate with diverse teams and climates across different technologies. Passionate about being a practitioner, he now focuses on aligning Harvard’s digital products with the university’s evolving needs. He leads a dedicated team test with the humbling and amazing challenge of helping Harvard share its knowledge with the world while breaking down digital access barriers.  

One of his favorite parts of the job is making digital content more accessible for everyone. He enjoys spending time traveling with his family, coaching and watching his kids play soccer and exploring the world on his bike. 

Joel Pattison is the assistant Vice President for Web & Digital Experience at Brown University. He is a technologist and user experience strategist with over 15 years experience in the higher education and nonprofit sectors.  

As the AVP of Digital Experience, he leads strategy and user experience for Brown’s digital ecosystem. He built the University’s central web team from the ground up and led an effort to transform the user experience of their website. A digital agency focused on creative and marketing solutions for higher education and nonprofits. His career began in institutions like the University of Virginia, where he built and led digital teams, spearheaded creative initiatives and delivered impactful web solutions.  

His passion for user-centric digital experiences continues to shape his work, driving innovation as strategic growth across the institutions he serves.  

I want to tell the audience that neither are endorsing any products or companies today and they are not being compensated in any way. They are here because they have a passion for what they do. And they are being generous with their time, and thank you to you both.  

Erin Schroeder is a Senior Content Strategist at Lullabot. With the unique blend of strategic expertise and a journalism background, she has helped clients like IBM, the state of Massachusetts and Dartmouth Health enhance content discoverability and clarity, while meeting stakeholder goals.  

Prior to joining Lullabot, she was a senior strategist at Geometric, where she developed content strategies, information architecture and user experience analyses for organizations nationwide, including UNC health, East Tennessee Children’s Hospital. And with over a decade of experience as a journalist in the quad cities of Iowa and Illinois, she also taught news writing at Scott Community College.  

A passionate writer, she shares her insights on content strategy and user experience at lullabot.com, UX collective and UX boot. Based in Cedar Rapids Indiana with her husband and cat, she enjoys reading and crochet, collecting vinyl records, kayaking and mastering Beatles tribute in her free time.  

My name is Jeff Dillon and I am a Digital Strategist at SearchStax. I’m also the founder of EdTech Connect, a service provider directory created for the higher education community. I spent 21 years in leadership roles at two public institutions, where I managed the selection and implementation and support for campus websites, portal, site search, mobile apps, as well as many of the web applications all over campus. I have experience in content strategy and even AI.  

By serving as the moderator today, I can bring a perspective from a more centralized digital ecosystem and I hope that by talking to the leaders of these complex challenges, that we can all grasp something to take back to your institution.  

So, I want to start and set the stage by describing the challenge: universities today face a growing challenge on how to ensure that students, prospective students, faculty, parents, donors, community members and all other stakeholders can easily find what they need in this expanding digital landscape.  

With so much content spread across multiple platforms, even organizations within the university have to be considered. It’s a compounded challenge with the need to balance the needs of various departments, where it’s getting a little tricky to say it nicely.  

Today, we will dive in on how they can address this challenge with the dual approach and I’ve spoken to close to 100 institutions in the past two years. Of all types, private, public, community colleges, all the way up to the R1s. Many of you notice that there are differences in how Harvard and Brown are doing things, but I hope we discover that there’s commonalities as well.  

I will kick it off with an open question here: when it comes to managing your institution’s visual content, what’s the first challenge that comes to mind at Brown, Joel?  

JOEL PATTISON: 

Good afternoon! Hello everyone and thank you all for having me. I think you kind of touched on it a little bit already and it’s really about the size and complexity of the digital ecosystems that we have at Brown. Digital presence is made up of many things, your web presence, mobile applications, it’s a whole array of things and if you dive into any one of those categories, it can be quite large.  

At Brown, we’ve done a lot of work over the past two years to make our website presence more cohesive and more strategic. We still have thousands of websites at Brown, and so just the size and complexity of the number of people we are talking to, the goals spread across that ecosystem, it’s really that kind of core challenge.  

JEFF DILLON: 

— How about you, Kenton? 

 KENTON DOYL: 

Thanks much for having me today. +1 to everything Joel said. I think inherent in the challenge is decentralization. What’s the first challenge? That is challenging in and of itself, decentralization, but I think more at a higher level, it’s really the friction between the desire for autonomy, or actually units being purposely autonomous and then the institutional need for standardization when it comes to things like accessibility, security, policy-based institutional needs.  

JEFF DILLON: 

Thank you. Digital governance might mean something totally different at various institutions, especially based on budget or FTE, which seems to be correlated to decentralization. I come from large public institutions and we were very centralized and like you just said, accessibility, content best practices and brand policies were such a challenge.  

Can you talk about, Kenton, how do you define digital governance? And why your digital ecosystem is so complex like your schools? 

 KENTON DOYLE: 

The definition of it is an interesting word choice. As you look around all higher ed and Harvard included, governance means different things at differing levels of the organization. Think about it from an institutional perspective: will by school, say professional school A, professional school B, they might have differing approaches to covering their own schools and then when you think about that at the institutional level, trying to find universal alignment across all the schools and the ways that major units and schools all collaborating or aligning on policies – thankfully, there are some forces like security, and accessibility, ensuring that content can be accessible to everyone. 

That’s gotten a lot of alignment, which is a wonderful, wonderful thing. Joel, I don’t know if you have anything to add there? 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

Yeah, some of the things we experience as well. It’s again such a broad topic, digital governance, and I think it helps to have a set of guiding principles for an institution. You have to segment it into what specifically you are talking about: are you talking about governance of your web presence, which might be different from your mobile apps and business ease, and within those categories of websites, there are websites that represent academic units or offices within the school. Or individual faculty members and people interested in engaging with the University. 

 

I think you have to think about governance within those categories when talking with something so large, so that you can kind of break it down and be more specific about what you mean and what specifically you are doing in those different areas to achieve the level of governance that’s affected. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

I think if you are looking at this from a smaller school perspective, it might be somewhat mind blowing to think of multiple models for different areas, but that’s really what we are dealing with at these large institutions it sounds like. Governance models, digital governance throughout the organization, and somewhat of a siloed manner. 

 

Erin, from an agency perspective, you’ve seen a lot of these kinds of situations. How do you balance the need for working with the centralized content management system with the necessity of maintaining this unified digital experience? 

 

ERIN SCHROEDER: 

That’s a great question! Not to dog pile on what Joel and Kenton said, but also to piggyback for sure, there’s a need for autonomy across large organizations. Aside from higher education, also in government and healthcare, you have these really big all-encompassing organizations that have multiple agencies, schools and hospitals. You do have a need for some autonomy because they do have different purposes and audiences and missions that they serve. 

 

When you’re looking at a centralized CMS, choosing a content management system that every school uses, there is benefit to that because you can train and document, and have a system that is built for authors to be able to officially do their jobs and that’s really key. 

 

When you think about website redesign and structure, we think about the end experience for the person on the other end of the screen, but there’s value in building unified experience across the screen, so regardless of their experience, they can officially and confidently create a page of content, update their site, and keep it manageable who the audience is trying to reach. 

 

In terms of unified design experience, that’s another loaded question because I think there’s a lot of branding and style that goes into a unified brand. For a large school like Harvard or Brown, they have their Brown or Harvard presence but then each school has its very unique mission. There’s a value to leaving that autonomy for schools to do that, but still empowering them with the CMS that gives them the tools they need to do their jobs well and efficiently. Brand guidelines and of course security and accessibility guidelines that need to be adhered to, so that that brand stance is together, even if the school stands individually as one. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Having such a distributed governance footprint and model, as Kenton mentioned, makes privacy, security and accessibility so hard to manage. We have a lot of marketers on the call today. What are the challenges of maintaining a design system across such a decentralized organization? Where you only have a carrier and not a stick to encourage but not mandate that departments use the system? I will throw it out to Joel. Any thoughts on that? 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

I think to connect to what Erin was saying, creating a good experience within a CMS is really powerful and creating something that people want to be a part of is one piece of it. Something that I really work to do and has proven effective is to think about working with the units across Brown and the institution. To think about their content. To the extent that they have resources available to them, invest in resources and are relying on these essential tools to provide design, system and technology. 

 

A lot of times good design systems get in the way. User resources to shoot a great video, take great photos, create content and put your resources there. Rather than investing a duplicate of design systems, you have a slightly different way, a card, poster or slideshow on your website. You will get more bang for your buck from doing it that way. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Kenton? 

 

KENTON DOYL: 

Sure, I will plus one what Joel said there. That is the very general guidance that we are giving to all of our partners and stakeholders now, is to invest heavily in the content and content strategy in the organization of the content. 

 

With the rise of AI ingesting the content and then repurposing for answers, I think, it’s starting to hit home with people that the overall aesthetic is a little less meaningful these days than it was as recently as three to five years ago. 

 

Not to say that aesthetic is important, it is. We want our digital presence to reflect our physical presence and we wouldn’t expect to see an unkempt grass or hedges walking through Harvard Yard. So, it sounds cheeky to say, but we want our digital presence to kind of reflect our physical presence and so the aesthetic is important, but I would say it’s far less important than it was years ago. 

 

Investing resources in a good, solid content strategy is definitely the advice of the day. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

A little follow-up to this, but it could cause the decentralization of fragmented content management, integrations, we have lack of unified digital policy enforcement, and all the way down to having so many broken links, do those resonate with you, Erin? Do you see that? 

 

ERIN SCHROEDER: 

Yes, absolutely for sure. I love that we are all symbiotic and how we are talking about this but there are definitely, first off there’s a great house and are to this. When you are building a house, you are excited about the wallpaper, paint and furniture but what we really need is the drywall, studs and foundation. That’s not the stuff that people want to talk about when they talk about website design. They want to talk about how to make it pretty or pop. 

 

I know designers out there cannot stand those words but that’s what we hear. When thinking about unified design systems, the benefit is, and sometimes it’s a hard sell, it does a lot of the hard work for you. By using a unified design system or unified CMS experience, you create those foundations and those drywalls, and all they have to do is move in and design. They can share their story, mission and content. 

 

There is a value to having those cemented parts of the brand experience, whether it’s the CMS background and admin experience for authoring, or it’s the front end of the design system and the structure of the pages and content types, and the structure of content connections behind the scenes. I think those are really important. 

 

It’s sometimes hard. I advise clients, especially working in a large organization, that we have these different fragmented schools or departments, to get a few cheerleaders on your side. Build that experience and get some cheerleaders who find value in having that there, and then help them tell the story to others to help bring more people under that umbrella. Once you get in there, and there is a consistent brand and experience, it takes a lot of load off of those schools and authors, who for the best of reasons want to go in and do their own thing, but don’t realize the lift it would take to do those solo. Having those experiences can be crucial to a good governance plan and building a solid strategy. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

I agree with all of that. I really want to set the stage for this next thread of our conversation because it starts to get at this dual approach. It’s about poor governance. 

 

A little story from my background: when I was in the process of centralizing some content at a large university, it was discovered that we had some conflicting information about general education requirements. We are trying to curate how it gets published, is it meeting all the standards, is it taken down when it needs to be, but also there’s discoverability of it. 

 

We were contacted by the President’s office saying we had conflicting dual information about the GE requirements at her school. Maybe in the corporate world you will not see that, but it’s such a highly decentralized environment like higher ed, that we were scrambling for a day or so finding multiple versions because we didn’t have good policy set up to enforce the cure ration of that content for hundreds of people that were creating content. 

 

Can you provide any examples of how poor content governance has impacted content discovery at your institutions? Kenton maybe? 

 

KENTON DOYL: 

Sure. It’s a thing. Content rot. Every one of us that works in a role like this, we understand how problematic it can be when they sometimes have different information. And so, just to go to the institutional policies providing the centrifugal force, I think it’s become clear to leadership the importance of having things like controls in place and at the administration level, I think there’s much more clarity now on the value of having more centralized, rather than distributed content management. 

 

Although content might be created in a very distributed manner, I think people are definitely starting to see the value in having the assigned people who are the administrators of a site, rather than having say 20 or 30 administrators on a site, which was fairly frequent five or 10 years ago. I think now people are starting to see the light and understand why. 

 

I think as far as examples go, thinking about things like in the self-service model in a big content management set up, where you’ve enabled self-service, there are initiatives that spark up across the university quite often, sustainability initiative let’s say, and you might find people posting information about the same events in nine different places and describing it nine different ways. That is super commonplace in especially large R1 institutions. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Joel or Erin, anything to add? 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

I don’t know if I have any specific example. Something that I think connects to what they were both saying is I guess, Erin, you were talking about the value of the central design system and things like that, is really partnering and making sure that you are partnering, if you are in the central units or one of the distributor units, creating a partnership between the people who are using these essential tools and creating a good feedback, so that information like that or if you have to convene a group of people that says who is going to host this content and be the authoritative source about this thing, we have to pull a group together and make a decision about that. 

 

If you build some relationships and you have long-standing, working relationships with people across the institution that’s really valuable and I think that plays on the content and design and technology side. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

We decided in a very tactical digital governance decision to not allow publishers to create new pages without approval. We thought it was going to wreak havoc and they couldn’t rename pages either, because that would’ve been a way around it. We were waiting for the phones to ring off the hook but it worked out and was a great thing to put into place. 

 

So, moving on, we all have acknowledged that we have this incredibly complex digital environment that we are dealing with. I always argue that it’s the most complex industry out there. I’ve seen healthcare but even government and private sector, it’s not even close to what we are dealing with because we have so many silos of information. 

 

Even if we are not magnified to the level of Harvard and Brown, even small institutions have data sources that are in different formats and locations. Thousands of catalogs and information. We have event calendars. When we have so many audiences to consider as well, what are the biggest challenges your institution faces when you are ensuring that this content is available, discoverable for these faculty, staff and students? Starting with Joel. 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

I will give you an easy one. Again, the size is playing out with another challenge. What was your question? Challenges or solutions? Which one are we talking about (laughs). 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Challenges. I would love to hear the solutions as well. 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

Data is stored in lots of different systems. You search over here if you want to see their number, a CV, etc. You have to kind of create interconnectivity between these places in ways that make sense, and guide users. We are talking about user experience and how to create good user experiences, really think about what their needs are. 

 

If I’m searching for a person or event, what information am I going to be looking for? Rather than just leaving them to figure it out for themselves. “I don’t know where to go now.” Thinking about what that journey looks like for the user and trying to create connectivity points throughout the journey, we would love for it all to be integrated and that there’s a search box for everything, but to the extent this is not always possible, creating that logic for connectivity for folks. 

 

KENTON DOYLE: 

I will start by describing the challenge as a symptom of what this challenge is. The symptom being, the thing you hear that we talk about sometimes, which is should we create a common registry for all of the websites at our institution? 

 

I hear that in different forms and some institutions are way out ahead of it. They have been doing it for years and summers just starting to think about the value of it. In institutional website registry or digital property registry, to the point made earlier, mobile apps are a different level of governance then websites per se. Or what about the administrative tools that we do? The teaching learning systems and things of that nature. What is that registry of digital presence? 

 

Thinking about how registries affect the way that things are managed, one thought that I had not thought of when prepping for this is the pandemic. We didn’t talk at all about the pandemic and I think the ripple effect that the pandemic has had in the space that we all work in – remember those scary days, the early days of the pandemic when the university administrators were saying to put notes on all of the sites. But big banner messages, can’t we just spread the message really simply? The answer was no, not really. That was really an impactful moment and thinking back on those times, where it started to really hit home about the fact that there is not just a single place to push everything. 

 

It took a little bit of doing, but we started to centralize the way that the communications were being pushed. The central communications office helped lead the way and be that presence but it took a while for that to all really coalesce. And so the simpler site, those folks were managing those sites, they weren’t necessarily onboard, didn’t know or didn’t understand, didn’t realize the need to push those messages and the value of their being centralizing there in that moment. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Erin, have anything to add? 

 

ERIN SCHROEDER: 

No, I don’t. I do think that these are all challenges – there’s lots of ways to approach them and try them and sometimes we do not learn until hindsight. What Kenton said about the pandemic, none of us could have pictured that happening. You don’t know what to do or what’s the solution. How do we prevent this if this happens again? How do we make this better the next time around? 

 

A lot of what we do in this industry, it’s just taking a moment to breathe and realize that you are going to try some things, that you may have to pivot again and again. I think even when talking about unified designed systems and unified systems, that works for some but not everyone. I think there’s a big story in all of this in centralized design folks, or folks who work on the higher web level, working with the folks in the schools and building that relationship in a way that you can rely on each other. 

 

Instead of it being orders from this level to this level, it becomes more of a teamwork of fact. It really should be a teamwork effect, especially facing cases like COVID or when you are trying to unify where is it appropriate to unify or remain decentralized? Those are conversations that work really well within the schools but also with the folks who work in the higher brand offices for the web. It’s a relationship that is built best together. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Thanks, Erin. I want to go back to something Kenton said about COVID and it really makes me think of how we handled that. We had some high level account managers saying, “We really need this COVID page up and we need people to get to this page.” When you questioned who this was for, there’s a lot of reasons people could’ve been searching for COVID. They wanted to report a positive test, information about campus policies, and it really was a content discoverability problem because it was so fragmented. 

 

You are right, that really kind of changed things. So, we know our students are expecting more these days. They are all digital natives. At least Gen Z and younger. They are loyal to brands that create personal experiences to them and they don’t really know it. I wonder at these prestigious universities like yours, is the bar higher to provide an incredible user experience for multiple audiences? I will throw that out to everyone. 

 

KENTON DOYLE: 

I will jump in because earlier I was talking about the aesthetic. I want to be clear that I’m not diminishing the necessity of the aesthetic, or a pleasing user experience. That’s just fundamental to the work, right? But I think the most valuable user experience is really rooted in good structure, good content, as we talked about earlier. 

 

I think there is a pretty high bar with the digital natives that we all have on our campuses now. They know a heck of a lot more than I do and I’ve been working in this industry – they were just born in it. What we find is that the simpler, the better. The quicker in, the quicker out, the more pleasing it is to them. Again, highly structured content is really the guidance of the day. 

 

I think the meta-challenge for all of us is that we cannot expect every departmental administrator to be a Content Strategist. We just don’t have that type of staffing. And so the staffing for professionals like us is to find ways to provide resources at scale, reduce the friction and the usability of the tools themselves, and then provide that kind of best practice coaching and advisory services at scale. 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

I will just echo that. I think one of the things that is challenging about the digital space is that there are so many great companies that have lots of resources that are essentially operating their services for free, we will put that in air quotes (laughs). 

 

You know, from a user perspective, these things do not cost any money. Everything from Google to Social Media. Those expectations in the digital space are very high because they are getting the experience for next to nothing. That’s a big focus at Brown for the last several years, on user experience will top 

 

If you think about the evolution of university digital ecosystems, for the first many years it was about what the institution wanted and needed. I think the last couple of years, the last 10 years have been a transformation to really think about the user experience, which encompasses all the things we were just talking about. 

 

We are never going to have as many engineers as Microsoft or any of those companies, but I think we can always be mindful of how we approach those things and the experiences we are creating. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Erin, anything to add about evolving expectations? 

 

ERIN SCHROEDER: 

This might be jumping ahead but one thing I work with my clients on is small step content strategy. What I think happens with any kinds of conversations like this, everything feels so big. Whether you are working in a single or centralized web team, it feels huge, and how do you tackle some of these problems? 

 

Going on the mindful list path, you can do smaller steps. I worked with Government agencies that have a single platform for all of their Government agencies. And I did a project where I took one small agency and we pulled it apart and talk to users and people who use the content. Really talk to them. 

 

When we work in our fields, we think we know the answers to what users are looking for. Going out and talking to real users, asking prospective students what questions they have about going to college. What concerns do they have? What fears do they have? What are they looking for when they go online? How did they find information there and started it in? Not just using Google analytics but truly talking to people. 

 

Doing that, in my experience, I have gotten the most useful information path forward. Even going into a project like the one I just mentioned, I went in with a assumption, and it gave us a chance to really sit down and focus on a very finite number of pages that we wanted to improve, a finite number of improvements and functionalities, then we tracked that for 3 to 6 months to see how it did. That becomes a great sales tactic to go talk about these different ways they can improve their stuff. 

 

It might take the school sitting down and thinking about what’s important to their audiences, but one small step at a time. You don’t have to burn down the house to redesign your website. You can really do five, 10 pages at a time if that’s all you can manage with the resources that you have. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Thanks, Erin. What we are getting at is personalization. It’s about needing to predict what our students need before they even ask for it. It’s really hard, right? Netflix and Spotify do it really well but it’s been so hard for universities to predict for decades now. The example I like to use is when someone searches for communications or business or marketing, you don’t really know their intent. 

 

They might be looking for an academic major, but they could be looking for that administrative office. Since we don’t know that, I think we need to be giving them some choices. Let’s say you are searching for nursing. What if you could show, really facet out the different types of data related to that query? If it’s an academic program, maybe it’s on this list, if it’s the list of faculty that the student didn’t even think about – wow, they have a lot of credentials and faculty. 

 

We really don’t know but I think we need to give our audience, our students more choices in how they are looking for our data. Since we cannot personalize it and we haven’t quite gotten there yet. 

 

So, let’s move on to this question about data. Can you talk about the data you use to help drive strategic decisions on your campus? Kenton? 

 

KENTON DOYLE: 

Sure. I mean, I sit in central IT, and so I won’t speak on behalf of the institution. I will just speak on behalf of the service team I’m a part of. When we think about driving strategic decisions and looking at involving out of the legacy platform into new services, I use the phrase content rot earlier, which is close to the hearts of many of the folks in the audience today, we really focused a lot on the issue as we evaluated thousands of sites that are running on our legacy platforms, in advance of moving things into our new systems. 

 

And so, I think that’s certainly a key part of using data to help drive strategic decisions. And likewise, it helped to set the stage for really thinking hard about things like lifecycle management, policies, and so using data to help inform how we set policies – I think it sets up the enduring oversight of how we will run and manage the services moving forward. 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

Just a tag onto that, I think we have to think about the goals of whatever element we are thinking about because there are so many different goals. You really want to look at data that tells you something about the goals of that particular website or element. 

 

Sometimes it’s analytics and sometimes it’s prospective students and you can drop some clear lines on whether they submitted their email address for inquiries. Sometimes it’s really nice and neat. Using air quotes on the word neat and some ways to measure that. 

 

Erin, something you said, you are talking about talking to users or doing usability testing of your site. That’s very valuable when looking at creating a valuable user experience. There’s a lot of information that can be worked in. We have a lot of foundational things you can start with but nothing is a great substitute for having those users and watching them do it. 

 

Thinking about the experience you are trying to create, the goal you’re trying to accomplish and what type of data helps you accomplish that goal. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Having spent the last three years of my career focused on content discovery, I have to provide this little tidbit. I recently saw one institution that saw that dental hygiene was being searched – one of their top searched majors through their search tool. They didn’t offer that major. No results were coming up. 

 

They were looking at trying to add that program due to that data that they found on the backhand. We also saw another school, whose click-through rate improved 14% year-over-year just by looking at their search results, queries and data and updating the gaps that they were seeing. 

 

Let’s move on to an agency question. For Erin, with undertaking these large web projects, how do you tackle content discovery? I’ve often seen that it’s not scoped in. Are you scoping it in that part of the project? 

 

ERIN SCHROEDER: 

We emphasize it. That’s the drum I will beat every second. Content discovery is often something that is overlooked. When you’re doing a content project, pulling pages and looking at the content rot, is there still value to this mission and the people we are trying to reach with this? If it doesn’t, pull it. 

 

If you are a small team at a small school and you don’t know where to start, pull your analytics and look at your lowest trafficked pages and start there. Don’t necessarily delete them but review them. Are they low traffic because the information is old or hard-to-find? Or, look at your highest traffic pages. Those are the big questions we always pass on to clients when we start a project for content discovery. 

 

For example, I’ve worked with organizations that have surveys on their website. On every page of the website, did you find what you were looking for? That opens up a whole host of not a great box of chocolates, but you are going to get some good feedback from people who really care to share their experience, good or bad. That can help drive, for people who are on the other side of the screen, and understanding of what is working and what is not. 

 

Jeff to use an example of the dental hygiene program. Using search as a way to get feedback and kinda see what people are looking for and get a pulse check on the audience and what they are searching for. Where are they bouncing around to? Why are they looking this up? It always helps to look at search because you do have real people looking for things. 

 

We are all searchers ourselves and so we are going these tools to find something. Using those as a guide of gaps, but then also like Joel and Kenton talked about, talking to the audience about that. Are there any folks out there to talk to on why they had that experience? What brought them there? That helps you understand more of the pathways, that will maybe help in filling some of those gaps of content that you didn’t know you needed. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Excellent, I agree. I want to leave some time for some questions. Just a couple more here. I guess anyone on the panel, talk about the impact of content discoverability on student recruitment and retention. We have this enrollment clip coming up, maybe not as equable for these procedures institutions, how is that affecting recruitment and retention from your perspective? 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

I think we know, from our analytics data, I think it’s widely known and published that academic program pages are often the most highly trafficked pages for a higher institution. Whatever your academic, undergraduate, PhD. It’s one of the common things people are investigating – do you have a particular program I’m interested in? I think making sure that you can answer that question quickly and definitively for people is absolutely essential. 

 

Again, providing a pathway for them if you have the program, or a similar program that they could be considering, something to guide them down the path to continue engagement for the University on that. We know this from the analytics data and from user conversations. It’s critically important to folks. 

 

KENTON DOYLE: 

I agree. The part of using analytics is the arms race it creates among all the different disciplines trying to compete with one another for the best talent. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

I agree. So, summarizing some of this that we talked about, what are the essential must haves when considering building a more user-friendly experience for a website? Let’s start with Erin. 

 

ERIN SCHROEDER: 

OK, we will TLDR this. There’s so much that goes into it! I would say again to focus on the discoverability and give yourself ample time to talk to people and get real data. Yes look at the analytics and the numbers but trying to verify it with your audience. Understand what it’s really for. 

 

Whether you are an agency or work at a school, our role is to connect people with information. We’ve all been on the web when we were frustrated about not being able to find the answer to a question. Understand what they are looking for so we can understand as efficiently as possible. Make room to talk to folks. 

 

We talked a little bit about governance quite a bit in this panel but building a chart and identifying who’s responsible for doing the thing. But also who’s on the other end who’s accountable but not really doing the work, who will also be useful for making those decisions? Understanding the roles and responsibilities will help a project go smoother, just like I said earlier, building a relationship with that central team or those school teams to help work together because there’s so much knowledge and sharing to be had between different groups of people. Bringing them all under one roof or in a once a month call when you talk about what’s challenging you, whatever works. Having those relationships can help build a better experience, in addition to all the fundamental CMS, the brand guides, and all of that. 

 

Truly focusing on your users at each other and how you can help each other in solving these problems together with the help of the people out there that you are trying to solve it for. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Thanks, Erin. I will wrap up with one more question before the Q&A. What do you see as the next big challenge for digital governance and how are you preparing to meet it? A big one to end here, Joel and Kenton. 

 

KENTON DOYLE: 

Am I required to say AI? 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

That is why we saved for the end. Only a few minutes (Laughs). 

 

KENTON DOYLE: 

I state it facetiously but that is obviously going to have a pretty big impact on things. Largely in a positive way I think. A lot remains to be determined and understood in regards to the impact. But in this conversation, I can see things, the type of work that we do with content auditing and gathering a bunch of vocabulary terms, including taxonomies that were created by people who may or may not have expertise, I think we can really leverage AI and have a much more positive impact just simply for me efficiency perspective. 

 

When you think about the time it takes to go through some of those things that we practitioners have been doing for years, I think it will take some improvement just in our ability to turn things around like that. And leverage AI. 

 

And I think as it relates to things like the search, the trustworthiness of a chat like interface will just improve year-over-year. I think the thing we talked about earlier when the digital natives wanted to jump in and jump out quickly to get the information that’s relevant for them, I think that’s where we will also see a really meaningful impact. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Thanks, Kenton. 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

I would echo that in terms of how we are meeting the challenge. We are still in a space of learning, building knowledge and expertise, building operational capacity. We are still making guidelines on how we think about the things. We are still learning about how we can use it. 

 

For those of us who remember the advent of social media, at universities I think this was kind of a useful guideline, or a useful facsimile to go back and see how this evolves. People developing best practices and guidelines, and eventually it came to place a policy and more staffing and operation, all of those types of things. I think we are trying to think about those in a similar way. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Thank you. Before we go into Q&A, I kind of learned some key takeaways. We need to have a flexible Digital Experience. We need to get used to evolving expectations. I will add one saying: I think content discovery is somewhat a low hanging fruit and something that’s probably even more important now as navigation is so tricky with all of our content. 

 

I’m going to put up a slide with our contact information but please stick around for the Q&A. I would be happy to talk about anything we discussed. We will also be in Albuquerque in five days next week at the Higher Ed Web Annual Conference. We would love to see you there. Reach out because we have some fun things going on in Albuquerque. 

 

I will move on to questions. Erin, how do you balance audiences when you have more than one audience, but one or two are more important than the others? 

 

ERIN SCHROEDER: 

I understand this question and the stars that come from it will. I think it comes down to why are we here? All of your audiences are important, no doubt, but why are you here? Why is your organization in business? Who are you serving? Really focusing on that. 

 

This is really for any organization: who are you serving? Who is coming in the door? Who are you trying to attract to your business, organization or school? That’s going to be your key priority. That should be your key priority. That doesn’t mean other audiences are less than. 

 

I like to consider primary and tertiary audiences. There are primary audiences and then there’s tertiary. The folks that are tertiary are probably smaller groups of people but are still valuable to your organization. Focusing on those primary audiences first is going to be essential because that’s really who you are serving and why you do every day. But those tertiary audiences also have a need for the site. That’s what I help clients working on to the side. 

 

We build a core strategy statement for each of those audiences. We are trying to create X type of content or X type of user so that they can fill in the blank. The bigger those blanks, the more primary those audiences are probably going to be to your organization. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

Thanks, Erin. I really want to start off, should we really focus on search when students just use Google these days? Just the first part of that. I did a little research preparing for this and students are using your campus website. It’s in the data. They are using search off the homepage and I can talk to 30 or so schools in the past couple months, and I can tell you they are generating thousands of searches per month. 

 

I looked at the top terms with a set of a dozen clients and 60 to 90% of those terms are for academic majors. Although Google might be getting some of the traffic, they are on your site because they found so much information elsewhere, they are confirming it now or looking at the details of the program. 

 

Any other thoughts for the panelists on that one? The second part was about AI and it kind of going into this other question. How are Generative AI solutions, which will take the form of a single search box, change expectations and behavior on the web? 

 

I think you have to look at the opportunities that AI unlocks in the context of a great search. It’s not going to be a wholesale move and it’s about what Kenton talked about earlier, it’s about trust. 

 

They have to focus on relevancy first. We see it as a hybrid approach that leverages core search technology, AI and human intelligence, to offer the most relevant and reliable trusted results. 

 

ERIN SCHROEDER: 

I think it also comes in the value of governing your content. Gardening your website, in a sense. Governing it well. Making sure the content is valuable to your audience and not something some random stakeholder asked for. Making sure that it is structured in a sensible manner and the pages are connected in a hierarchy that makes sense because AI can only do what we give it access to. It doesn’t run on its own. It needs our language to run from. 

 

If you have a Chatbot that’s finding content for users on your site, if that site is not structured well or laid out well, that AI is not going to serve as much of a function that you hope it will. You still need to stick with the basics of content structure and good information architecture to build that experience. 

 

Likewise, think about building a policy around AI. I don’t know how popular those are these days and I think I’ve seen some coming around. How does AI play in accessibility and branding so that you have some connection there between your brand and how you are employing AI, if you decide to go that direction. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

AI for Joel or Kenton? Anybody want to touch on anything more? 

 

All right, here’s one: we probably will only have one or two more here. What are the new metrics or conversions we should strive to achieve at the end of the day? Kenton or Joel? Any thoughts on that? I have a thought but I want to hear your point of view. 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

We kind of covered this earlier, in a way. It depends on the goal on a particular website, digital app, whatever you are looking at and what it is. Thinking about the metrics there. When you are talking about such a large diverse presence and audience, it depends. Sorry, it’s not a really fun answer but at least it’s my answer. 

 

KENTON DOYLE: 

I had a similarly not fun answer. Yes. 

 

JEFF DILLON: 

You have one minute left and I’m not sure if we are going to cut off hard here. I feel like I cannot take anymore. That was really engaging and I was excited to really learn some stuff from the whole panel. The slides up to contact us and reach out to Erin or I. We are Inside Higher Ed. Thank you so much everybody! 

 

JOEL PATTISON: 

Thank you for having us! 

 

KENTON DOYLE: 

Thanks.