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Fortunately, it should be easy enough to repurpose most of your content and use it in different places (forums, fbook event invites, stickers affixed to Blue II’s forehead, etc.).

You still might want to look at using a blog as your “home” for all things Welcome Week, and then sending out shorter emails and fbook messages that tease events/info and guide interested readers to the blog.

Yeah, this definitely is nothing scientific and probably could have been worded better. Can’t you tell by my screencast that I’m getting a little tired/drowsy? I went straight to bed after that, lol.

I do plan to spread it across multiple mediums, which wasn’t really conveyed in the blog post. To post only to Facebook would only reach maybe 200 students out of 950, which is unacceptable. The email I sent to ’08′s last week had a 43% open rate (400 students), so we would be missing out on a good chunk of students there also if we only did email. Multiple formats has to be the best bet.

Unfortunately a print/mailed newsletter is not in the budget, I am told. They are sending a packet of info out (already mailed maybe?) which will be a part of the communication we send; more of a heads-up that it’s coming and there will be a lot of information there.

Good thoughts on ‘junk’, Kevin. I had wondered if people weren’t choosing the Facebook group because they did not want us putting information there.

Karlyn – I like your idea of asking before we win them over, but the sample size would be so much larger… think 24K prospects vs. 900 matriculants. I wonder if we did that, would the prospects then expect to get the information how they asked for it and be disappointed if the method of delivery wasn’t what they wanted? I think that would be a ton of work to segment, and definitely couldn’t do it on my own. What a great way to head towards the future though, with more staffing of course

Quick Update: There are now 194 responses, and it’s following the same trend as the first 160 I blogged about.

Very quickly students (not at Butler I’m sure, on on avg. nationwide) learn to assume that University communication is SPAM. They would rather get spam in email.

If, however, you ask them how they would like to communicate about a class they are excited about with a professor they are close to, Facebook comes up.

So email is and isn’t “dead”. It’s preferred for junk mail. Putting junk mail (one size fits all mass communication) into FB is not the answer.

The better answer, and the technical solution that is still very challenging, is reducing SPAM by breaking content into smaller chunks and delivering what’s relevant or urgent.

WAAAAAAAY better than whatever newsletter you send is the students being welcomed to Butler with a sincere question about their preferences.

I personally don’t think there is a good / easy technical answer. And the behavior answer – what will they use – shifts over time as email gets burned out over the year.

So this type of survey isn’t going to result in some statistically valid ah hah. You are communicating care. Which goes a long long way.

And maybe, just maybe, by giving students the option to express their opinion about the channel, you might be building up the goodwill that gets you closer to the click through / read / engagement rates that you were looking for, regardless of the channel.

Well done!! And great use of a pile of tools in this blog.

My last year in admissions, I started a new students blog and updated it literally every single day with bits and pieces of info. For 600 students enrolling, that thing had well over 20,000 views in less than 3 months. There’s another idea for you, but it only really works if you update it super often.