8:30 - 9:15 a.m.

• Inside the Black Box: Open Source and Higher Education Systems
  Modern applications are not built from scratch. Instead, we combine together a variety of open-source components, frameworks, and libraries to efficiently create products that meet our users' needs. But when it comes to higher education, the open-source landscape feels sparse: where are the components to process government file formats? Where is the framework for creating a campus tour? Why don't we have libraries for common financial aid calculations? In this session, we will explore how institutions can embrace the open-source development of their core systems, from student information systems to financial aid management, by breaking open these black box systems and viewing them as a composition of parts, parts that can be shared and developed across schools. Through this more granular perspective, higher education institutions don't have to view participating in open-source as a daunting "all or nothing" prospect. Instead, by sharing pieces of our systems, we create an open, collaborative ecosystem that allows us to leverage the contributions of our fellow campuses to remain flexible to the needs of our users. At the end of this session, you will have a better understanding of, and tangible strategies for, how your institution can participate in and benefit from a higher education open-source ecosystem. View Details

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  • Data and APIs
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• Building a Better (Campus) Map
  Wayfinding and map data: so many (conflicting) data sources out there, so little time - but so much potential for losing your future students before you’ve even made the pitch. We’ll briefly review ways to correct your campus data in major mapping systems, and then we’ll use that data to form the building blocks of a fairly easy to build, inexpensive, mobile-friendly interactive map for your campus. View Details

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  • Mobile
  • Data and APIs
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• Nailing Pinterest: It's Not All Wedding Dresses and Desserts
  For many institutions, Pinterest is considered a “secondary” social media platform; one that’s handed off to the student intern, or something that you don’t even want to touch. Although Pinterest has a stereotypically niche audience (hint: it includes muffin-top-busting workouts and DIY projects), it’s not something to count out of your social media strategy. Jackie Vetrano of Skidmore College explains how she took Pinterest from a tertiary platform to the front of the college’s social media strategy, and the lessons learned. View Details

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  • Social
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• The Web is Not a Project : How to Effectively Manage Your Web Operations
  One of the biggest mistakes made by web teams is thinking about the web as a project. Projects by definition have an end and the project mindset is the primary reason the overall quality of websites deteriorates over time. When web teams define their work as a series of projects, the live site is often ignored as new projects become a priority. The result is content that quickly goes out of date, spelling errors and broken links undermine the credibility of the site, branding is compromised, and there is increased exposure to legal risks. In addition, many web teams have not created the internal processes and procedures necessary to efficiently manage the ongoing support of the site. In this presentation, Mark and Doug will introduce the audience to the field of web operations management which provides a framework to efficiently manage ongoing operations to meet business objectives and maintain the operational integrity of the site. Topics will include: • The differences between project work and operational work • How the project mindset is damaging your website. • How to move from project management to operations management • How to develop a website operations plan • Demonstration of an operations management system that streamlines requests and task management, improves internal and external communications, and provides resource tracking and reporting. View Details

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  • Project managers
  • Governance
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• We Don’t Need No Education: Web Governance Through On-Demand Online Training
  One of the biggest web problems we have in higher education is the number of cooks in the kitchen. We’ve got SMEs and HIPPOs and the immeasurable plethora of “non web” people making changes to web content throughout the institution. Since there are as many ways to do things as there are people to do them, it all comes out a big mess over time. All the content strategies, web governance plans, and communications policies in the world won’t help if people in the trenches (and often their bosses) don’t understand what’s expected, why, and how exactly they can accomplish their goals. Enter training. In this presentation, I’ll talk about our content strategy journey, the redevelopment of a brand new .edu website, and how we used this process to both make the case for mandatory training and develop training beyond using the CMS. I’ll even make available lesson plans, scripts, and talk about the actual tools used for development of the on-demand delivery system and content. View Details

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  • Content strategy
  • Professional development
  • Governance
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• Hello from the Other Side: Painful Lessons Learned from a Website Redesign
  Website redesigns are more than content and code. They are (or should be) a thoughtful and strategic process to improve a college’s largest publication. In this presentation I’ll talk about lessons learned during the recent redesign of Western Oregon University’s website. Late in the process we discovered a variety of issues that would have been prevented through decisions and discussions early on. Learn from our mistakes and find out how you can streamline your redesign process, help communication among involved parties, improve campus buy-in, and avoid settling for a website migration. View Details

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  • Redesigns
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• Seven Common Redesign Pitfalls… and How to Avoid Them
  When redesigning a website, the focus usually centers on a modern-day look that delivers a great user experience, and rightly so. However, while working with colleges and universities across the country, we have found that many client-defined project scopes routinely overlook important steps that are essential for great higher education websites. These misses can threaten 508 compliance, damage the institution’s hard-earned search rankings, cause Google Analytics errors & inaccuracies, and even lead to a negative user experience. If you are planning a redesign or have recently launched a new website, don’t miss this presentation! Gus will address seven of the most common redesign pitfalls so you can make sure that your website is working on all cylinders. View Details
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9:30 - 10:15 a.m.

• At Your Service: The Next Generation of Offline Websites
  Lets face it. There are more devices out there than you can support with dedicated native apps. And except for very specific cases, most of what you’ll want to do with your app is available through web API’s. And yes, this includes offline support. Whether it’s a loss of cellular connectivity or lousy wi-fi at a conference, there will be times when a site can and should be available when the network is not. During this presentation we’ll take a look at Service Workers, which can be used to store data in the client browser, and how you can leverage them. View Details

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  • Data and APIs
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• Get Hooked on Integrations With Github
  Github service hooks are awesome tools for developers to integrate Github into the systems their organization uses. Even though there are over 75 items listed in Github’s integrations directory, this presentation will highlight just a few of the interesting ones. Also, we will look at a case study where Loma Linda University leveraged Github’s webhooks, a way to integrate with systems not in the integrations directory, to implement an automated deployment process for their in-house developed intranet portal platform. View Details

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  • Data and APIs
  • Collaborating
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• Share Human: The Value of Sharing Beyond Authenticity
  Humans have always had an innate need to share their lives with others in a variety of ways. From the first cave paintings to the latest apps, we continue to invent ways to learn, to create, to express, to discover, and to share ourselves with the world. But when we share as institutions, as organizations, as brands, we too often let a vague need to be "authentic" get in the way of truly engaging with our human audiences. First presented as the keynote for the 2016 HighEdWeb New England regional conference, this is a personal exploration of how we can and should embrace the human core of what, why, and how we share; how we can eliminate the barriers that keep us from sharing, and how we can share better by sharing human. View Details

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  • Collaborating
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• Explain Your Work! 5 Public Speaking Skills You Can Learn Now
  Ever seen a blank look while you talked to your boss or a client about your project? Between coding and designing, we often use jargon that can make non-web people feel stupid. When we convey our ideas clearly, we can change our supervisors and customers from confused and disconnected to happy and supportive. Genevieve has been a member of Toastmasters International for more than four years and has been active in developing effective public speaking skills for more than ten. In this session you'll learn 5 concrete skills you can use immediately and other suggestions to keep building your career. View Details

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  • Professional development
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• Marketing Your Faculty: Help Them Help You
  Faculty expertise and visibility drive the academic reputation of education institutions. Proper collection, curation, and promotion of faculty information can help improve that reputation and benefit marketing, enrollment and public relations efforts. mStoner Strategist Fran Zablocki will discuss best practices for using faculty expertise as a critical marketing content pool to raise the prominence of your institution. Attendees will learn: - Content strategy practices to leverage faculty expertise on your academic program pages and throughout your entire website. - Best Practice examples of faculty content done well. - Identification of the types of content needed for robust faculty profiles. - Tactics to establish sound faculty content management and governance. - Recommendations for building a faculty experts center and maximizing the promotion of faculty expertise and engagement with media professionals. View Details

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  • Marketing
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• After Years of Delegation, Taking Back Control
  After years of delegating content to campus departments, an IA overhaul caused the Marketing and Communication department at Xavier University to rethink who maintains the content for key sites. The end result meant taking back control of many websites that for years had been maintained by academic departments and support offices. After a brief review of the overall project we will look at the sites we decided were too important to delegate, how we brought them back in, and the obstacles we have faced. View Details

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  • Governance
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• The Art of Texting Students
  Leaving voicemail is considered rude and email is for old people. 98% of students use texting as their primary form of communication. With texting, institutions are able to efficiently increase engagement throughout the student lifecycle. We have helped over 100 institutions implement texting on their campus. We are here to share what we have learned along the way. In this session, we will explore: - the legalities of texting. - how to gracefully manage opt-in, opt-outs. - recommendations for governance. - proper content/copywriting. View Details
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10:45 - 11:30 a.m.

• Fienen's Totally Topical, Terrific Tutorial to Tag Manager
  Google Analytics is an everyday part of most people's lives now in the web world. And it's just one of many third-party tools you might be using to manage your website. However, with large sites and disparate groups, it's common place to do little more beyond implementing basic tracking. It turns out, Tag Manager can vastly simplify how you enable people to track their websites without needing to intervene with extra coding, as well as enabling additional tools, features, and embeds for a site. Everything from analytics to live chat, from form tracking to social media conversions can all be tied together with this simple tool - all without adding any extra code to your side (besides the Tag Manager code, obviously). Let's make your life a little bit easier, and a lot cooler, by digging into Google complementary tool, Tag Manager, and look at ways you can streamline your site tracking process (and much, much more). We'll look at some real-world use cases, and maybe take some audience questions to do live demos, because that's just how we do, right? View Details

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  • Measuring
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• Agile: Not Just for Developers Anymore
  Agile is a proven methodology to support incremental continuous improvement. It works well when requirements can be expressed as discreet user stories that describe specific kinds of people doing specific things whose value is well understood and agreed upon. But where do those stories come from and how can we be sure they are the "right" stories? A common criticism of Agile is that it works well to manage engineering teams working to deliver individual features, but can feel awkward to creatives like content strategists, user experience experts, and visual designers who may see "the big picture" getting lost in small pieces. This can pose significant challenges to integrated, cross-functional teams seeking to adopt Agile as a single methodology for all of their work. Add to this that higher ed's leadership culture is often more comfortable with traditional project management methodologies and a waterfall approach to planning, and Agile can be quite difficult to pull off. This session will offer a whirlwind tour of Agile and explore how it can be extended to manage requirements and content strategy, UX and interaction design, front and back-end engineering, and visual design and theming. We'll cover process, tools, and deliverables and discuss how to introduce Agile to stakeholders with varying levels of skill and commitment in ways that support the success of their web projects. If you're new to Agile and considering its use, this talk will help you anticipate some of the challenges ahead and offer strategies for meeting them. If you're already using Agile, then hopefully you'll learn something new and share your own approach. Whether you manage an internal cross-disciplinary web team, subcontract parts of your web presence, or work as an army of one, Agile has a lot to offer. View Details

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  • Collaborating
  • Project managers
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• Events in Stereo: How to Help Your Campus Events and Campaigns Succeed
  Every year, universities have dozens of major events ranging from graduation to giving days. William & Mary’s Tiffany Broadbent Beker (University Communications) and Sarah Juliano (University Advancement) will explain how they approach these varied events - what’s worked, and what hasn’t. They’ll address the ever-tricky balance between engagement and fundraising on university social media channels and suggest innovative ways to have the entire campus community help distribute your message and promote your event. During this session, they’ll discuss how to set social media expectations, ways to collaborate with your peers across campus, suggestions for creating and executing a hashtag, and how to create a social media guide to make each event one to remember. View Details

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  • Social
  • Collaborating
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• You Broke it, You Bought it: Using Site Redesigns to Foster Culture Change
  Redesigning and relaunching an academic website is a complicated and often difficult process. There are multiple stakeholders and most of them have some say in what does and does not happen during the process. In 2015 the ILR School at Cornell University relaunched their website under severe time constraints that left many internal and external groups feeling marginalized. Surprisingly, the resulting fallout gave their web development team the opportunity to change a long-standing siloed culture in the school. Participants will learn: - the process and methods of moving a site from commonspot to Drupal - the pros and cons of moving a site quickly without ideal input - the content strategy behind this kind of move - the process of migrating content - how to clearly identify their audiences and stakeholders - how to foster culture change in your organization after something goes wrong View Details

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  • Redesigns
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• Faculty Website vs. Blackboard: Beyond Instructional Benefits
  Faculty Website and Blackboard can both be used as effective tools to facilitate instructional activities in higher education. They overlap with each other partly in content, yet a closer look into these systems reveals that the benefits of Faculty Web pages have gone beyond just learning and teaching management. Easy access to detailed information about the instructors and courses without login requirements has made Faculty Website a valuable recruiting asset for prospective students and effective tools for retaining and engaging current students. The enhanced features of WCJC’s Content Management System allow instructors to create well-designed, user-friendly Faculty Web pages that are more appealing and relevant to students. In this session, a comparative analysis of WCJC’s Faculty Website and Blackboard will be conducted, and the new CMS functionalities behind WCJC’s Faculty Website will be demonstrated to justify the maintenance of both systems. View Details

  Tags

  • Students
  • Admissions
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• The Who, What, When and Where of Accessibility
  Web accessibility. OK, now take a breath. Successful web accessibility initiatives need to distribute work around to different part of project teams. One of the challenges that accessibility faces is the perception that it always adds tons of time. And worse yet, that time is spent chasing bugs instead of learning good accessible design techniques. Wouldn't it be great if you could find a way to keep accessibility from slowing you down on project after project? This session will introduce you to the ways that accessibility fits into different project roles on your design team. Integrate accessibility into roles and your team starts to develop and maintain a body of knowledge that creates sustainability and scalability to other projects. Join me to learn how to take the critical step of sharing the right work across the right project team members. View Details

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  • Accessibility
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• Pics or It Didn’t Happen: How to Get the Most from Your Photos and Videos
  You need images and videos for every aspect of your school’s online communications, but the process of finding, organizing and sharing your visual assets can be challenging. Join Libris by PhotoShelter’s Martin Vloet and Kristin Twiford to explore how universities and colleges across the country get more value from their photos and videos on social media, their websites and in marketing campaigns. View Details
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11:45 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

• Mastering Person Data: Making the Data About You, Work For You
  If you were to ask three different business units what information about a person is key to them, there would most likely be three different answers with some commonalities. Take this example and apply it to the real world where it's not only university business units need information about a person, but also all of the cloud applications that exist or are on the horizon. Leveraging the EIP (Enterprise Information Platform), Ohio State was able to bring ALL of the important data points about a person to a single location. HR (appointments, hire dates, position info, department info, addresses), IAM (affiliations), Student (academic info), Building (space management link), and Research (KM Data link). This information flows from varying databases through EIP to a load process that builds the person documents and loads them into an Elasticsearch type and in turn exposed via EIP. Some notable consumers of this data currently are the Ohio Board of Regents, BuckeyeLearn (a cloud-based administrative LMS), and varying workflows in our Electronic Document Management (EDM) system. Within the next year, Ohio State’s move to WorkDay Financials will be leveraging the Person Master source for various data points. As a developer, you no longer have to manage a plethora of endpoints for varying data points about a person. Through the EIP, each developer or team can have one endpoint that serves the elements they need by the parameters they require. As the underlying data store is Elasticsearch the performance is enhanced immensely. The entire employed population , ~65k people, with HR data, affiliations, appointments, addresses, academic info, department info, building API link, and research data API link returned in minutes. View Details

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  • Data and APIs
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• Git For The Stubbornly-Resistant Organization
  You and your team members would like to introduce Git for managing your development assets. You know it's popular, but you've also heard horror stories about converting. There's a lot of doubt, and things are working now.... sort of. Not well enough to be totally happy, but also not badly enough to just "throw everything up on GitHub" as people seem to keep suggesting. But there is a middle way, a way to move the organization forward into a more modern flexible development infrastructure without feeling like you've lost complete control of your source code. The Git ecosystem has matured to the point it can serve some of the most obstinate masters. This talk will dive into the methods of how I brought a stubbornly-resistant organization into the world of Git and how we tackled the most challenging obstacles to adoption, from management to engineering. View Details

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  • Collaborating
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• From Strategic Plan to Content Strategy
  Content strategy is good for business, but it can be challenging to sell the fundamentals of content strategy to leaders and decision-makers in our organizations. It can also be challenging to stay focused on strategy when faced with multiple audiences, politicized home page real estate, conflicting priorities, and demands on web resources. In this session, we’ll discuss the value of your organization’s strategic plan in the face of these challenges—examining its application for making a case, guiding content and design decisions, and evaluating the success of your efforts. View Details

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  • Content strategy
  • Measuring
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• That is Not My Job.
  We all know that person — the one who stays focused solely on the task at hand, doing only the work dictated by his or her job description. They may have incredible depth of knowledge and specialized skills — and quite possibly, a lot of education to back it up — but is that what it takes to be successful? Or can the common generalist’s outlook help your team step up their game? What if…everything was your job? What if we are working from the wrong job descriptions? What if, rather than focusing on our own success, we started to ask different questions that focus on our team’s success? How do we promote the success of the team as a whole? What would that look like? How would our focus change? This presentation takes a look at how, by turning the question around, we can change our culture and create stronger teams as a result. We’ll discuss why teamwork matters, and how you can contribute to the team in ways outside any job description, that will result in success not only for you and your team, but your institution as well. And really, isn’t that our job after all? View Details

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  • Collaborating
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• Accessibility Essentials You Can Use Today
  All students deserve full access. Many are being left out. End that cycle now with these accessibility essentials. Penn State’s Dutton e-Education Institute embraces accessibility to create a culture of inclusion for all of our online students. We’ve become efficient and effective in developing and maintaining accessible online content, and this session will motivate and equip you to do the same. We'll demonstrate how a screen reader interacts with properly formatted online content to ensure a positive user experience. Creating accessible online content doesn’t need to be overwhelming or daunting; you just need to know where to start. You’ll walk away from this session armed with our top accessibility tips and the knowledge, tools, and resources you’ll need to immediately begin to improve the accessibility of your web pages. LEARNING OUTCOMES: • Acknowledge that the need for widespread accessibility is universal and not limited to individuals who are vision and hearing impaired • Identify and remediate the top accessibility ‘blockers’ in an efficient manner (images, tables, links, math equations, etc.) • Gather information on various methods used to improve accessibility • Understand the function and limitations of a screen reader and how it interacts with online content View Details

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• One Size Fits None: Remaking a College Site for a Content Hungry Generation
  From Netflix to Spotify to Amazon, prospective students are accustomed to personalized websites that offer recommendations to help them discover new content or products. When they arrive at most college and university websites the experience is very different. It can feel static and generic by comparison. The culprit? In order to tame the massive amount of content and competing priorities of college websites, a one-size-fits-all home and landing page approach has proliferated. When North Central College decided to redesign its website they wanted to break that one-size-fits-all mold and engage tech-savvy prospects with an experience that felt different from other school sites. With agency partner Spark451, North Central took cues from non-higher ed sites to develop a concept called “stacks.” Stacks are topically bundled content cards. For example, a photo of a faculty member, a video, a student quote, career facts, all related to a particular major. Stacks allow for things like curated categories, and can be embedded into landing pages, news articles and other types of content. They help North Central repurpose and surface content in strategic ways that support admissions efforts. Attendees will learn how North Central took a radical approach to organizing its content to create a user experience that’s different for higher-ed but feels familiar (in a good way) to prospective students. View Details

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  • Redesigns
  • Admissions
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• Don’t You Forget About Me: Building a Site That Serves Your Campus Community’s Needs
  A shift has been happening in college and university web experiences. Higher Education has embraced marketing, dedicating much of their site’s content to recruiting students. This adoption is revolutionizing the way we recruit students, but does little to increase and strengthen our communication with enrolled students and alumni. All too often we see just a simple network of links meant to help enrolled students find and interact with the myriad applications that help them manage their day-to- day needs on campus. For alumni, our communications often fail to engage graduates or never even reach the intended recipient. We can do better. In this session, we’ll take a deep dive into what students want and need to communicate with applications, faculty, administrators, and other students. More importantly, we will cover what information needs to be stored where, and how to access this information. From there, we’ll take a look at ways to bridge the gap between enrolled student and alumni, methods for engagement after graduation, and tools to create long-term bonds. View Details
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3:00 - 3:45 p.m.

• Easy, Affordable Digital Signs with WordPress
  Learn how to set up low-cost, easy-to-maintain digital signs using WordPress, an HD-TV, and a Chromebit. Leveraging WordPress plugins, you can easily pull information from many existing sources for display on your digital sign. Creating new content is also easy, thanks to WordPress's straightforward, browser-based user interface. View Details

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• Stop Repeating Yourself: Modularized WordPress Development
  Find yourself repeating the same basic tasks on every new development project you take on? Streamline and bring consistency to your development process by designing for reusability and bootstrapping your projects using tools like Yeoman and WP-CLI. This presentation will demonstrate the effectiveness of D.R.Y. (Don't Repeat Yourself) concepts across projects, concentrating on WordPress Theme development. Additionally, it will explore design patterns that promote shared, centralized data, reducing data duplication across your sites. View Details

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• Beyond SEO: Writing Findable Content
  "I can't find it." Yep, I hear that one too. In fact, it's the most common complaint I hear from students, faculty, and staff about their university website. I also hear them ask: "Where am I?" "Is this for me?" "Where do I go from here?" These questions are symptoms of poor findability—and we need to answer them. No page on our website should feel like a dead end. Institutions that take action often responded to these problems with a redesigned website or new information architecture, but what about the content we create? Beyond SEO, how can we effectively guide web users toward their destination—as well as enable their discovery of useful, relevant content? It starts with a content strategy and continues by educating content contributors about findability and navigation. View Details

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  • Content strategy
  • Measuring
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• Copy and Paste Is Easy, but Let’s Make Your Site Shine: Helping Non-experts Thrive as Web Managers
  I’d never trained a hunting dog before, so when an eight-week-old pup joined my family in the spring of 2013 I was as clumsy and confused as she was. We went to a trainer and the first thing he said to me was, “I’m not teaching your dog a damn thing. I’m going to train you to train her.” I can’t work with your content managers, but I’m going to train… I mean teach you to teach them how to thrive in their role, even if it’s an “other duty as assigned.” As a former English teacher I jumped wholeheartedly into the training aspect of my role as web communications manager in a decentralized system with more than 200 content managers. I will share tips and tactics for planning your training sessions; helping your content managers embrace their responsibility; demonstrating the function of a well-designed, well-written page and how to make each page useful to their audience; and share some of my favorite IA, UX and web writing resources that novices can use—and actually enjoy—to build their confidence and skill sets. My university’s site is far from perfect, but as you improve your content managers so shall you improve your school’s web presence. View Details

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  • Professional development
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• E-Expectations 2016: Online Behaviors for College-Bound Students from Junior to Senior Year
  Each year, the E-Expectations report summarizes the online behaviors of college-bound high school students in order to inform and improve e-recruitment strategies. For the first time, a fall survey was administered to learn about behavior variances that occur when high school students transition from junior to senior year. Attend this session and be the first to learn about trends and behaviors among juniors and seniors as they use digital marketing resources to explore their college enrollment options. Stephanie and Lance will discuss prospective students’ use of websites, email, texting, paid marketing, social media, forms, and more. Additionally, they will compare the spring and fall survey data and explain how the results should influence your own e-recruitment practices. By the end of the session, attendees will: 1. Understand what campuses need to do to meet the online expectations of college-bound high school students at all stages of their college search. 2. Know how to manage their institution’s digital presence across multiple channels, including the campus website, email, and social media. 3. Learn how mobile device usage is changing how students browse websites, complete forms, and interact with campuses online. View Details

  Tags

  • Students
  • Admissions
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• We Live in the Future: 360 Video & Higher Ed
  Virtual reality is coming, and it's coming fast. In December 2015, the New York Times distributed over 1 million Google Cardboard viewers to its print subscribers. YouTube and Facebook both support 360 degree videos, and WebVR is bringing virtual reality content out of the realm of high-end gaming and specialized devices. Some experts predict VR will be bigger than the film industry within 10 years. What does this mean for higher education? With a new and cheaper gadgets released seemingly every day, the technology is becoming more and more accessible. Come hear how Colorado College is leveraging this new medium, what we’ve learned, and how you can get started--even with limited time and budget. View Details

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  • Social
  • Marketing
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• Numbers Game: How Dartmouth & Marquette Measure Social Success
  Your goals on social are varied: raise brand awareness, recruit new students, engage alumni and even increase donations. How do you define success on social and ensure that your efforts make an impact across departments, schools and organizations? In this panel discussion, Tim Cigelske (Director of Social Media, Marquette University), Erin Supinka (Social Media Manager, Dartmouth College) and Patrick Cuttica (Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Sprout Social) will talk about using analytics to inform your social strategy, secure buy-in for new initiatives and move beyond vanity metrics to measure what actually matters to your institution. Bring your questions and experiences to share for an interactive discussion. View Details
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4:15 - 5:00 p.m.

• “Forming” an Online Data Collection Strategy
  In 2014, Illinois State University took their online forms to the next level by implementing a new form/survey system that supported data workflow. The biggest requirements that had to be addressed were to implement something that worked with our current web technology, was mobile friendly, and empowered users to manage their own forms and data flow. Big questions had to be answered along the way: Who will run it? How do we make it work with our web CMS? How do we train users? What policy will be enforced/created to support its implementation? How will we maintain it in the long run? Find out how Illinois State answered these questions when they implemented Formstack for data collection needs on their campus — and why having a plan matters. View Details

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  • Data and APIs
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• 3, 2, 1, Lift Off . . . Now What? Maintaining a WordPress Site for Long-Term Security
  You've spent six months working with five different departments on your website redesign. You've gone over each page with a fine-tooth comb. You've perfected the perfect "voice" for your content, striking the right balance between fun and professional. You've launched successfully and clinked glasses at a celebratory happy hour. Congratulations! Now what? Launching a new website is a great feeling, but too often we become lax in maintaining our sites post-launch. Once the dust settles, take action to ensure that your site has the longevity and security that it deserves! When you work this hard for something, it pays to take care of it. In this presentation, I'll go over valuable maintenance tips for Wordpress, the world's most popular content management system: 1. Evaluating whether or not a content management system makes sense for you in the first place: think about maintenance before you build! 2. Setting up a project management tool or ticketing system after launch to track future requests and updates 3. Plugins, plugins, plugins. Keeping a strict "update" schedule and the importance of updates 4. After-launch training sessions and what should be covered 5. Managing permissions for users who may access your site 6. Security provisions - what to configure up front and what to do in case of an attack 7. Backups - how, when, and what to do if the worst should happen and more! Maintenance is not always a "sexy" topic, but just consider the ratio of build time to "maintenance" time. A website build may take six months, but the life of your website could extend five years or more! To say that maintenance is "half the battle" is selling it short - it's more than that. This presentation will arm you with everything you need to know before embarking on a new build, and give you valuable tips to ensure the longevity and security of your existing sites, microsites, and landing pages. View Details

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• Nested Content Strategy: Adding Layers to Rally Content Teams
  Higher education is a notoriously decentralized environment — and one of the most difficult to reign in when it’s time to change your school’s content culture. A bit of nesting (visualize Russian nesting dolls) can prepare an organization by providing flexibility while managing individual needs and creativity. In this session, you will learn how the University of South Carolina was able to implement change to build on research-driven brand strengths and created harmony across content teams by layering key university messages, attributes and values to lead content development in teams from publications, web, internal communications, social media and more. Learn how to: • Layer your content strategy to add meaning without overcomplicating your message. • Provide flexibility for content creators while still maintaining brand cohesiveness overall and prepare your teams for change. • Identify champions in your team to help spread the message and build a content culture that everyone can rally behind to bring harmony to a house of chaos. View Details

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  • Content strategy
  • Collaborating
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• Project Management: The Musical!
  Sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things” from the Sound of Music: “Stakeholders pausing and missing their deadlines, Engineers working to tag all the headlines, Scheduling has me all tied up with strings, These are a few project management things!” — All great musicals tell stories of some sort of journey. It’s usually a tale of overcoming some type of adversity, with plot twists, occasional heartbreak, and humor. And isn’t that what a web project is? Musicals simply include songs to help move the plot along. We’re going to give an overview — with a soundtrack! — of how to best manage a website design and development project from contracting to post-launch. We’ll share tools and spreadsheets, steps to take, how to work with clients, and how project managers overcome the odds to navigate it all towards a fantastic product at the end. It’s going to be informative, and at times very very musical. Along with learning how good your immediate neighbor is at audience participation, you will learn items such as: — how to get your project organized for success right from the start — what analytics and KPIs to review — what to do when stakeholders disapprove — how to handle scope creep — how to survive a project with humor through use of the occasional show tune This session is not technical, and is great for both beginning and advanced project managers alike. A general knowledge of popular Broadway musicals is helpful, though not required. There will be one or two opportunities for sing-a-longs, and the audience should feel welcome to join in. View Details

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  • Project managers
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• Effective Academic Program Pages That Attract and Convert
  Academic program pages are dollar for dollar the most important pages on your institutions site. Why are we not treating them like it? Learn how to craft a user experience and SEO informed content strategy to gain more organic search traffic and better answer the questions of your prospects to generate interest in your schools academics programs. View Details

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  • Marketing
  • Content strategy
  • Admissions
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• You Can't Spell Usability without USA!
  Democratize usability at your campus! Just as content-creation has become the unalienable right of contributors across your campus, so too usability and it's message of user-centered design can become the pursuit of your whole college. We'll take a look at how to bring project teams and staff from across the school together in the patriotic mission of making people-centered websites. This session will cover which usability tasks to implement at every step of your project, how to spread the recruitment workload (so it doesn't all come out of your time budget), and how to spread a culture of student-centered design on your campus. We'll also share our process for recording, captioning, distributing usability results. View Details

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  • Collaborating
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• Personalization on higher education websites – the new competitive advantage.
  If it’s not personalized, it’s not engaging. The idea of making the website experience for your target audience both personalized and targeted isn’t a new one. It is however one that has eluded many higher education institutions. This is often down to time, skill or technology. This presentation will outline how higher education can apply ecommerce and online retail techniques to drive website improvements. How to plan for personalization? What works and what doesn’t. View Details
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8:30 - 9:15 a.m.

• "Give it a REST"
  WordPress is ubiquitous. It powers small sites, large sites, blogs and just about everything else you can imagine, partially because it's so versatile. With the advent of the WordPress REST API, the platform became even more flexible. Depending on how things are configured, the REST API can be used to syndicate content from a WordPress-powered site to myriad other platforms, or it can be used to send and update content from an external source to a WordPress-powered site. In this session, we'll explore some of the ways the REST API is being used, and we'll talk about the possibilities that have been opened up as a result. View Details

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  • WordPress
  • Data and APIs
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• Get Dirty. Be a Vagrant!
  Do you need to work on your website while offline? Want to test code in a safe, production-like environment, without the extra work of having additional servers to manage? Maybe a little surprise project you want to develop and test without letting anyone know? If this is you--and it should be all of us--you need to be using Vagrant! You will get an introduction to how Vagrant works to allow you to have a complete virtual machine of your preferred production-like environment, how to configure & fine-tune your settings to accomplish amazing feats! And, play with Puppets too! For the managers in the crowd, Vagrant allows you to put a new staff person on a project, and be up and running in five minutes! View Details

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  • Collaborating
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• "No, YOU'RE Crying": How Two Schools Turned a Cinderella Experience into Social Media Gold
  Getting into "The Big Dance" is one thing. But what do you do once you're there, and how can you make sure you get the most out of it? University of Arkansas at Little Rock & Stony Brook University were two Cinderella stories in the NCAA basketball tournament this spring, and Meaghan Milliorn Fikes and Chris D'Orso helped tell their schools' stories through social media. They will discuss how best to collaborate across departments and mobilize campus resources quickly and efficiently, and will provide examples of how they capitalized on the excitement of being suddenly thrust into the national spotlight. View Details

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  • Social
  • Admissions
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• Transforming the Traditional RFP into a Request for Partnership
  All too often, web projects are destined to fail before they begin due to pitfalls in the traditional RFP process. The results of these pitfalls can range from months of lost time and effort to hundreds of thousands of wasted dollars. Trinity University, in collaboration with their agency partner, ImageX, has found a way to put web projects on a rocket ship toward success, straight from the get-go: they’ve transformed the traditional Request for Proposal process into a new kind of RFP: a Request for Partnership. View Details

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  • Collaborating
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• The Next Generation: Post-Millennials...What Is Next?
  This popular session from last year is back with new research on the iGeneration and late Millennials. With a focus on technology and cultural shifts, we will explore generational differences and similarities and why those things are important. Come find out about what traits this generation has, and what impact will they have on the work you do. View Details

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  • Students
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• It's Made of People! A Strategic Approach to Dynamic Web Content Personalization
  Personalization gets a bad rap for being a creepy practice. But given the complexity and depth of higher ed websites, delivering relevant content and calls-to-action to our wide range of unique users quickly and efficiently is a must. By serving users dynamic content that speaks directly to their unique needs and communicates in a way that appeals to them, we can cultivate deeper understanding, drive more meaningful actions, and foster stronger relationships. We can accomplish this by inviting user research and content strategy to the party. In this presentation, we’ll use case studies to explain the process behind creating an effective, sustainable, and unobtrusive digital personalization experience that provides relevance for the user and ROI for you. This includes developing personas, identifying user needs and tasks, applying these insights to your website’s information architecture and user flows, developing and delivering relevant dynamic content, and analyzing user behavior to gauge success and refine your approach. The result? A personalized experience that is less like a creepy robot, and more like a friendly human who knows what you need and when you need it. View Details

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  • Content strategy
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• Designing for the CMS
  From the beginning of a web design project, designers (and those who approve the designs) need to consider content and the way it is managed. The design should reinforce the content strategy while also accommodating the necessary edge cases. We can ensure the design intention becomes a website reality by creating a solution that focuses on site governance, brand compliance, and the user experience of the content editor. Drawing on the recent redesign and content management system (CMS) implementation of simons-rock.edu, Michael will examine successful tactics and pitfalls. Subjects include pattern libraries, CMS functionality, dynamic content, and agile development. View Details
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9:30 - 10:15 a.m.

• Still Slacking Off
  An update to last year's Red Stapler winning presentation: we're still slacking off. In this session we'll explore how Vanderbilt University implemented Slack in their Web Communications office (and other offices around campus), integrated it with their help desk, project management system, and code repositories, and how it completely changed the culture of the office. View Details

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  • Collaborating
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• Access Denied: Keeping Yourself off an Attacker's Radar
  Google's recent Transparency Report shows that nearly half a million websites are now hosting malware, an increase of 160 percent from this time last year. Higher education websites are particularly attractive to attackers, offering access to large amounts of bandwidth and broad network space. In this session, we will examine blackbox scanning tools to discover what types of information your WordPress site might be leaking to attackers. Then we'll explore steps we can take to stop this information leakage — one key segment of a larger strategy to fortify WordPress sites. View Details

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  • WordPress
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• “Mike’s an Idiot” And Other Ways a Responsive Shop Changed Recruitment in 2016
  What happens when you send prospective students an email with the subject line “Mike’s an Idiot," linked to an "un-marketing" video? How do you build an audience of 4,000 in nine months on Snapchat, on a campus with only 1,200 students? Why do millennials love dashcam videos and what happens when you put your baseball team in a van? Can movie trailers double as recruitment videos? Get answers to these questions and more at our session. Last year we said, "go bold, or go home’." This year? We went even bolder and saw huge returns on the risk. Hear from both the marketing and the enrollment sides of the team about why partnering together and taking bigger risks is working well for Beloit. We’ll even share details on why we plan to send blank postcards in 2017. Just kidding. Maybe. View Details

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  • Social
  • Admissions
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• The Making of a Web Team
  A year ago our web shop went from a couple full-timers to three full-time staff, one part-timer, two interns, and a partnership with another unit. The two people whose idea of communication meant yelling across the hall at each other suddenly expanded to 6+, and with it came the inevitable requirements of management, and growing pains of organization and oversight. This session will talk about how we addressed our sudden influx of staff and met requirements for training. It will also review the technology we've adopted to help us day-to-day: Slack, Asana, and ServiceNow. And we'll discuss the effort to shut that technology off to help improve our communication and share ideas. View Details

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  • Governance
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• #FridayReads: Library and Campus Engagement through Social Media
  This session will focus on how academic libraries can reach faculty, staff, and students through social media and website integration. The library offers an abundance of resources that often remain hidden within the library building, but by using social media including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Periscope, the entire campus can not only be made aware of the library services, but also engage with the library staff. For a successful social media marketing plan a number of concerns must be addressed including scheduling of posts and intentional graphic design. This session will provide examples of successful and not so successful posts and there effect on campus outreach. Outcomes: Attendees will learn ways to implement a social media plan that includes Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Periscope to market library programs and resources. Attendees will learn strategies for integrating web site content with social media planning. View Details

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  • Social
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• Whose Website is it Anyway?
  Learn how two University at Buffalo (UB) communications professionals reached across departmental lines in a decentralized graduate admissions environment to collaborate on an integrated and engaging website redesign. The focus of this presentation will be to discuss how we developed a messaging strategy tailored to students rather than internal faculty and staff, and utilized existing resources to improve operations and the overall web user experience at UB. We will also discuss the political and organizational barriers that communications professionals often face while collaborating on university-wide projects and how to overcome them. This session would benefit those who are part of an admissions, marketing, recruitment or student services team who are looking to improve internal and external communication through their website. Learning Outcomes/Objectives: • Identify your primary and secondary website audiences • Auditing existing content based on audience needs • Identifying and reducing internal lingo and industry jargon • Improve user experience through collaboration View Details

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  • Redesigns
  • Collaborating
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• It’s the end of the WYSIWYG as you know it ... and I feel fine
  The evolution of content marketing and the increased importance of developing and executing an iterative content strategy has necessitated significant changes to the way that higher education approaches content management. As a result, content management systems continue to have to accommodate this paradigm shift. In her session, Kat will discuss the evolution of content marketing in higher education and what it means for your content management system. Topics covered will include COPE (Create Once, Publish Everywhere), targeted content delivery, putting more ownership on your content contributors, and measuring and maximizing the effectiveness of content. Note that this session will be product agnostic. View Details
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10:45 - 11:30 a.m.

• Self-Updating Social Media-Driven Digital Signage
  Digital billboards are practically ubiquitous among college campuses now. They're a helpful tool to get information to students but they also require regular upkeep to keep their content fresh. With limited staff and time, we found that ours were often becoming stagnant. Learn how the Web/Marketing department at Jamestown Community College created a self-updating web-based solution, based on Ruby on Rails, React, CSS animations, and Raspberry Pi, to automatically pull information from a configurable list of social media services and display it with a simple, eye-catching design. View Details

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  • Social
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• Learning to COPE at XU
  In 2015 Xavier University rolled out a search-based homepage. After providing such a dynamic homepage, the content strategy was lacking. We started utilizing a blog tool to push fresh content out to our audience but still had a semi-static web presence. We'll discuss the tools we used to build out our CDN and the challenges we faced. View Details

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  • Content strategy
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• Defeating Content Zombies: What “The Walking Dead” Taught Me About Web Governance
  We all know that our institutions need web governance, yet the road to this utopia always appears fraught with zombies. But without web governance, zombie content will continue to consume our site’s usability, travellers may be mislead by outdated information, and a culture of malaise keeps our sites from moving forward. This presentation will glean insights from cult hit “The Walking Dead” -- and from SUNY Oswego’s massive web redevelopment project -- to show that the journey to web governance is not so scary after all. Disclaimer: Knowledge of “The Walking Dead” is useful but not required; graphic violence is not anticipated; no humans or animals were harmed in the making of this presentation. View Details

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  • Content strategy
  • Governance
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• 50 Case Studies Later, Have We Learned Anything? Running an Internal Web Agency at Stanford
  At Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences, we've seen it all: a nursery school, an archaeology collection, a slang dictionary, a collection of 10th century manuscripts, and a wide variety of academic departments, interdisciplinary programs, and research projects. We’ve redesigned over 50 websites in the last two years - and we make it a priority to learn and reflect on each one. What makes a client well poised for a web redesign, and how do we get them there? Why do plenty of big agency projects fall flat? How do we educate clients about project costs? When do sub-sites make sense? And of course how do we balance projects vs cross-cutting initiatives vs time for the team? Learning Outcomes * Matching projects to different redesign formats * How to be the most attractive option for a website redesign (cost, security, branding, accessibility, support, and maintenance) * How to allocate a team to invest in initiatives and create long-term dividends * Design thinking tips to build an effective team View Details

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  • Redesigns
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• Getting it Right: What REALLY Matters to Students in Social Communities
  The use of social media in higher education recruitment is a common practice, often used to supplement more traditional print and email-based outreach methods. Are institutions doing all they can to strategically reach students during the yield period? Are we using the right media and messaging? In 2015, Dr. Corie Martin completed a nationwide research study on admissions and marketing recruitment outreach activities and observed thousands of student interactions within university social media communities. The results of the study showed what was really important to students and suggested how Higher Ed leadership might prepare for the next generation of prospective students. View Details

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  • Students
  • Social
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• S.I.F.T. Through Your Content For Accessibility
  Accessibility standards, ADA-Compliance, WCAG… all this accessibility talk can get confusing, right? In this session, learn about a new, simplified approach to accessibility: S.I.F.T. Most institutions already “sift” through their content for various reasons, but I will present an easy way to make sure you are “sifting” properly by abiding to the following steps: Structure, Images, Forms, Tables. You will learn how to S.I.F.T. through your content to ensure you have the most thoughtful – and accessible – content possible. I will discuss accessibility benefits and best practices, and I will share a collection of tools to aid in this process. View Details

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  • Accessibility
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• Accounting for Website Security in Higher Education
  Online threats against web applications are growing at an exponential rate and is estimated to continue to grow in the coming years. Higher education finds itself in a precarious position trying to balance the need to provide services like external websites to it's various functional groups, while working to stay ahead of such threats. This is further exasperated by the adoption and deployment of open-source CMS applications like WordPress and Drupal. In this talk, we'll explore the latest tactics, techniques and procedures being employed by cyber criminals, their threats to Higher Education institutions and provide a security framework from which organizations can expand on within their own organizations. View Details
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11:45 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.

• One Cool Thing -- Everyday
  Competing for the attention of prospective students, alumni and others is a huge challenge. Take a look at whether developing a mobile app ought to be part of your strategic mix. According to Nielsen, when it comes to using apps versus mobile web, 89% of people surveyed access content using mobile apps, while only 11% spent time using the web on mobile. Learn about how one college marketing department developed an app to ride this wave. One Cool Thing is an iOS and Android app that delivers content supporting key brand messaging — with the specific intention of becoming part of a person’s daily routine. This session will cover how the app was conceived, the technical work that was required to build the app -- but not too technical ;-) -- the editorial work required to maintain the app, and a look at the analytics. We’ll talk about how the app is connected to our alumni magazine, the physical campus via augmented reality, blogs, and other platforms. View Details

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  • Mobile
  • Content strategy
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• Rethink Reuse with Web Components
  Enter a world where inline script and style tags are the norm, content areas have a single focus, and the way you look at web development gets turned upside down. We think of web development by units of sites and pages. But then we turn around and style rules for one particular content area on a single page to a site-wide stylesheet! This mode of thinking by nature limits how we can re-use small blocks. Web components provide a way to think smaller. By destructuring a page into self-contained blocks, we can share not just content, but full interactions across widely disparate sites with ease. View Details

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  • Content strategy
  • Collaborating
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• Snapchat, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Snap
  "Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things.” -- Douglas Adams Let's say you are in charge of your institution's social media presence and strategy, but you've tried and failed several times to come to grips with the fastest growing platform among people under the age of 25. Your students and prospective students, in other words. If this sounds like you, then hello. I'm old, too. It's nice to meet you. In this presentation, we will walk together hand-in-hand through the sometimes mystifying Snapchat interface, we will discuss the features of the app that differentiate it from other social platforms, and will look at some examples of how universities and colleges are using Snapchat to connect with their students and prospective students. And if you are under 35 and this all makes total sense to you, you'll at least get a laugh. View Details

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  • Social
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• The Art of the Presentation
  Whether you're pitching a new project to your senior leadership, or you're talking about an idea or successful campaign to a conference audience, knowing your audience and how to communicate to them is key. In this presentation, Karlyn Borysenko and Jeff Stevens will share best practices on how to identify your audience needs, how to craft the perfect presentation proposal, how to construct slide decks that communicate key ideas and keep the audience fully engaged, and tips and tricks from award winning presenters. View Details

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  • Professional development
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• Through empathy to humor: creating content to engage students without being naff
  Injecting a little lightness and humor into our student-facing content is something we’d all love to do, and some of us try. But making this work in higher ed is no laughing matter. With committees to battle, brands to comply with, the fear of just not being “funny”, and the even greater fear of getting more groans than giggles, getting this part of your content strategy right is seriously tough going. So much so, that many of us shy away. In this session, Tracy Playle will explore how to develop your audience research approaches to better support your development of humorous content, understand how empathy mapping techniques can influence all areas of your student engagement content strategy, and look at how different types of humor can play a strong role at different stages in the student journey, and in different types of institutions. View Details
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• Redesigning Your Site for a Better User Experience
  Using analytics and qualitative data, Farmingdale State College implemented a simple, yet powerful Bootstrap design. The site’s information architecture now aligns with their audience’s expectations, so visitors are able to locate information without confusion. Since going live in June 2015, admissions questions have been reduced by 22% and inquiries for general information have decreased 14%. Additionally, their new modular design makes life much easier for content contributors, who are now actually looking forward to attending training sessions. In this session, Sylvia will discuss their redesign process, including their analysis of analytics, the information architecture overhaul, and the preparation and launch of the new layout. View Details

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• Decentralize your creative files and collaborate your marketing efforts
  Higher education institutions have heaps of valuable marketing content (think your photos, videos, audio, PDFs, creative files, website images, user generated content, presentations, and more), but are often disorganized and being used blindly by multiple departments. Join Dustin Pence and Sam Schnepf with Widen to showcase how higher education institutions are planning for and implementing DAM (digital asset management), as well as their approach to taxonomy, content management, creative workflow, metadata and more. Learn the stories of how digital asset management is helping other higher education institutions decentralize their digital assets, gain visibility into their asset usage, track what works and what doesn’t, become more transparent and collaborative across all departments, streamline workflows, and achieve a professional level of university brand consistency. View Details
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3:00 - 3:45 p.m.

• You Get What You Pay For: Make Facebook Advertising Work for You
  We've all spent countless hours and months -- for many of us, years -- growing our Facebook page likes and optimizing our content and calendars. Yet each year our organic reach shrinks, and our carefully crafted posts reach a smaller percentage of our fans. The reason for this is obvious: Facebook wants us to pay. The good news is, with even a small budget, you can make use of Facebook's robust, detailed, and, at times, creepy knowledge of their consumers, and spend your money and your energy reaching your target audiences. This session will focus on the backend of Facebook's native advertising tools, covering Facebook Power Editor, advanced keyword and geo-targeting, email match, remarketing, conversion tracking, Google Analytics integration, and more. We'll also touch on Instagram advertising, as it relates to Facebook, and touch on Twitter and LinkedIn as a bonus if time allows. Bring your laptops, your questions, and any of your own experiences with Facebook advertising to share–together we'll cut through the noise and get our content back in front of the people who care about it! View Details

  Tags

  • Social
  • Marketing
  • Measuring
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• How Vassar Home-brewed a Headless CMS
  “Headless” or “decoupled” may be buzzwords you’ve heard recently applied to CMSs (Content Management Systems), but the principles they follow and systems they represent are neither fads nor new, and help us solve real-world problems in scalable, maintainable ways. It’s well understood that separation of concerns is a best practice, especially when applied to separating content or structure (HTML) from presentation (CSS)—this same principle applies to a CMS. Learn what a headless CMS is and the benefits of separating the content in a traditional, monolithic CMS from its proprietary HTML templating engine. Learn how we designed our system with facilitating change in mind, and can manage sites that share code, markup, and assets—while allowing for infinite variation at the site level. We employ simplicity, consistency, and principles such as progressive enhancement and individualized design to guide us. Using a server-side templating; centrally controlled server-side SASS compilation; and a headless, push CMS that publishes flat files has helped us achieve more efficient workflows, gain total control over our markup, and nimbly adapt to change. View Details

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  • Collaborating
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• Words. Words. Words: How to Write Sizzling Content
  We talk about content. A LOT. But what about the actual words? This practical session is all about finessing your wordsmith skills and adding sizzle to your sentences, no matter what the medium. OK. So you weren’t an English major. You might not recall the terms, but you know when a headline is catchy or a story is compelling—we’ll look at the actual language and explore why that writing sounds so darn good. We will explore some tried and true literary elements and journalistic techniques that make content pop—repetition, alliteration, those sorts of things. Finally, we’ll talk about those sensory details that connect people to content. Also, we’ll explore why brevity rules – how you can make that stuffy report of a webpage into a lively, user-geared paragraph. And how you can turn that stuffy paragraph into a compelling sentence. In all, this session--inspired by a pre-conference workshop of the same name last year--will help you, no matter what your skill level, become a better writer and self-editor for any medium. View Details

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• Gone Idea Fishing: A Creative Problemsolving Tacklebox
  I've often been told, "I wish I was a creative person like you," as if creativity were a static trait, that some people are simply creative and some are not. But creative problem solving is, in fact, a concrete skillset that anyone can learn, practice, and master. With the aid of an apt metaphor - fishing - I will share key concepts, strategies, and tools for finding novel solutions to difficult problems. This package of skills can be applied to challenges in any of our disciplines. Whether you are a developer, project manager, writer, social strategist, designer, or just someone who needs a good idea from time to time, expect to leave this session with some new ideas for coming up with ideas. No prior experience with creative problem solving techniques required. If you are a total pro at this you might not get as much or if it, although you will hopefully appreciate the metaphor. View Details

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  • Professional development
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• Train the Trainer: Tips for Enhancing Employee Learning
  Let’s be honest: no one truly enjoys sitting through an hour or more of training that is required as part of their job. This is especially the case when said topic is less than exciting or ever so slightly technical in nature. “Come sit for an hour to learn a web content management system so I can update the university website? Well, that sounds super fun and at the top of my to-do list!” Said no one, ever. When it’s your job to facilitate training, it can be discouraging to know that your participants may not be as engaged in the topic at hand as you are. In this presentation, we’ll cover three things that you as a training facilitator can do to enhance the learning experience of your participants, so they walk away not only having learned the required material, but actually having enjoyed their time with you. View Details

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  • Professional development
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• We Can All "Do" User Experience
  In higher education, and especially at smaller colleges and universities, some of our most critical web functions -- prospective student inquiry gathering, online gift forms, etc. -- are farmed out to third parties. Why? Because they’ve already got the tool we need, and we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. However, the solutions we buy are often focused exclusively on making US happy, not our users. They provide good data output and reporting… but what about the user experience of inputting data in the first place? We need to recognize that these functions are far too important to leave to non-designed interfaces onto which we slap our logo and primary school color. When we redesigned our online giving form at Colgate, we took the time to think about design -- not just for aesthetic, but for user experience. With minimal cost and a lot of goodwill gained, we executed research and testing throughout the project, and reached the end result of a visually stunning, easy-to-use form that helped drive a measurable increase in the online giving rate. In this presentation I will share the methods we used -- borrowed heavily from the work of Steve Krug -- to reach our successful outcome, and how they can be used by teams of any size to vastly improve project outcomes. View Details

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  • Redesigns
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• How the Rapid Evolution of Technology Changes the Way Students Interact
  Digital experiences and the way we interact through technologies are evolving faster than we can keep up with, with some even taking it as far as calling it a 4th industrial revolution. In this session, Ben will speak about how established and new technologies can work together to create unique experiences like never before and how the future for Higher Ed in the digital space will look. With a specific focus on website search, he will explain concepts like machine learning, proactive search, personalisation, insights engines - and how the advancements in technology will change the students experience forever. View Details
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4:15 - 5:00 p.m.

• Not Yet Scheduled
• Speed and Security: A Better User Experience with HTTP/ 2 & Let's Encrypt
  When it comes to web pages, speed is always important. Users leave if a site takes too long. Google ranks faster sites better. Our browsers, computers, and smartphones have all evolved, but HTTP/1.1 was last updated in 1999. In internet years, that's 5 lifetimes ago. Now, HTTP/2 has emerged as a modern update for serving content to users, quickly and securely. In this session, we will discuss HTTP/2, its improvements, challenges, and opportunities for web developers in higher ed. This speed comes at a cost - HTTP/2 is, for now, only servable via HTTPS, so we will explore easy SSL generation with Let's Encrypt, a new certificate authority offering free SSL certificates. View Details

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• Is This Hashtag Really Necessary? – Taking the Plunge into Twitter Chats
  The Twitter Chat, or any internet “ask me anything” event, can be a dangerous proposition. What starts out well intentioned can go south in a huge hurry. Just ask Citibank, the CEO of REI, or any GOP presidential candidate. Then why would any higher ed institution want to expose their leadership to such a potential pratfall? Because it’s the right thing to do. It’s a direct connection to your audiences, and gets better attendance and broader reach than any forum held in a campus auditorium. When properly executed, a Twitter chat can generate excellent results for institutions of all sizes. This presentation will discuss lessons learned from The College at Brockport’s first ever presidential Twitter chat in November of 2015, using the hashtag #bportprezchat. It will explore what went right, what went wrong, and what could be improved. It will also provide tips for helping you prep for your own Twitter chat, so you can communicate more directly with your audiences. View Details

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  • Social
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• A Day in the Life of an Analyst
  Aaron Baker, Digital Analytics Lead for Harvard University Public Affairs & Communications, will walk through his editorial calendar for analytics reports, touching on everything from how Google Analytics and Tag Manager work together to how that data should be interpreted and reported to managers and executives. Aaron will also talk about the process he used to build a data landscape for Harvard.edu and the Gazette news website, investigating and integrating multiple data sources for combined analytic data on email, social, and web. You will learn how to map out your own data landscape of what data you have, where it comes from, where it resides now, and what your access is to it. You will learn how to pick which KPIs you should keep track of and what metrics you should use to report to your leadership. View Details

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  • Measuring
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• Shall We Play a Game? Gaming the System, When the System Is Your Learning Management System
  This session will provide an overview of the world of games and discuss how we envision the adaptation of specific elements in the educational interface. What is it about games that engages and motivates players, and how can we apply this interest to increase learning success in online? We’ll also consider the future of games, and how this developing technology might level up learning as well. View Details

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• Think Static -- What to Use When a CMS is Too Much
  A CMS works well for large sites where content needs to be added and updated frequently by many collaborators. Quite often however, content management systems get shoehorned into being the only solution for the web, wasting development time and unnecessary database queries. What about smaller sites, such as course pages & blogs, university marketing campaigns, or portfolios? Static site generators are the answer! Static site generators compile websites -- from source code on your development machine -- to produce plain ol’ HTML pages that can be hosted practically anywhere. I’ll show you how to use them, the popular ones out there, and why they may be more appropriate for that next project. View Details

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  • Content strategy
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• Hub Projects: Influence Across Your Institution
  Your digital project is important. Perhaps it is more important than you have imagined. It might be a Hub Project, one that impacts the lines of business of multiple stakeholders. If you are at the helm of a Hub Project, you have the opportunity to chart a course toward the positive change your institution needs to navigate the years ahead. And yeah, some changes are needed. Higher education is facing down many challenging new realities. It is harder to find students who can pay for tuition that covers increasing operational costs as funding sources diminish and society questions the value of the traditional model of higher education. A Hub Project can invite stakeholders out of silos and into a collaborative change process. In this interactive presentation (yep, participation is welcomed) we will explore some of the attitudes and tools that will make your digital project a hub of influence. You will walk away knowing: How to determine if your project is a Hub Project - The Hub Project formula and its variables - How to use a SNAB Card - A silo can be busted View Details
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9:00 - 9:45 a.m.

Red Stapler Best-of-Track

• Fienen's Totally Topical, Terrific Tutorial to Tag Manager
  Google Analytics is an everyday part of most people's lives now in the web world. And it's just one of many third-party tools you might be using to manage your website. However, with large sites and disparate groups, it's common place to do little more beyond implementing basic tracking. It turns out, Tag Manager can vastly simplify how you enable people to track their websites without needing to intervene with extra coding, as well as enabling additional tools, features, and embeds for a site. Everything from analytics to live chat, from form tracking to social media conversions can all be tied together with this simple tool - all without adding any extra code to your side (besides the Tag Manager code, obviously). Let's make your life a little bit easier, and a lot cooler, by digging into Google complementary tool, Tag Manager, and look at ways you can streamline your site tracking process (and much, much more). We'll look at some real-world use cases, and maybe take some audience questions to do live demos, because that's just how we do, right? View Details

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  • Measuring
• Access Denied: Keeping Yourself off an Attacker's Radar
  Google's recent Transparency Report shows that nearly half a million websites are now hosting malware, an increase of 160 percent from this time last year. Higher education websites are particularly attractive to attackers, offering access to large amounts of bandwidth and broad network space. In this session, we will examine blackbox scanning tools to discover what types of information your WordPress site might be leaking to attackers. Then we'll explore steps we can take to stop this information leakage — one key segment of a larger strategy to fortify WordPress sites. View Details

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  • WordPress
• “Mike’s an Idiot” And Other Ways a Responsive Shop Changed Recruitment in 2016
  What happens when you send prospective students an email with the subject line “Mike’s an Idiot," linked to an "un-marketing" video? How do you build an audience of 4,000 in nine months on Snapchat, on a campus with only 1,200 students? Why do millennials love dashcam videos and what happens when you put your baseball team in a van? Can movie trailers double as recruitment videos? Get answers to these questions and more at our session. Last year we said, "go bold, or go home’." This year? We went even bolder and saw huge returns on the risk. Hear from both the marketing and the enrollment sides of the team about why partnering together and taking bigger risks is working well for Beloit. We’ll even share details on why we plan to send blank postcards in 2017. Just kidding. Maybe. View Details

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  • Social
  • Admissions
• Explain Your Work! 5 Public Speaking Skills You Can Learn Now
  Ever seen a blank look while you talked to your boss or a client about your project? Between coding and designing, we often use jargon that can make non-web people feel stupid. When we convey our ideas clearly, we can change our supervisors and customers from confused and disconnected to happy and supportive. Genevieve has been a member of Toastmasters International for more than four years and has been active in developing effective public speaking skills for more than ten. In this session you'll learn 5 concrete skills you can use immediately and other suggestions to keep building your career. View Details

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  • Professional development
• Shall We Play a Game? Gaming the System, When the System Is Your Learning Management System
  This session will provide an overview of the world of games and discuss how we envision the adaptation of specific elements in the educational interface. What is it about games that engages and motivates players, and how can we apply this interest to increase learning success in online? We’ll also consider the future of games, and how this developing technology might level up learning as well. View Details

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  • Students
• S.I.F.T. Through Your Content For Accessibility
  Accessibility standards, ADA-Compliance, WCAG… all this accessibility talk can get confusing, right? In this session, learn about a new, simplified approach to accessibility: S.I.F.T. Most institutions already “sift” through their content for various reasons, but I will present an easy way to make sure you are “sifting” properly by abiding to the following steps: Structure, Images, Forms, Tables. You will learn how to S.I.F.T. through your content to ensure you have the most thoughtful – and accessible – content possible. I will discuss accessibility benefits and best practices, and I will share a collection of tools to aid in this process. View Details

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  • Accessibility
• Hub Projects: Influence Across Your Institution
  Your digital project is important. Perhaps it is more important than you have imagined. It might be a Hub Project, one that impacts the lines of business of multiple stakeholders. If you are at the helm of a Hub Project, you have the opportunity to chart a course toward the positive change your institution needs to navigate the years ahead. And yeah, some changes are needed. Higher education is facing down many challenging new realities. It is harder to find students who can pay for tuition that covers increasing operational costs as funding sources diminish and society questions the value of the traditional model of higher education. A Hub Project can invite stakeholders out of silos and into a collaborative change process. In this interactive presentation (yep, participation is welcomed) we will explore some of the attitudes and tools that will make your digital project a hub of influence. You will walk away knowing: How to determine if your project is a Hub Project - The Hub Project formula and its variables - How to use a SNAB Card - A silo can be busted View Details
• Poster: The Kitchen is Closed: Main Menus, User Experience, and Competing Orders