TNT7: Inform, Interact, Inspire: Reimagining the Admissions Website

[Intro Music]

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

Mark Heiman: Great. I have lowered the lights but I promise to keep you awake. So, hang on to your coffee cups. I've got about twice as much to cover as I actually have time to cover. So, we're going to see how it goes. My name is Mark Heiman. I'm from Carleton College, which is located in Northfield, Minnesota, a little bit south of the Twin Cities. We are a top-rated small arts college with about 2000 students. And if you haven't heard of us, you should have.

I'm going to be talking about the process that we went through over the last couple of years actually to rethink how our admissions website works. And probably as an effort to try to keep you awake, I've scanned a lot of images from a lot of our admissions material. And I've peppered that throughout the presentation. I'm afraid they might be a little bit out of date but it's OK. It will give you a sense of the school.

Before I start, I want to give credit appropriately here. The story that I'm going to be telling you is not my story. It is the story of the entire Web team at Carlton College. It's collaboration of all of us. And most of those folks are here today. I'm the one here who is standing up telling the story mainly because I'm the one who likes to stand up and tell stories and hopefully keep people awake.

So, if you have any questions, any of them can tell you what we did. And depending on who you talk to, you might get slightly different stories. So, to help you out, here's the team, Jaye Lawrence, Matt Ryan, Nate White, Matt Brockle, Doug Bratland and myself in the middle. That photo is a little bit out of date. You might just want to look at the name tags. It will help you out to figure out who they are.

So, before this year, the last update to our admissions website was back in 2005. This is what it looked like. I'm not going to dwell on it at all because it was a perfectly fine website, purely clean design. It did what it needed to do. But after four years, it was time for us to look for something new.

Now, I'm going to start the story back in 2007 because redesigns don't happen in a vacuum. There's contacts. There's history. There's unintended consequences. Back in 2007 we were actually working on a redesign of our campus homepage. And as part of that process, we worked with a group of 60 high school juniors. What we did was something like the exercise that you saw yesterday with the pages being flashed out. We showed this group of 60 high school juniors college homepages. We showed them your college homepages actually. And we asked for their gut reactions, their initial responses, the things that they liked, the things that they didn't like, what attracted them, what turned them off, where they would click, all that kinds of stuff.

So, we got a sense of what our high school students are looking for in the homepage of a college website. The things we learned are not particularly surprising. They were looking for lists of majors. They were looking for those stats, the size, the faculty-student ratio, all those kinds of numbers that we used. Admissions requirements, what does it take to get in? Cost and financial aid, can I afford it once I am in? They were looking for pictures of the campus and the community.

I'm sure you'll have all of these things on your websites. You might want to make sure they're not buried. But that's not the interesting part. Let's look at number 5 here. When we showed these high school students your homepages and we asked them for their gut reactions, we know there's something really surprising. When your homepage came up with pictures of great buildings on beautiful lawns, they said, "That looks like a good school." And when the pictures on the websites show the campus spread out majestically with the mountains in the distance, you can't see our mountains here at the top, they said, "That looks like a really like great place to go to school."

And when the pictures showed close-up of the students discussing philosophy on the quad, they rolled their eyes. And when you had pictures of theatrical events, they said, "Who are those people and what are they doing?" That's probably a very reasonable question, given this picture. But we know exactly what this is after yesterday.

[Laughter]

So, as we got their reactions to all of these different homepage images, over and over a pattern started to emerge. Buildings good, people bad. Now, I don't know about you but somewhere along the way I internalized the notion that prospective students were interested in pictures of beautiful people, that what they wanted to see were smiling faces, people sitting on the grass, talking on the quad. If you look at all of our admissions literature, it's beautiful people. It's pictures of faces. But that is not what these high school students were responding to. They were responding exactly the opposite of what we expected.

So, we dug a little deeper. What was it about the photos of the students? What was it about the pictures that they just didn't like. And these are the kinds of things they started to tell us. They said, "Those students look posed. They might not even be students. I bet they're models." They said, "I can't tell where they are." They said, "Look, they're trying to make it look like they're diverse." We've been doing this for a long time.

High school students are critical, skeptical, media savvy. Sometimes they're too skeptical. A lot of the photos that I'm pretty sure were unstaged they were very suspicious of. But that's only one side of it. Those happy pictures of smiling students were missing something that they wanted to get, something that they weren't getting from those stodgy pictures of old buildings.

It took a little digging in conversation, but we finally pulled it out of them. The phrase had captured it. It's sense of place. Suddenly it all makes sense. Try to imagine yourself, throw yourself back to 16 or 17. You're thinking about going to college. A college is a place. It's a place where you are not. And you're trying to imagine yourself being in that place. You're trying to place yourself in the picture and figure out if this is the place that you want to be.

So, obviously, if all of the pictures you can find of that place are close ups of people who might be students or might be attractive models, you can get fed up and say, "Get out of the picture so I can see the place I'm trying to think about," which means that if prospective students are not getting a sense of place from your website, they're going to have trouble imagining themselves in the place that is your school. And that is bad for admissions.

This whole idea was the central concept for the new homepage that we rolled out back in 2008. That's what it looks like. There's not a single student on our homepage. It's all pictures of buildings. And it has done extremely well for us. I encourage you to go to it. It's actually an animated site. It gets interesting when you watch for a while.

Now, if the sense of place is as critical to the admissions process as I'm certain that it is, it must show up in context other than just a website. And in fact, it does. What factor is more important than any other in determining whether a prospect will apply to and accept an offer from Carleton College? That's something that we can measure. We know what it is. It's the campus visit.

I've got some numbers here. Last year we had 23,000 prospects in the class of 2009; 1.4% of them visited campus, a very small number. And 2.1% of all those prospects applied, also a very small number, very close to the number of visit. Fifty-four percent of those who came to our campus applied. Eighteen percent of those who never visited campus accepted the offer of admission that we gave them. Forty-eight percent of those who had visited accepted the offer. Ultimately, 81% of the class of 2009 had made a visit to campus, a huge number. What that tells us is that there's a critical connection between visiting campus, taking the tour, spending time with students and actually coming and becoming a part of the class.

Now, this is true about Carleton. It's entirely possible that there may be schools for whom the campus visit is a liability. If that's true in your case, you should do exactly the opposite of what I'm about to recommend.

So, the next thing we did was to ask our group of high school students what was it about the campus visit that appealed to them and what was it that they didn't like about the campus visit that they might have done. And again, we don't have a lot of surprises here. They like the campus tours if they were led by students but not by staff. They like sitting in on classes, staying overnight with other students, eating in the dining halls, getting a sense of the place. They didn't like the campus tour where everything was scripted and you couldn't go off the program. They didn't like getting only to hang out with other prospects. So, programs where they didn't actually get contact with other students. They didn't like the program events that weren't representative of campus life. Again, no surprises here.

But let's look at that list of likes through the filter of thinking about it as developing a sense of place. The campus tours, what's that about? It's about exploring the environment in a guided way but in a genuine way with actual members of that environment. Sitting in on classes is about experiencing the context and the relationships of the academic experience. Staying overnight with students is about meeting other people in an unscripted way. Eating in the dining halls is about understanding the settings of this environment, being able to place yourself in the places that students spend their time.

And obviously getting a sense of the geographic setting is about where is this place in the larger context? Is it an urban place? Is it rural? What is the city like? What is the neighborhood? It's all about developing that sense of place. And the campus visit helps the student to build that sense of place in a really admirable way. And that leads directly to admissions.

But we're talking about websites. We're Web people. And so, this kind of talk gets us thinking about recreating our campuses in second life. That sounds appealing. Please step away from the mouse. No one will get hurt. There must be other ways to convey these experiences, the experiences that are conveyed through the campus tour and the campus visit. There must be ways to convey that through the college website. And I think we found one. And I'm going to show it to you in a minute.

Before we begin to even imagine what our admissions site was like, we did some more research. Back in the winter of 2008, we camped out in our admissions office. And we waylaid prospects as they came through for interviews and tours and information session. What we did was something similar to what we had done with the high school students before except now we're working with admissions sites.

We pulled up a whole bunch of admissions sites, your admissions sites. And we showed it to them and we asked them, "What do you like? What you don't like, what sort of things you're responding to? What would you click on? What attracts your attention?" And the list of things that we developed out of that really isn't any different than the list I showed you earlier of the things that the high school juniors were looking for. It's the same site. There's really not a lot of difference in that list.

So, there's one lesson here, I think. To the prospective student, every page of your website is an admissions page. So, we knew what these essential items were. But there were a number of other potential features that people would talk to us about, things that we saw on your websites, things that people would ask about that we thought might be interesting. So, we wanted to get a sense of whether those were things that the students were actually interested in.

This is how they ranked; virtual tours of campus, student profiles, faculty profiles, student blogs, videos, audio video of actually what's it like in the classroom. Financial aid calculators to figure out, "Can I afford this?", the major tools to sort of match me up with the majors that are available. I have chatted with staff and students. Those actually got ranked negatively. The students that we talked to didn't want to go there.

So, if you look at this list, it's fascinating. The highest ranked items up here, the tour of campus, student profiles, the blogs, the videos, again, think sense of place. These are all things that allow you to develop a sense of what is this campus like, what are the people on it like, what is the experience of being there.

But there's one more thing that we learned as we listened to prospective students as they were praising and trashing your admissions website. What we learned is that there are two kinds of prospects. And a single individual may be one or the other, depending on where they stand in the admissions cycle.

The first kind of prospect, let's call them searchers, is looking for something in particular. At the beginning of this search process, maybe they're trying to narrow down the list of schools. So, they're looking for schools of a particular size or schools that are in a particular place. Maybe they are looking for particular facts that they can use to narrow their search list. If they can't find those facts quickly, you're not going to be on their list.

Later on in the admissions process, those same prospects may be looking for application information or maybe instructions for scheduling of visit. They've got a very discrete task in mind. And anything that gets in the way of completing that task is going to be marked against your site and marked against your school.

At other points in the process, however, the same prospect becomes a different kind of visitor. We can call them browsers or explorers. You've got their interest and now they want to learn something about you. Most of all, they are in search of that sense of place. They want you to help them to imagine what it would be like for them to be on your campus, interacting with the people there. It's a really broad, unfocused search. They're in a completely different mode than the people who are looking for something in particular who want to get it done.

But in my searching about the importance of that sense of place and the campus visit are correct, then that kind of exploratory mode is perhaps more important than anything else to turning those prospects into real students. So, what we need is an admission site that supports both types of interaction or even better, meets the searchers where they are looking for particular things and then teases them over into an exploring mode so that we can catch them there as well.

Now, there's a lot of research out there about websites and people working in searching and browsing mode. And it all applies to what I'm talking about. And it's all fast; they do not have time to go into it today. Google is your friend; I will leave it at that. So, now it's the spring of 2008. We promised the admissions office a new site by the start of 2009. And all we have is some interesting research. So, a series of brainstorming ensues.

Let's go back to the list of features that the prospects identified as interesting; virtual tours, profiles, student and faculty blogs, video. Those are the things that top the list. Those are all fabulous things. And I'm sure you've all sat through presentations extolling the virtues of one or all of those on the admission site. And we could just take every single one of those, carve out a slot for them on the site and call it good. And I think that's what we find in a lot of sites.

But if we understand these elements as part of a larger exploratory experience that somehow parallels the campus visit, can we imagine a way in which we might integrate all of them into a seamless hole that meets the goals students have for a real campus visit. Absolutely. There you go. You're looking disappointed.

All right. And once we've got this, can we place it in a structure that also meets the goals of the searchers who are looking for a particular thing? Sure, we can. We have our explore feature and a list of actions up at the top, asking questions, visiting, interviewing, applying, affording. Those are the tasks that the searchers are looking for.

Add some other basic info that we knew we need on here. We've got the basic wireframes that we were using in the summer of 2008 to present to admissions the basic concept that we were working with. I'm sure you are familiar with the concept of wireframes. You lay out the page without any design elements. You can move the elements around and test it. And that's what we did. We knew the basic elements. We laid them out in different ways. We used different terminology. We tested those with prospective students and tried to get a sense of which things made the most sense to people. And we ended up with something more or less like this. And so, that's our site. Thank you all for coming. I forgot to tell you what the explorer feature actually is.

All right. Let's think about what we have to work with. We've got a campus. Our campus has buildings and locations of interests. We've got student. We've got faculty. We've got classes. We've got student activities. We've got majors and departments. These are all the elements that we've got to work with.

Now, the key thing to remember is these are not isolated facts. They're not abstract facts. They are particular people, places and things. We have specific students who live in specific buildings. They attend specific classes which happen in other specific buildings. They are taught by specific faculty. And those faculty are part of departments in specific buildings. Those buildings and the departments have majors and concentrators who are students who take part in student activities with other students in particular locations. And most of all, all of these people had interesting things to say about the other people, the places, the activities and all the rest. Somehow I always end up with a slide like this in my presentation. I don't know.

All right. This is how you experience a college. You do not arrive on campus and say, "Now, I will learn about the buildings," or "Now, I shall consume information about the student body. Please present me with the necessary data." Maybe you would do that if you were a robot. But we're not trying to enroll robots.

You experience a college as a complicated set of relationships and interaction. And it's the metadata about those interactions, how do the students feel about the faculty who teach them? How do they feel about where they live? How do they feel about the courses? Those emotional metadata are probably more critical to the college decision-making process than the actual facts that they connect. So, can we capture not just the data about the people and the places but can we capture that metadata and make it accessible to the prospect who is exploring, trying to find the sense of place? Yes, we can. Yes, we can.

How do we do that? Let's return to our wireframe. We know where we're headed ultimately. So, I'm just going to apply some design here. I say that really lightly. We actually had to lock our designer in his office for a week and slide food under the door while he came up with lots of multiple design concepts, which we then tested and revised and tested and revised. And we ended up here. So, I don't want to diminish the amount of work required.

So, here's what we do. We take about a dozen students and we had them fill out a survey about their lives at Carleton. What's your major? What year are you? Where are you from? All that basic factual stuff. But we also asked them to answer a lot of fuzzy questions. What's your favorite class? What do you do for fun? What are your favorite places? What assignments have you particularly enjoyed?

And we asked them specifically about the admissions experience. Did you do a campus visit? What was it like to interview? Did you get financial aid? And because Carleton students are articulate and interesting writers, we asked them not just to give us lists of stuff but to write out discursive answers. So, they gave us sentences and paragraphs about all of these things. And from that text then we could pull out stand-alone quotes that we could associate with the individual students.

Then, we sit them down in front of the camera. And based on the survey that we presented with them, we know what they're interested in and things that they're excited about. So, we asked them questions about that, questions that will bring out the things that really interest them. And we take all that video and we sliced it out. And we associated that as well with the people.

Now, a lot of the quotes and a lot of the video are about particular places. So, we take all of those places. We figure out where we are. We put those locations on a map. And we take all of those comments and things and we apply tags to them so that we can build a tag cloud that talks about the different topics that are relevant here.

And then, we take a few of these students as well as subset of them. And we asked them to dig a little deeper and provide us even more information by blogging on some regular basis about their experience on campus. We pay them standard student wage to do that. Only missing is the one thing that the students say they absolutely had to have which is a list of academic subjects and majors. And soon we have our new Carleton admissions site.

So, let's click around a little bit. This is live. So, keep your fingers crossed. As a student browsing the site, what you're immediately noticing is that there are multiple ways to interact with this material. If you're somebody who responds to video -- well, forgot to plug in the sound -- but you can get a sense. These are very short clips. They're all about 30 seconds long. Each of these clips is tagged with particular topics. So, this is about choosing a college or the liberal arts experience.

We can also browse through by the particular students to get more information about them. Here, we've got a page for this particular student, Alex Brewer from Mount Prospect. What you're seeing down the middle here is what we call the feed. It has got a list of activities that he participates in, his favorite places, the place where he lives, his favorite course. It has got answers to questions about things that he provided information to us for. How would you describe the students? How would you describe campus life? And all of the stuff that is interlinked.

So, for instance, one of Alex's favorite places is the Cowling Arboretum, which is another place that we can go to. The Cowling Arboretum has a page. It has a list of people who are interested in that place. It has got quotes about that place from those people. It has got video. We've got multiple videos here that you can look through, talking about running in the Arb videos, biology research. We've got a slideshow of the Arboretum that they can click through to get more of that sense of place about this location.

We've got a map which shows where the Arboretum is, that along the right side here. We have all the other locations that are registered in our system. And if you want to, you can go to a map which shows you all those locations in their context. And any of these locations is clickable to get more information. And we can click through to see that place.

Audience 1: Through a custom map?

Mark Heiman: That's a custom Google map. And all of these places have people associated with them. And they've got other things associated with them like events. The Skinner Memorial Chapel has the Halloween Concert associated with it.

The Halloween Concert is an activity. And we have pages for all of the activities. The activities have slideshows. Many of them have videos. They have people associated with them. We have the list of all the activities on the side here.

So, there's a deep interconnection between all of the different pieces of information. But it's all centered around the individual student and the people that they interact with and the places in which they have that interaction. The other parts of that site are also tied in with the same kinds of information.

So, if you're going to the Ask section here, which is where prospects can ask questions, and there's a box right here where they can put those questions down, they get answers here. We've got a staff person in admissions who take these questions and post the answers. Here's the first question on the college search. The answers to these questions are the quotes that came from students that we profiled.

So, here are all those different quotes. If you particularly are interested in what one of these students said about that experience, you can click through and learn more about them and things that they're interested in, the things that they like and the kinds of things they do at Carleton. You can browse through the different topics that the questions pertain to.

So, somebody who is in here looking for particular kinds of information or say they're looking to experience a little campus visit, we can tease them back into the explore mode by the stories of the campus visits of the students that we profiled. So, here's a story about a campus visit. It's linked to the question "Did you visit Carleton?" It's also linked to the activity Halloween Concert, which was something that's mentioned in his quote.

Let's see if there's anything else I can tell you here. We've got a list of all of the people who are available to help. Right now, we just have students in here. We'll talk about that more in a little bit. All of them with some basic quotes. We've got another map here that has locations of all of their hometowns so we can get a sense of where they're from. If there's somebody you're particularly in, you can go and learn about somebody who you can choose. We have a very special student here who is Toff, our campus cat. Toff is special. Here's a documentary about Toff. Here's a student talking about Toff. Toff has answers to various profile questions. What are your interests and hobbies? We've got a lovely slideshow of Toff's birthday party.

So, I think that gives you a sense of what the experience of exploring this site is like. Well, we found that talking to people when we first rolled this out, the staff people that we presented it to, said, "I kept getting sucked in. I lose half an hour and not realize where the time had gone because it was so fascinating throughout."

One of the things I wanted to show you, we've got our blogs here along the side in standard blogging format. But again, it's linked back to the profiles. So, not only can you read the day-to-day experiences, you can go back and learn more about the student, how they're connected to other things. So, the integration is complete.

All right, let me go back to the presentation. There we go. Sense of place. I forgot to add that in. Our old admission site had 45 pages; our new site has 430. That's today. To which you would be appropriate to respond, "Are you people insane?" Probably but not in a bad way. The reason that it works is because the vast majority of those new pages, in fact, the ones we were just looking at, they don't really exist. No one maintains those pages. They are untouched by human hands.

So, how does that work? No, better than that. Now, you could probably do this with any sufficiently, sophisticated content management system. So, I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time with a pitch on Reason. Several schools did a presentation on that yesterday. But really quickly, for those who are not familiar, it's an open-source content management system based on PHP and MySQL designed by higher ed for higher ed, used by several schools across the country. It is the cat's pajamas.

Here's what the back end, the administrative view of our admissions site looks like. Sorry, it's technically tiny. But these are all the different kinds of things. We've got the activities. We've got the categories, the comments, the events, the images, the people. Each of the different kinds of data is stored as a custom object type within the content management system. We used some built-in types but a fair number of custom types. However, it only takes a couple of minutes to build a custom type. And that can all be done through the Web interface.

Here's the management interface for the people. So, here's our list of people. We can go through and edit those. If we edit one, this is what it looks like. It's just a forum you can fill out. It requires no technical skill to do this. Anybody at all can do it. Somebody in the admissions office can do the entries for the profile information.

And then, we're using Reason's association tools to make relationships between the people and all the other different kinds of things. So, down the side we can say that this person has affiliations with other people. It provides quotes, has hardest course, majors in a subject, lives in a particular location, likes a particular course. All of those things we can define just by a click. It makes a relationship between those two things.

So, back to our timeline here. All of these different kinds of connections and data storage are easy to do on Reason. But we spent a couple of months actually, starting back in November of 2008, figuring out the best way to do them. We worked at all the different possible types of objects that we could pull out of the profiles. And we defined all the different possible relationships between those different kinds of objects.

Here's an example. This is the technical definition of a person. So, a person has particular attributes. They have a page dedicated to them. They have particular relationships with other things. They have things that they can like. So, we very carefully defined all of that stuff before we got started in order to be sure that it all made sense before we actually started entering the data.

And we did that data entry then at the beginning of January 2009, at the same time that we began to do the actual development for that process. Now, just to give you a sense of the scale, these are the different kinds of types of things that we have in the system. There are 72 activities, 46 topics, 40 courses, 43 faculty, almost 500 images. Lots of data, lots of different stuff. It's a little smaller when we rolled out, not a whole lot.

So, we've got all this data. We've entered it into our Reason content management system. What's left to do? Well, the Reason administrative interface handles the data automatically. But at this point, there's no public interface for people to browse that information. There are no Web pages.

So, we spent the month of January coding an interface against the Reason API to present things. By this time, we had all the wireframes. We had all the designs for all the different kinds of data. So, it went pretty quickly. And all of the core data handling was handled by Reason. So, we were just really building interface at that point. Still, it took two programmers about a month to work it out. We had to build a separate interface for each of the different kinds of pages. But what we did was to take the individual parts of the page and code them up at separate blocks, which then could be laid out in all of the different pages where they might occur.

The result then is that we have a set of pages. The pages are dynamically generated out of the data so that whenever for instance we add a new person, we don't actually have to go in and edit anything. The person is automatically included with all their connections. The appropriate pages are built based on the data that we provide. So, no one creates the pages, nobody edits them. There are probably pages on that site that have only ever been seen by robots. But that's OK because a real campus visit is a deep and complex and untidy kind of experience. So, it's not a problem that our site might be the same kind of way.

And so, that's how we got here. We rolled out the new site in January of 2009 to great accolades. There were praise and fireworks and the mayor gave us the key to the city. So, can we measure the outcomes? It didn't do any good. We don't have a full year with the data. But what I can show you here is the last two years. The old site is the yellow here, the 2008. The new site is 2009

Now, this is the count of visits. It's not a count of page hits. So, the fact that there are a lot more pages on the new site doesn't skew the data at all here. This is actual single visits by individual people. What we're seeing is we're hitting about 10,000 more visits per month on this new site than we were getting on the old site. So, that's significant.

What do we know about those particular visits? Average visit duration back in 2005 was about 5 minutes. High school students had a slightly longer attention span then, I think. It has been declining ever since then. But with the new site, we're back up almost to the 2005 level in terms of how long people were spending on the site.

Pages per visit is dramatic. It had been pretty steady. We've added an entire page to every single visit. It doesn't seem like a lot. But when you realize that that's 10,000 visits per month, that's 10,000 more pages the people are seeing. And that means they're staying on the site longer.

Visits per visitor is also interesting though not as dramatic. We are seeing a slight uptick here of people coming back. That's harder to measure because it's hard from a website to tell from the IP address if it's the same person coming back. I suspect that's probably somewhat suppressed from the actual number. So, we're seeing measurable results in terms of how much this is engaging people coming back to the site. So, more visits, longer visits, more pages per visit, more return visits. I think that counts as success.

All right, where do we go from here? We'd like to do faculty profiles. We've begun that process. We've got some profiles on paper. We've done a little bit of video. At some point, we'd also like to do alumni profiles because students are interested in what becomes of them after they have been students. That's a little bit more on the edge because it doesn't quite relate as closely to the campus visit experience. You may not run into alumni.

However, at Carleton we have a very rich alumni admissions program. So, our alumni and our prospects interact with each other a lot more than I think is the case with a lot of other schools. So, they're actually is seeing valuable parallel there.

We're looking to do a richer map-based tour experience. We've got the map. We can click on the locations and see things. We'd like to do something that's more of a virtual tour. We're actually having Google come through with their street view tricycles onto our campus. So, we're hoping to leverage that.

We're hoping to do something more with automated profile creation and updating. Right now, it's a hand maintenance process when we get new profiles from students or updates. We have to go in and do that. But it wouldn't be difficult with Reason to build an automated process for throwing that data in. So, we just have to approve those changes.

We'd like to do some improvements of our caching to reduce the load on the server of all those dynamic pages. We've got some caching in place but we weren't able to complete that at the level we wanted to. We didn't scope the project. And looking at our friends from Beloit, we realize that our video looks chunky. So, we're going to look at doing some higher-quality video as well. So, that's a lot of stuff. And I'd like to leave a few minutes here for questions. I've got a whole lot of things I'd love to tell you but I don't have time.

So, let's do some questions. Yes? I saw a hand go up in the back.

Audience 2: You talked about the focus groups and I'm wondering is that, what would be the role of the college to import students from the urban areas for focus groups.

Mark Heiman: Well, the big focus group experience was with primarily local students. However, we did also work with prospects who had come to us from other places. So, we've got a little bit of both. We saw similar trends in both of those groups.

Audience 3: I was wondering you showed the map that one of the students had done. It is a great idea. But I'm wondering if there is any privacy in that?

Mark Heiman: As part of the profile process, we asked the students to basically sign off. We make it very clear to them what exactly they're going to be doing here when they fill out this profile. So, the privacy issues are covered in advance. We say, "Everything that you provide to us is going to be published on our website in a public way. So, if you don't want to share something, then don't put it on your profile and we won't do it."

We try to identify students who we think would be interested in this. We offer it to them. We explain what's implied by it. And that's the crew that we get.

Another one in back row.

Audience 4: [Unintelligible 34:34]

Mark Heiman: Correlations between the website and what we're doing in print. We just rolled out this website nine months ago. The admissions office is currently in the process of going through a redevelopment stage for the printed materials. So, we're actually in conversations with our publications group to make sure that there are some overlaps, that there is some continuity between those two. But I don't have anything to show you yet because that process is just beginning.

Over here there was a question. No? Anyone? Yes?

Audience 5: It looks like from the technical feed that it has some pretty dynamic things. What was the strategy? How did you develop so many student profiles and videos? It looks like a feat in itself.

Mark Heiman: How do we develop so many profiles and videos all at once in content creation? It was a bit of a slug but it wasn't too bad. We did the most of it in the course of about two months. The actual collection of the profiles from students, that was most of their work. We spent about an hour in front of the camera with each of these students. So, that's about 12 hours for the 12 students. And there was a fair amount of number of hours of editing work involved. I'm sure Doug can't speak on exactly how many hours that was but it wasn't overwhelming.

So, it appears that there's a lot of content. But if you think about it, it's just lots of small pieces of content that are laid out in a way which makes it look a lot richer than it actually is. It is rich but it looks like a lot more content than it really is.

Yes? Back there.

Audience 6: What did you have to do to finish this?

Mark Heiman: That's always a good question. I think this was a classic project management win because we would have been able to set aside the time and say this is a project for one of our core offices admissions which is central to the admission of the college. And we as a group are going to be dedicated to this for this amount of time. And during that last month from January 1 to January 30, 2009, we basically told people, "We're not doing anything else right now unless it's on fire." And we were able to do that because it's the admissions office. If they crash and burn, nothing is going to happen. So, it's good project management, I think, that made it a success.

Yes?

Audience 7: You have a great communication.

Mark Heiman: Thank you.

Audience 7: Can you recommend on how to build a team for this?

Mark Heiman: Yes, sure. How is our Web team composed? We have six members. We have basically a project manager. We've got two programmers. We've got a programmer designer. And we have a Web server administrator. I'm sorry, and we have a Web writer. I was looking right at him.

[Laughter]

Mark Heiman: It's a collaborative team which consists of members who are paid for from the external relations office and from information technology. But we work as a single group. So, that's what we're comprised of. We have grown from just me back in 1993 when I turned the website on.

Yes?

Audience 8: Are you all in one office?

Mark Heiman: Yes, we're all in one location even though we're budgeted from different sites, yeah. So, we function as a single team.

Audience 9: The people part of this is provided.

Audience 10: But physically, you're right next to each other?

Mark Heiman: Physically, yes. We couldn't do it if we weren't in the same place. That's critical.

TNT7: Inform, Interact, Inspire: Reimagining the Admissions Website

Mark Heiman, Senior Web Application Developer, Carleton College