What can Higher Ed learn from the Brand New Conference?
I recently had the opportunity to attend the Brand New Conference, a series of talks focused on the creative side of branding. Although the target audience was advertising and marketing agencies (not higher ed practitioners) I was blown away by the people who spoke and their passion and understanding of what makes a good brand [...]
Students Love Us: Success With Social Media
As Schools App reaches more and more students, we’ve been hearing a lot of great feedback about how students are using the application. Here’s a quick sample of what students have to say about Schools App and how students are using it to connect with each other (click on a post to see a bigger [...]
The “Hook” of Social Networks and Social Media
People that post things on the internet for others to see are subject to the extraordinarily powerful force of positive, negative, or no feedback at all for an indefinite and infinite amount of time. This is the first time in human history that this is so, and frankly, our neurons are not wired to handle this kind of uncertainty. In fact, humans are highly motivated to seek out certainty and security in regards to social acceptance, inclusion, and praise.
The most effective way to build an accessible site is to write good markup
If you produce well written HTML you shouldn’t have to do anything clever to make your site accessible.
Non-directed, Ethnographic Interviews
We do our best to shape the next stages of our product development around the real needs of current and potential clients. Our primary tool for discovering those needs is the non-directed, ethnographic interview. The format of the interview is a relaxed, 30-60 minute guided conversation between one of our product designers and a single interviewee.
Student Clubs, Virtually: A Reply to an Inside Higher Ed Editorial
Community is one of the most influential factors to a student’s persistence at an institution, and has the largest effect (outside of financial reasons) on student retention as well.
Branding in Higher Ed: The Battle of Waterloo
Six months ago, the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada began transitioning over to a new branding identity. Marketing surveys had shown that the University of Waterloo was perceived as a “regional” university despite having highly ranked Engineering, Computer Science, and Mathematics departments. The school needed to market their campus as a cutting-edge and competitive [...]
