Catherine Coe (North Central Michigan College) on The Future of Institutional Websites in a Data-Driven Era

On today’s episode of the Illumination by Modern Campus podcast, podcast host Shauna Cox was joined by Catherine Coe to discuss the balance of personalization and accessibility, along with the opportunity for data-driven optimization. 

Transcript

Voiceover: Welcome to Illumination by Modern Campus, the leading podcast focused on transformation and change in the higher education space. On today’s episode, we speak with Catherine Coe, who is Digital Marketing Manager at North Central Michigan College. Catherine and podcast host Shauna Cox discuss the balance of personalization and accessibility, along with the opportunity for data-driven optimization. 

Shauna Cox (00:02):Catherine, welcome to the Illumination Podcast.

Catherine Coe (00:05):Thank you for having me. I'm pretty excited to be here.

Shauna Cox (00:07):Absolutely. I am very excited for our conversation, and we are in, I know we've heard this many times, but a digital era of higher ed and something like an institution's website is so key to not only attracting students, but also keeping them engaged and informed. And I want to kick off our conversation by first asking you how has the evolution of web content management systems impacted the ability of institutions to create a more personalized digital experience for students that we're hearing more and more from of what they want?

Catherine Coe (00:39):Right. Well, I think from a user standpoint, the content management systems have become really user-friendly, become tools that allow people to assign or delegate work to individual groups. So if it's a student services or an outreach group, they can have their content posted specifically to talk to that part of the campus community. Then you have more of the board or the administrative part and posting up minutes and things like that to talk to that part of the campus community. So it allows communication to go full circle and then being able to change things quickly in real time allows us to better get stuff out in front of students more quickly. Integration of just alerts on the website. Specifically today, we have a campus closure until 11:00 AM so nobody's here, but we have to let people know. And so if you haven't signed up for our text alerts, you can always check it on our website and it's right there. So that sort of seamless integration of communication has been great. And then just the ability to just make changes quickly from anywhere. It's amazing

Shauna Cox (01:57):And really important when times are changing, things are happening in the moment, and just getting things out there in front is so important. And now when I'm thinking about the website, there's that need for personalization that everybody wants and every individual is very different and things like that. But at the same time, accessibility is becoming more and more important. And so how do you balance the need for personalization with the challenges of maintaining the accessibility and inclusivity on your website?

Catherine Coe (02:33):I think just keeping it really simple, I think not overcomplicating the messaging. I think that accessibility will always come first. That was one of our main drivers in developing our new website is getting through the Office of Civil Rights, the measurements and the standards in which we had to, basically we had to throw out our entire old website and start from scratch because it was so out of compliance. And so keeping that paramount mindset of, okay, is it accessible? Is it clear? Is it accessible in ways that people can, if they don't have a screen reader, how will this look and what is the contrast like and all that other good stuff. And then the messaging can be as personal as defining it by student groups or community groups. Are you a returning learner? Are you an adult learner? Are you a transfer student? Are you transferring to North Central from another institution or vice versa.

(03:46):I'm like, what is your journey looking like? And then for us anyway, we keep it more high level. We don't necessarily go down to the granular, what program are you exactly looking for? And let us help filter you. Because sometimes I think that me especially, it's like I don't necessarily know. And I know from experience or speaking with our admissions team, a lot of students don't know what they're going to do. And we're a two year institution and we're sort of like, if you know that your terminal degree is a two year degree, great. But a lot of our students do move on to four year institutions. And so they figure out a lot of stuff here. And so for us in particular, we try and keep it as it's personalized, but it's not too granular in that people do change their minds. And then that's when I think the human element comes into play. Particularly for an institution of our size, we have some really great academic advisors and student support services that really help hands-on with our students, moving them through the journey as well. So from my perspective, the website, it's awesome. It's a powerful tool, but it's not the final destination for a lot of our students because they're just trying to figure it out.

Shauna Cox (05:06):Exactly. And I think for a student, the first thing that comes to mind when they're like, oh, I want to find out more information, or where do I go? I kind of know what I want to do. As you mentioned, you're going to Google things, you're going to go to the website. That's your first, typically that is your first point of interaction with an institution and where to go. And I love that you guys don't put people in boxes and someone might say they want to do something, but you're allowing that room for them to grow and explore because they might come in thinking they want one specific program and leave going to a different one because they realize, Hey, maybe I can try this. So I think allowing that space for them to navigate their own personalized journey, but it's catered enough to them, but it's still open enough for them. I think that's really, really key.

Catherine Coe (05:59):And I think that the personalization factor from a technology standpoint is fantastic for that first blush of information.

(06:08):It's great for that Google search, how can we optimize the content so that we bubble up and how can we present the information to a user in a way that is not overwhelming? They get everything they want on one stop. They're not having to hunt and pack through gobs of navigation and content and everything else. How can we present this information really simply? And then again, as a small institution, our student to faculty ratio, again, we're very lucky because a lot of our students, in addition to our admissions and our student services that we have, our faculty play a huge role in the student journey. Adjuncts and full-time faculty members develop these relationships with the students. And sometimes they'll go back to the website for more information, but at that point, once we get them in, it's a human interaction

Shauna Cox (07:02):At that point. And I want to expand on your point that you mentioned of students wanting easily accessible, easy to navigate experiences when it comes to the website. So as that demand for more seamless user-friendly interaction continues to rise, what role does data-driven content personalization play in meeting those demands? I think that

Catherine Coe (07:30):When you say personalization, because, so I have to change my thinking a little bit because I know modern campus has personalization, like the feature personalization, but we don't necessarily use that. What we try and do is curate our content by what we feel are known and identified groups of users. So it's not like, Hey, John, welcome back. I mean, that's great. I mean, it's really lovely. We're not there yet. As an institution. We're taking baby steps in that direction to have some of that more immediate personalization. But for us, it's about helping direct traffic when they come to our website. It's about optimizing our programming pages. We recently did, we modified all of our program pages for our academic offerings in the fall and had some really great success. So what we saw out of personalizing it in the sense of everything is in one location, making it easy for you. We're not saying, Hey, welcome back, but we're saying, oh, you're interested in nursing. Let us help you identify this. And so by integrating real time data for the job outlook and career outlook opportunities, we were able to increase the visitors by 78%. We decreased page bounce rates by 93%, and this is a five month sample of data from before and after we optimized six pages, like six program groupings, and our on page time or the visitors on page time increased 183%.

(09:27):And anecdotally, what happened in speaking with our outreach and recruiter team, they have told us, they're like, people are coming to our campus visit days, or they're coming to our admissions events. They have so many more questions and they have super specific questions,

(09:48):And cool, we did our job. Then if they're coming for the page and they're able to look at the course outline of how many credits you need to accomplish this particular degree, if you look at, okay, what kind of job can I get? What does the pay look like? It allows them to come with a lot more of informed decision making right out the gate. And it maybe demystifies a little bit, maybe it's less intimidating to come to some of these college events, particularly I know high school students, I mean, they don't know. My daughter's 18 and she doesn't know, I mean, they still don't know. I work in higher ed and she's still no idea, mom. Okay. So I feel like that's where we've seen success in terms of being able to optimize and personalize and use data to increase engagement and increase the number of visits to our program offering pages.

Shauna Cox (10:54):And I love to hear that students are coming to your events with more questions. I think that's how the website should be functioning in the sense of you're prepping them enough so that they're, I would say, a little bit more confident to come to the events, not going, oh, maybe I'll go, I don't know what I really want to do. Or too shy to talk to someone. And when someone comes up to them and says, what do you want to do? But with the website, giving them just enough information to prep them, but not enough so that they can ask their specific questions to faculty or things like that, I think is really important in that engagement piece. Which doves tail into my next question. You kind of alluded to it here. So what strategies or technologies do you believe are most effective when leveraging SCMS to not only attract those prospective students that are interested but then also engage and then retain them throughout the academic journey that they have with you?

Catherine Coe (11:55):I think in our example specifically creating, so it's twofold. One is creating specific landing pages for those identified audiences, whether they're adult learners, transfer students, high school students, recent high school students. So those specific landing pages have allowed us to highlight. There's a couple of state initiatives that are very specific to the recent high school grad of 2324. There's the Michigan Achievement Scholarship. And so we were able to help rather than stuffing that information into someplace where someone maybe wouldn't think to look like financial aid and scholarships and drill down to that point because folks just don't do that. It's like, oh, I'm a recent high school grad. What's there for me? And then they click into that section, they're like, sweet, I could get my tuition paid for at an in-district rate or whatever. So that's one element. And then as I was explaining before, the program specific or academic offering pages is allowing them to really do more research, but it's in their own privacy.

(13:13):They don't have to raise their hand and ask a question. They don't have to email somebody. They don't have to interact with a chat bot. They're doing it on their own time and in their own pace, which I know is important because you can't, I think chatbots are great, and I think for a lot of institutions and things like that, that works out really well. But for us, we've seen great results just by having, we're getting more informed parents too. I mean, certainly parents are engaging with it, so we can't discount the students. Yeah, sure. Maybe the students look at it, but the parents are doing the research first. So

(13:52):As a parent, I know that. So yeah, so that's kind of where I would tie that together. And then we also, on each one of those individual landing pages that we've created, we've also embedded in inquiry forms. So if they're ready or they just want to learn more, then this information is sent, very minimal information is collected, but it's sent to our recruiting team, and then they're able to follow up and help guide them through the next steps and then inform them of student events that are happening or orientations or campus visit days, becoming, getting students more familiar with who we are.

Shauna Cox (14:35):Absolutely. And I think I'm just going to leave you here with one last question because of course, digital era websites we're at a time, or we're in a time that technology is rapidly moving and being someone who is dealing with technology and websites and things like that, it must be, I feel like you're just constantly running and running to keep pace with what is going on out in the world. So how do you envision advancements in web content management and possibly AI integration? That's also a big topic right now, shaping the way that higher ed institutions engage with learners digitally.

Catherine Coe (15:18):I think that it's inevitable.

(15:23):I think we have to keep a super open mind to it. It's funny because I'm at that age where I think I know a lot, but I'm about ready to know nothing. I look out there and I'm like, oh my God, I have a whole new world to learn, right? It is just the way that I have come up through the ranks of CMS development and website development. And I think it's interesting from a higher level, I think there's some really great benefits to using things like AI and using things like sort of conversational chat bot kind of texting, whatever. But as colleges go, I think we just have to be really careful of baked in bias and things that are so helping students from an accessibility standpoint, I think AI is going to be great for institutions from a marketing standpoint. I think we have to be careful because I don't think that, and I also think that the visitors and the students who are now, they're integrating with this or they're interacting with this content, I don't think that they're going to become very good at filtering out

(16:53):What's real and relevant as opposed to going, oh, that's exactly what I wanted to hear. It's like, wow, so smart. I think we should get ready for some skeptics. But again, from an accessibility standpoint, I think it's great. I think it would be awesome. I've used AI to help write code. There's certain things that it's like, this is great. I know I can do math, or I can have it rewrite something I'm thinking like chat GPT or something. But I also think in terms of content management and message delivery, from a marketing standpoint, I think you still have to think a human,

Shauna Cox (17:39):It still needs that human component to, I feel like AI can help with some efficiencies and stuff like that, but that human component is never going to go away.

Catherine Coe (17:49):No. And you can just see, if you look across digital spaces right now, you can, sometimes it's really easy to flag the stuff that's AI generated. You're like, oh, yeah, right. But it's getting more and more difficult. And I think I would say my job as a parent of young adults going out into the world, and then I would imagine any child is to look at it, not skeptically, but look at it intellectually. So think about it. Don't stop thinking, because that's what concerns me a little bit about my kids. It's like, well, where did you get that little snip of information and what rabbit hole? Did you fall down on Reddit to get that? Is it

Shauna Cox (18:32):

Verified? And things like that. I come from a journalism background, so it's always your sources that is ingrained in my brain, and I think that's such a key element to keep in mind when we're facing things like this.

Catherine Coe (18:46):And I know we've had discussions on campus about the use of AI policies around what does faculty usage look like? How does that work for grading a paper or making recommendations, and is there a platform that comes without bias? Or do you just naturally, when you put in your information or you put in the prompts or the query into whatever it is that you're using, are you implicitly putting bias into that? So I think we just have to be really careful. I think from an accessibility standpoint, I think it's a great tool to have in your toolkit, but I wouldn't necessarily want to say, okay, well this is it and let's just go, because I like to see all sides of things. So inherently skeptical, I guess.

Shauna Cox (19:39):Very good critical thinking. Got to use it. And so Catherine, those are all the questions that I have for you, but is there anything else that you'd like to add or any advice you'd like to share for people working in web content management, dealing with this in a rapidly evolving landscape, anything like that?

Catherine Coe (19:57):Just keep learning. Just keep reading, learning, reading all you can, going to any webinar if you can get to them. And then formulating your own path because there's, there's never going to be a cookie cutter path for anybody or any institution. It's like, great. So you have to go and learn. What I try to do anyways is just always try and see every aspect, and then you take 'em all and you bundle 'em up and go, great. Now I've got my solution because taking a little bit of this and I'm taking a little bit of that and I'm sort of curating this path for me. And I would always recommend that because it's sort of like you don't want to get too complacent in one technology or the other. See what everybody else has. It's the internet. You can borrow anything.

Shauna Cox (20:56):You saw the resources while they're at your fingertips, craft your own experience and correct. I love it. Amazing.

Catherine Coe (21:03):Yeah.

Shauna Cox (21:04):Well, Catherine, thank you so much for joining me. It was great chatting with you.

Catherine Coe (21:07):You too. Thank you so much.