MMP3: Creating an Online Brand: From Buy-in to Execution

[Intro Music]

Announcer: You’re listening to one in a series of podcasts from the 2009 HighEdWeb Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Jeanette DeDiemar: Cool. We’re going to run through a topic that probably takes a half a day to run through but we’re going to do our best. And if you have questions, I think Jamie is comfortable to that. We can take them as we go. Hopefully we’ll have time for questions at the end as well too.

Really quick. What we’re going to do is because online branding involves integrated marketing communications, we’re going to help you better understand that. Talk with you a little bit about how you manage change. And I know there was a really great workshop earlier this morning. So, it’s great to kind of piggyback on that as well.

How the role of leadership and getting institutional buy-in for things that involve centralization and creativity and flexibility. And a little bit about how a little about UW Oshkosh kind of weathered that change. And very important that we’ll wrap up with this, how we can serve the needs of our campus through integrated marketing and communication.

So, how many people are familiar with that term ‘integrated marketing and communication’? That’s very good. If we were to ask that question about five years ago, people would have gone, “I don’t get that.” So, I’m not necessarily going to read this to you but will highlight some of the slides as we talk.

Does anybody know who one of the first integrated marketing practitioners were? How about Disney, Walt Disney in the 20s and 30s? And that is carried through and we’re going to explain that. Jamie, this isn’t working too well. Oh, there we go.

Integrated marketing. Any of you are in the role of marketing in your current positions? OK. Who do think in the institution that you work at is in charge? I shouldn’t say in charge but responsible for marketing and communication? Where do you think that responsibility lies?

Audience: I'm guessing in each of the four P's.

Jeanette DeDiemar: OK, that’s a great answer.

Audience: Everybody.

Jeanette DeDiemar: Who said that? You get the prize! That’s exactly right. Maybe you’ll share. I’ll pass this now [Laughter] because you know I need a little sugar this time of day. Can you pass it back to that gentleman in the back? He’ll share because we need sugar this time of the day.

That is exactly right. I think your answer was very helpful too on the left. But it’s very important and I’ll tell you why because integrated marketing is all about, I need a little help here.

Jamie Ceman: Point to the computer and then you have to use this.

Jeanette DeDiemar: OK. Integrated marketing is all about shifting the paradigm from product, price, place and promotion to the 4Cs. Ever heard of those? Consumer? It’s all about them. Customer, those are words sometimes that people don’t like to hear in education, right?

But as the gentlemen in the first session put it so well, we really are in the business of education. It’s about cost. Not necessarily price but the cost to the individual and also the cost to the institution for either change or implementation or for buying something or purchasing something.

And so, with regard to higher education is the cost to the student, to the parent and to the intuition to get them there and to educate them. And it’s about convenience. What do I mean by convenience? We want to take a stab at that.

Is the convenience of finding the offering, finding the product, finding, for the consumer to be able to go online, to be able to attend class in a meaningful way, whether that’s virtually or in the classroom. And it’s about communication.

Left or right?

Jamie Ceman: There at the side just now.

Jeanette DeDiemar: OK. So, integrated marketing at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh was a kind of a scary proposition. And we’re going to talk about managing that change. A little hard to see but integrated marketing, best practice actually involves everything from advertising and promotion. Although it’s a state public institution, we don’t spend much on advertising if at all, about marketing communications, about Web and social media, about public relations and about external relations which includes media relations as well.

So, integrated marketing communications on a Web? Web presence, what does that mean? Well, what it means is that synergy really makes the difference. It’s very audience-centric. And its effectiveness means that you can eliminate fragmentation of messaging. And you know how sometimes you go to a website and you jump from page to page and you’re like, “Where am I? Wow that doesn’t look the same.” Very confusing, very noisy.

And it’s also about change management for the Web as well too. If we look over in the left. This is very similar to the model I showed you. But hard to see but integrated marketing at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh includes everything from Web development to admissions, to providing services for outreach, to administration. Helping people get messages across, about financial services, to alumni relations, to messaging about media relations sustainability.

And so, we have embarked about four years ago on brand evolution. And what that means is how better can we support the institution’s mission of recruitment, retention and outreach. How many of you in the room that say, “That’s probably similar mission to my university or college?” Everybody’s hand probably should have gone up in that because that’s actually what we’re doing.

We’re recruiting students. If we don’t retain them, there is no need for the university and education. And also the outreach supports the other two as well. And also the other component of that is philanthropy, fundraising, endowment for scholarship. So, you begin to see that synergistic message there.

So, Brown Development consist of creating a clear vision for the institutional image and reputation. And I’m going to use that word because a lot of people are more comfortable with that instead of image and establishing a robust, contemporary, and memorable visual identity, hence the website sits in the middle of that.

And the website also is a component for education across campus. There is the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh website. Probably some of those are from about 18 months ago. You wouldn’t know if that’s our four colleges. You wouldn’t know that they’re even part of our university, really when you look at that.

What would you grade that? Bzzt, right! Our challenge then, is we’re going to talk. Was it how to create as a change agent to begin to develop an online brand. So, managing change. It’s understanding the importance of getting buy-in for people to embrace the change. It’s about whoever needs to make that change, establishing some credibility.

So, if you’re the new person on campus and you’ve been brought into lead the change, you got to build some credibility. Also by positioning yourself that you’ve been able to look at best practices. But it’s not always about best practices, it’s also being brave enough to be innovative.

If you’re the person that’s been in charge of this area for a long time and now you have to embrace a new way or you’re the champion for the new way, research can really help with building the credibility. It’s about identifying the vision where you need to go. For those of you that were on the street strategic planning session that was a little bit earlier. That’s a really helpful tie into this as well.

So, when you go back today, you actually have a toolbox to manage change which is very exciting. It’s about being focused on our jobs because we all multitaskers. We can be very, very distracted. And the newest innovation that comes in, we might need to try that.

But being strategic with integrated marketing means very pragmatic and moving along. It’s about creating a climate of openness and transparency. And Jamie is going to talk about how we did that in a climate of shared governance. And it’s empowering action so that you’re ensured that your change will stick.

Nothing worse than making changes and it all unravels. Nobody is committed to it, “We try that. We don’t want to do that anymore.” But being able to be pragmatic. And your strategic plan, you’re absolutely outlining tactics that help you with that.

And the commitment of your key stakeholders. Whether that’s at the grassroots level, the people that are in the trenches everyday doing the work or at the senior leadership or middle management. Whether it’s the faculty, whether it’s student organizations, leadership and shared ownership of that is not negotiable when you’re creating any type of brand or change.

So, your leadership needs to be supportive. They need to champion what you’re doing so that it shares a clear vision across the university that you’re there together working. And it needs to be reinforced through consistency of messaging.

And also you have to be brave enough to make some tough decisions. And they may not be popular. So, you have to be able to have those individuals that are supporting you.

Audience: Who exactly did you mean?

Jeanette DeDiemar: It might be that people who are in certain roles need training and they’re resistant to that. How would you manage that? It might be that your content management system that you’ve been using for a few years or many years, may not be working. But people have ownership of that and it might be that you’re brave enough to say, “Look, we’ve looked at it.” It might be that, “No, we’re not going to give you a half a million dollars to do that. We need to use the skill sets.”

And it might be saying to a department chair, “No, you’re website cannot look like that. That’s part of the university’s website.” We’re going to talk about that in a minute. So, we have experience all of that.

So, you as practitioners of managing the change to build a consistent message, an online brand, you’ve got to balance where the target audience that you’re approaching. And in higher education, how many target audiences do you think you have?

There you go. I can identify probably about seven to eight major ones that we believe we have. Everything from potential students that are traditional to non-traditional, stakeholders, board members, the media and on and on. And so, being able to probably pair them down from 4,000 but to, a group is very helpful.

So, you have to balance the project with people who feel they need to participate in the change with how you communicate it. So, you can strike a balance of actually reaching your target audience. So, key to successful change implementation and building an online brand is being able to guide those who must change.

Some of the people that might be affected by your tough decision to the same thought process that you might have gone through either as an individual because of the level of your leadership or management responsibilities to those that first discovered that a change is needed.

So, about five years ago at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh through examining their key operational plans, the university discovered that it had a very fragmented approach to its image and communicating that. There are about 150 different logos. No exaggeration because we did a survey of that when I got on board. So, a committee was charged, shared governance group that actually work extremely well to identify the priorities.

One of those priorities was to create a search to bring some crazy person like myself there to the university to help lead the change and to implement that. And so, that happened about three years ago. And then we worked with the team that was charged to help develop integrated marketing. That slowly evolved into an operational structure that we have today.

And Jamie is going to talk about that, which evolve as various communications channels of which the Web is the most significant area of communication that we’ve made a commitment to.

So, our job has been to help those individuals that recognize through key operation planning and strategic planning that we actually needed to make a change. So, that’s the universe of opinions at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and quite possibly internally at yours as well. It starts at the grassroots level. Very powerful area of shared opinion. You have the faculty. You have the administration. You have student leadership, student groups and you have senior leadership but we don’t always have that in a linear fashion. It’s this whole universe of opinions that need to be influenced in order to effectively manage the change.

Does that sound familiar to you that your university or college or entity is very similar? And everybody feels that they have shared ownership. Higher education is an interesting place to work and I bounced back and forth between higher education, government work and business.

And the challenge in higher education is everybody has an opinion or view of how things could go better and the change. And once you make the change, how it should have or couldn’t have gone. So, our job was to be sure that through shared governance, are you familiar with that term?

OK. And those of you that were in the first session, you talked a little bit about shared governance as well. And not everything is a shared governance decision, not everything. And helping your organization to understand that too as part of change agency, the community. You have external people making comments about the change or your brand. And then all the different constituency from partners to media, people, constituency, people that are going to comment on that.

Jamie is going to talk with you now about how integrated marketing was rolled into the Web strategy.

Jamie Ceman: I’ll trade spots with you.

Jeanette DeDiemar: Sure.

[Laughter]

Jamie Ceman: One of the biggest changes when I came on the campus was explaining to people the difference between website from the technology perspective and website from the approach we take from the integrated marketing perspective. So, when I came on the campus, which is about almost two years ago, IT was running, the website development. And it was always from a very technical perspective.

So, from their perspective, it was getting the technology to users and that it was up to the users to get the content in it and make the site what they need it to be. And so, we’re taking a different approach now that we’re moving forward with an integrated marketing model because the content is so important.

So, part of what I have to do on a constant basis is explain to people that your website is not your technology. Your website is not your CMS. Your website is the content and the navigation and the message that you’re trying to communicate. It’s the structure of the site and it’s the visual identity of the site. If that is what makes up your website, the CMS is the tool that delivers it. So, understand the distinction between it. And once you start understanding that, then you understand the process of how to start putting your site together. And I’ll get to that a little bit more.

So, when I came on the campus, a big part of what I had to do is start explaining that to people. So, we kind of started with an informal process. I popped on campus. I started doing research. I start going around and meeting people and talking with them, getting their perspective on Web development. How it was going? What they needed it to do? Was it working well for them? Have they been using our CMS working for them?

And it was very informal. I wasn’t meeting with governance groups yet. I was just getting to know people, starting to build relationships with people and starting to get them to understand why I’m here and that they can trust me and I’m not here to dictate change.

But it started to create a much stronger environment. People started to understand that we’re here to listen, that we’re not here to tell you what to do, that we’re here to listen and understand what your needs are and help you accomplish those.

So, our website development became a much more strategic approach. Up to this point, before I came on campus, again it was, what IT was driving it. But there was no real dedicated resources on our campus to do it. So, we have different packets on campus who were doing Web development because nobody else was able to do it. So, they’re trying to fit it in with other responsibilities. And maybe this is familiar, that there were no dedicated resources to it. So, people were doing the best that they could.

So, now we came on. We have a strategic approach to Web development. We understand where it fits in our communications model and now we need to commit resources to it. So, when you’re presenting the need for resources, it’s much better to have it laid out strategically because you can much more easily explain why you need resources.

So, in addition to not being able to justify that they needed to me, we were able to explain that we need someone to write content. And we don’t need the permanent person to write content. We hire a one year project appointment and her responsibility was to get through the majority of it, as we’re moving through to the process of redesigning people’s websites.

We hired a Web developer and a Web designer developer and a programmer. So, that’s the team that we’ve been moving forward with and of course we have our supportive IT. But again, in the midst of the rest of their responsibility. So, those were the dedicated people we have.

So, prior to actually building the website, we went to a very again, strategic process of doing research and more listening sessions, focus group testing. We had taken a very methodical approach and it’s very data driven. And I’ll get into it a little bit more of how we did that. But the important part of doing any sort of research phase is that you need to have data to back up any sorts of decisions you make.

So again, as part of that building buy-in, when people start questioning the decisions you’ve made, the more data you have to back up those reasons, the easier it is to explain to people how they’ve come to be. Instead of just, Jeanette want it this way or Jamie want it this way. We have reasons why we’re seeing some things should be a certain way.

So, we did a ton of research. We looked at over 200 different university websites to start finding, we call trend analysis to see what kind of navigation do we have to have based on what we’ve seen on other institutions. So, we look at, not only everything in Wisconsin, all of our brother and sister schools, all the tech schools, everything within our region. We also download to the top school nationally. Just because we’re not Harvard, doesn’t mean we can’t learn from Harvard.

So, we did a trend analysis. So, we were able to say, “This is a navigation which absolutely have, based on what we’ve seen from 200 other universities.” And then we started digging into again, more meetings. We started pulling people together from all different areas of campus to tell us, “Who do you think our audience are? What does our website needs to accomplish based on this audiences?”

And again, not only was this needed information, it was another 202, start building relationships and get more buy-in because now people had a voice in it and they’re giving us the information that they feel is important.

So, this is showing you, is kind of a matrix that we use when we start pulling the research together. The wire frame that we put together. Does everybody use wire frames? I think it’s a really good tool because before you actually start putting a designer on something, you can say this is the information you absolutely have to have on the page. And that was another two that we could shop around to tell people that this is what we think we need on the website. What do you think? What are we missing?

So, again, building up that buy-in and that involvement that shared ownership. And then we went out to design. We design several options and we start the focus group testing again. So, we tested the three different options. We have what we consider kind of a conservative approach, kind of a more contemporary look and then somewhere in the middle. So, we tested it with prospective students, current students, faculty and staff, our alumni to get how it resonated with them.

So ultimately, the way these things always go, we kind of end it up with a mishmash of the conservative and the middle of the road. And surprisingly, nobody like the contemporary one.

So, that’s where we started to get into the more formal process of getting feedback with the actual, tangible focus group testing and the data around it. And once we came up with what our final design was, what we thought it was, that’s when we started shopping around to our actual shared governance areas.

So then, we have something tangible to show them and we went to all of our governance groups. And I think you probably have similar ones, our faculties and their academic staff and our classified staff advisory counsel. We meet with all of the deans. We meet with all of the chancellor's staff which is all of our senior leadership.

So, we shop it around to everybody. Again, to get their opinion on it. And also to get their buy-in on it. And again, so that there is a shared voice in the outcome of what we’re putting together.

So, then we came to a consensus of what the website needed to be and then we build it. And that would took us about six weeks. It took about a year to get to the point of what the website needed to be. And then we crank the first phase out in about six weeks of development.

So, another tool that we use which is common. We launch it in beta for about six weeks. So, we launch the site. We put a link up of our current site and we opened it up for feedback. So, we had hundreds of responses come in and another point that we thought was really important is the people gave us feedback to actually respond to them.

So, of the hundreds of responses, we personally required every one of them. There’s a question, we answered it. Someone was questioning some sort of logic behind it. We explained it to them or we just gave them, thank you for your feedback, sort of response.

So, that was time consuming but I think it was really important, to again, let people understand that not only do they have a voice but we heard it and we wanted them to know that we responded to it.

So, we went live and with the website in January. The part that we launch first, our first phase was the main site and the first few layers of the main site. The ones that were linked to some of our primary audiences. Like this is mostly our future students and our academic section.

So, you can start to see where the brand, look and feel were starting to come together. And we felt the need to face it so that people could see what it was going to look like and they could start to get comfortable with it before we start rolling it out through campus. So, this launched.

But then the question was, “OK, how do we roll it out?” We have over 350 individual websites that comprise of four university Web presence, since it was probably no different than you hundred of sites out there. How do you roll this out?

What we needed to do was part of top decisions was we needed to prioritize who was going to go first. How are we going to prioritize them through and dedicate our resource to them because again we have an X amount of resources. We have hundreds of websites. How are we going to do this?

So, that’s where our senior leadership got involved and they took each of their units and they told us who needs to go first and we outlined it.

Jeanette DeDiemar: One key point that maybe you’re going to get to is well, in terms of priority, remember we said the website supports the recruitment, retention and outreach. And that was some of the criteria that Jamie developed in partnership with IT and senior leadership and shared governance in how to make that tough decision.

Jamie Ceman: Right. Some of the things that we look at were, what audience are you serving? Prospective students being a really important one. So, you are serving prospective students and perhaps you get higher. So, I actually don’t show you. The next slide actually shows you the ones we’ve done so far. And we prioritize the colleges first because you saw that slide earlier on. They needed work.

So, we prioritized the colleges first and then from there, now it’s looking at the different audiences. And then we also took into consideration how badly did a site need to be redone? Is it still a front page site from 1999 that really need to work and it was doing the unit more damage than good, then we try to prioritize those little higher as well. Again, depending on their importance.

So again, in a desire to be transparent, we then publish the list. We have a website that people can go to that talks about this full process, the whole project and then the priority list is published as well. So, people can see who’s coming up next, where did they fall in it. But then the issue came then of course, when we have 350 websites, if I’m not a priority one or two, I’m potentially two years down the road. And I can’t wait two years, so what do I do?

So, we came up with a solution for that and we’re going to talk about. So, these are the sites that we’ve launched so far and there are the colleges and our adult, non-traditional unit. So again, you can see where the brand is starting to carry through but there is still some of the duality within the colleges themselves.

And we were collaborative with the college to design a look and feel for them that they’re comfortable with. So, as part of the change of the culture, the concern was for every website is going to look the same. I’m not going to have any say on what my website is going to be. And what we want people to understand is that this is a really collaborative experience.

And when we do a website, we sit down with people. We talk through with the entire processes. We’re methodical about this now and we have a very clear step by step process that we follow and it involves them at every step. And everybody needs to understand that they have some involvement as well. That we can’t do this without their help. So, you can’t read what this is but it’s what we walk through with, with our clients. We call them our clients. And it’s our flavor of the system development lifestyle of lifecycle. But we walk people through what the stuffs are.

So, to solve the problem with people who are two years down the road and they can’t wait. We came up with what we call our self-service option. And again, because this project is not getting technology in people’s hands. It’s getting them a better Web presence.

We ask that they attend a workshop. And it’s a two part workshop where first, they get me talking through, here’s how you do research, here’s who you need to talk to, here’s how you look at it. Think about your audience, here’s how you should structure your website and then they get the hands on CMS training.

So, the big message that comes out of that is, you should understand what your website is before you ever log in to these CMS to build it because people don’t necessarily think that way, it’s because we’re taking a new approach to Web development and we’re looking at the full package of what a website is. It helps them to understand the full package instead of logging into their CMS and starting to create the site without putting any real thought to the way it should be.

So, that’s going really well and we’ve had two workshops so far. We’ve had over 60 people come to the workshop. We’ve given them all almost 20 sites, now that people are working on themselves. And everybody has been extremely pleased with the fact that we’re serving their needs and that we’re understanding that they need to move forward and they can’t wait for our resources to help them. So, that’s going really, really well. So, we give it back to Jeanette to talk about some of the trials and tribulations.

Jeanette DeDiemar: So, with anything like this, the reality because everything, a 100% foolproof, you get a 100% buy-in. Are there any glitches? No. And realistically, you have to accept that and the perfect is sometimes the enemy of the good as well. So, being realistic, being able to overcome things that are entrenchment. When you look at change management, there are some people who either are new to the game or also have been doing it for a while, who have always done it that way.

Who are these people that are now telling us that we need to maybe try something different? We need to be more collaborative or the work that we did before might need to just be the building ground for something but not be the final solution.

And resources, often people are saying, “Well, the solution is, we already are overwhelmed and we have a lot of work to do. We either need to get new people or we need to get more money.” Well, the reality is in higher education and as a state funded institution, that’s some of the greatest challenges. So, being able to provide quality and excellence and train the staff that you have because if you notice, we’ve talked about doing this all in-house. And the only consulting work that we did was with a small design agency to help us to kind of tweak some of the design work that we were going to do to tie in the online brand. Everything else has been done in-house.

And at the same time, training people and educating them across campus. So also recognition, people are toiling away and often they don’t receive recognition and they might have evolved their job into being responsible for an area. So, being able to celebrate and champion and recognize people and their good work that they do as well. No matter how small or how large. And we were able to do some things for that and we continue to do that.

So, recognizing in terms of change management, recognizing the reality. You may not have a big suitcase full of money. You may not have enough people to do it. And then being willing to promote the shared success. I think there’s a little video. I don’t know if, oh it should work. It should work. OK.

We kind of like this video because, I think I need your help with that. Oh, there it goes. It kind of shows the shared ownership and sort of the win after that.

Jamie Ceman: It’s a good thing I know.

[Laughter]

Jeanette DeDiemar: While Jamie is talking, I’m going to ask you, in terms of where you think in recognizing the reality that we might have gotten some pushback in terms of developing a comprehensive online brand. Yeah?

Audience: Do you have different units wherein they’re interested in how to work on it or have a new site, or participate. But they’re not interested in the participating process. How do you handle that? They want it to happen but don't want to screw it up again?

Jeanette DeDiemar: Yes. No matter how much you can anticipate that, that’s still a challenge. And one of the things that we had to do was begin working through the hierarchy, both in shared governance but also maybe in the department level and the unit level. And just being very matter of fact and saying to them, “We’re going to have to be here either now or later. We hope that you will come along with us in the early days because you can celebrate that success sooner. And we really want to partner with you. Long term, this isn’t going to be an option, so we would rather that in the early part of this, you work with us.”

And I would say that 99% of the time, once we are able to have that discussion, people were reassured. And it was about building credibility as well that what we were asking them to do was not something that was going to fail and they had to trust that. And that the institution had made the shared commitment integrated marketing and hence, the Web was a big part of it.

And I would say that typically, sometimes that took one meeting. We always try to do that face to face and have various people at the college. Typically, what we wanted to do is to get those people at the grassroots level, the people that are actually the technicians who were responsible for that but also the dean or the department chair and to have a roundtable discussion about it.

And again, sometimes it took one meeting and other times, Jamie would just say it probably took maybe four or five. And that was our greatest challenge is getting the people buy in. So, that was really important. Did that answer that for you? OK.

Audience: Question, where are you in the organizational structure? I imagine that’s something you have to do in terms if you are too far embedded to go. You have mentioned, not necessarily going up and down the hierarchy.

Jeanette DeDiemar: Right. Right. And that is probably really helpful for you to know as well. Integrated marketing and the commitment to that is part of the vice chancellor’s cabinet, which was a first. So, I actually have to go in and rebuild and build the unit.

And so, several things merged to make that happen over a two year period. So, we’re now in year three and I would say that whoever is responsible for making communication and Web decisions needs to be at a more senior level. You look at that universe. And then also, for Jamie to be seen as the project lead and working collaboratively as well too.

So, integrated marketing communication is currently at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh sits under advancement but also reports to the chancellor. So, I have a dual recording for that. We’re also responsible for alumni relations and external relations.

Everything you would think of as a traditional university relations model but also a social media. We’ve re-overhauled quite a few things and may have time to get to that. So, there’s some slides to explain that as well too. Yeah.

Audience: How do you begin to raise your online presence in publication? How does that process work? About the time, we perfect it. There is a process when it is normally at.

Jeanette DeDiemar: That’s right. I would say when I inherited a team that was extremely print heavy. Maybe you can just bypass the video and we can show it later. And we’ll show you some explanation of that, that everything that we do.

Audience: I'm sure you can from print?

Jeanette DeDiemar: Yes they will. And I come from a print background and I started as a graphic designer and moved into journalism.

Audience: We get the message, you’re totally wrong and hope... so we see a new design...

Jeanette DeDiemar: Right. So, what we’ve done. Let me see if I can, to be sure that we have time.

Jamie Ceman: What are you looking for?

Jeanette DeDiemar: Can you just advance this next slide? In terms of building credibility and looking at how you move people from being very print heavy because print is a wonderful thing but it’s only part of the package. We actually created, in terms of educating the campus and “What’s in it for me?” kind of thing, is we created an in-house agency and that’s how we operate.

So, part of the structure within integrated marketing as Jamie’s wonderful, talented team of Web and new media. We have people responsible for design. And it’s not just print, they’d have to change and realize that they also need to design the artistic and vision and visual identities for the Web and also other new media products.

We have photography and videography that’s shared by one person and then we have news and information. Each of those persons, individuals on the team are responsible for integrated marketing communications.

They each serve as project managers. And so, project managements are like account management that you might find. So, they have clients. We have an account liaison process. So, each person is assigned either to a major unit or a college. So that when you meet with your client, you can, to answer your question, you go and, you look at what they want to do, who’s their audience.

So, just because they have a brochure always or print piece, is begin to ask those questions. What’s the best why to reach your audience? And it might not be a printed piece anymore. And that’s been a two year process. We also have workshops that talk about, how do you identify the types of tools that you might need to communicate? So, as before a brochure might work or magazine, an online version might be better for that. It’s all about building that credibility.

Audience: You got to swap the, other people in the process. Where I am right now, everything is segmented and siloed out. In order to do what you guys have done, you almost have pulled in this person from that school, this person from that school.

Jeanette DeDiemar: It’s kind of what we’ve done. We’ve build the integrated model, development wise. And what I mean is we’ve been building the brand all along and then we’ve built an infrastructure. And we’re almost to the point, if you check back with us in December, what you’re going to see from a strategic plan is we moved into this part.

So, what I mean by that is educating people that have worked traditionally just for a college and believe themselves to be the marketers or integrated marketing or media relation, begin to centralize some of those function. We’re introducing a brand review process.

So, if you do something as an individual unit, it still, will need to go through this centralized portion to check off that the visual identity is there. But if we’re educating people early on, as I answered somebody else’s question over here before is that you get buy-in early on. It’s not so painful later when it becomes part of the university’s voice. That we’re removing towards this creative way.

The liaison system has been a huge part of pulling all sort of people in. While they’re not part of our unit, they have someone dedicated within our unit that we work directly with them. So, we take the role of being right there marketing manager so we help them with their marketing planning and we ask that they involve us in, if they have marketing subgroup. So that we can become a part of their process and then they understand how we work as well. So, we can help them.

So, that’s been actually really well received. That’s going really well. And each step of the way that we slowly unveiled that strategy, Jamie talked about the formal and informal processes of communication that’s been done for every change. Is it fatiguing? Yes. Is it worthwhile? Definitely. That’s the best way to create that buy-in and education and training.

If you check out our integrated marketing website, we hold series of workshops for people on campus that practice marketing throughout campus. To educate them that integrated marketing, while you’re going to have unified brand and vision even online, there still is flexibility within that family of creativity because as somebody said before how many audiences do you have? 4,000?

You have various audiences that you’re responsible for, whether it’s recruitment, retention or outreach or the academy side or the administrative side. So, helping people to be self-sufficient with that. And I also think that what’s been helpful too is that serving as a model for innovation.

I have a staff that came together, whether I inherited people or was able to bring new people on board and to have some of these early work and innovation to be recognized throughout the industry for them, that also is help to build credibility for the institution as well as for the integrated marketing model that the advice and guidance that we’re giving people whether it be Web development or other promotional materials or communication, or crisis management is recognized in the industry. So, for all of you, if you have the time, it’s worth the effort the be able to do that.

Jamie Ceman: Yeah, and just for fun, as we are rolling out our online brand, everywhere we can, we try to push it out like our social media and those things. Just so that, there’s always that consistency. Not that it’s anything new but it’s in for us to be rolling that out.

Jeanette DeDiemar: Yeah. All of these things that we’re talking about, you may already be doing those but you maybe doing them in a more fragmented manner because higher education tends to be that way. So, the purpose of putting the social media out there is that we have moved very quickly into all of those arena.

It’s still early days for us but in that online brand management and social media, in the early days and what our researchers is showing has been highly effective. Do you have a question?

Audience: Yeah. Do you have any issues coming up as far as giving them the separate sites that are not directly, something that IT has a direct tool to them?

Jeanette DeDiemar: Would you like to answer that for us?

Jamie Ceman: Well, what we’re doing in that is, we’re going to be coming up, as part of our brand roll out is just social media guidelines. That’s going to be an aspect of that to the things, the way to use our logo, how to be professional about it. Just some general guidelines.

Audience: We've been avoiding it just so we didn’t have anybody to face it.

Jamie Ceman: Well, it’s going to happen. People are going to be doing the stuff. So, the best thing to do is put some guidelines and place for it. Yeah?

Audience: You talk a lot about volume and at the same time you mentioned non-negotiable leadership. How do you balance this?

Jamie Ceman: No. The support of leadership is non-negotiable. Can you see the difference?

Audience: Leaders have to be supported.

Jeanette DeDiemar: Yeah. You know sometimes in organization whether it’s a business or government or higher education, there might be a few people who think change is needed. But if that change isn’t embraced in every level of the institution, including senior leadership, they won’t work.

So, when you have to make those tough decisions and you maybe can maybe have to go to senior leadership group that’s looking at how we expend the budget for example and commitment. Those individuals have to be on board, in terms of supporting the initiative or it will fail.

You can’t have a packet of people here saying, “I don’t believe in that online Web stuff.” Forget it. But that unified voice is very helpful.

Audience: And how do you, what do you do with that if your higher management doesn’t seem to merit getting out and getting professional experience.

Jeanette DeDiemar: Sure. Sure. Then you need to seek out other individuals that are their peers and to help them to bring them around and to do that in a careful way. But if you’ve been pragmatic and strategic and you can show why this change is necessary and why the anticipated return on investment, whatever that may be for your institution, eventually that change should come around because there’s a lifecycle for change as well.

And so, you want to have that. Is it easy? No. I’ve been very fortunate. And I think Jamie has to that, the university as a whole was ready for this change. Was everybody? No. But I would say the majority of them. We heard people be relieved that we had the resources to begin implement and develop better reputation management and put all of these things together.

So, with this point, we haven’t had any prospect from anyone in the senior role because again, when you explain the why and why this is a benefit to you, because it is a benefit to you and we’re not just trying to throw a logo on everything for giggles, there’s a strategic reason for it and it’s going to help you. People will start to get it.

As you’re asking questions, I’m going to advance some of these slides. This answers your question about everything that we do, whether it’s print, has a Web component to it. OK? So, as we’re answering more questions, I’m just going to go to this slide slowly. Yeah?

Audience: What sort of pushback or level of pushback do you get when you pull some of the resources?

Jeanette DeDiemar: Would you like to start then I’ll follow up?

Jamie Ceman: That was probably the biggest challenge for us. Having, especially me plop on campus with the ownership somewhat of the Web, pulling it from people who had it before is the perception that they had. And there was a lot of time spent discussing that this needs to be a partnership. We cannot work without IT. We need IT involve in this. And understanding where the roles and responsibilities come from.

And again, it wasn’t a necessarily a smooth transition but it’s come a really come a long way and we’re getting it at point now where we really are starting to work together.

Jeanette DeDiemar: Education, in terms of shifting the paradigm about why integrated marketing was so important. Every opportunity, every meeting, we try to bring somebody with us from IT and they would listen to what we said about why this change needed to take place.

And slowly that evolution where we, we understood their role better and they understood our role better as well too. I think it’s been about two year evolution for that, as part of change management. My staff would say to me, “Well, How many meetings will it take before people understand this change?” And I would say, “As many meetings as it’s going to take.”

We just need to keep being very transparent. Everything that we did, in terms of communication was online and meetings, open door policy in the office. And I think that really help for IT to understand why this unit was being built and how it would touch other units as well too. Yeah?

Audience: You mentioned that tuition fee related thing. You can just roll that new logo with... We can always say because you have to, right? You have to take it up. But I mean, there’s a better means of answer that question. Is there a better means to get to articulate that to the faculty head?

Jeanette DeDiemar: And I guess, this will be the final question because we have one minute left to and I’ll wrap it up.

I think that’s a really great question to wrap it up as well too is because this isn’t all about somebody coming in and dictating. This is shared ownership. We reminded everybody at every meeting, particularly if there was pushback, “You as a university ask for this. You as a university came together and you examined the key operational plans. You as a university, decided we needed to do it differently because it wasn’t effective before.”

And so we had a desperate, fragmented approach to our identity, who we are and who we know ourselves to be and who we are thought of. And our job was to bring that into an alignment. So, isn’t that important to you as well? Without that, that affects recruitment. It affects your ability in the classroom, to retain people in the classroom. It affects your ability to teach. It affects outreach and it affects even return on investment.

We could show hard numbers for that and statistics. So, it depended on the audience, what was more important to them about that.

Audience: So, do they still see their department as their brand.

Jamie Ceman: But they don’t exist without the university and that’s the biggest, strongest message we have is that you’re not the Department of Chemistry. You’re the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh Department of Chemistry and without that you don’t have that strength behind you. So, it’s a benefit to you to use the university brand.

Jeanette DeDiemar: I think once people, their suspicions move away and they understood that we understood the value of a sub brand, that’s what you’re describing. And if you go to the website, you can see the evolution. But you see very distinctively between the four colleges, a very different look. However, College of Nursing and the College of Letters and Science for example, which is going to launch or soon to launch or tomorrow. There you go.

There’s a family around that and you know that that’s Oshkosh site that you’re at. Nobody really can argue with that. And once we help them to understand the sub branding, so we’ve done individual workshops to help those people understand that. And remember Jamie is talking about that two part workshop, if you’re going to do that self-service option? That’s not an option. You have to come to that workshop.

First part of that is explaining brand and integrated marketing. And then, you move into the IT structure.

Audience: Dr. Jamie, thank you.

Jamie Ceman: Thank you.

[Laughter]

[Applause]