 Okay, I guess we'll go ahead and get started. It's 2.45. My name is Alex Mackey. I'm from the University of Kentucky working the Office of Academic Excellence as an Interactive Communications Specialist and what we do in our office is we maintain all communications from recruitment to retention. We manage somewhere about 40 Drupal-based websites, manage our CRM campus-wide solution among a few other things. And today I'm going to talk about a project that we started back in 2015 and officially launched in February of last year. And just share some of our insights and what we learned as we did this project, some of the content strategies we built and how we kind of changed the way that campus thought about the web content and the structure of everything out there. Question, any higher ed people here today? Nice. Everybody else, we still like you too. Don't worry, you can get a lot out of this. I promise. So what are we going to talk about? Well, we're going to talk about what is the academic exploration tour, what we like to call AET. You know, why did we need it? How did we make the changes that needed to be made? Why was the content the most important piece of the site? Not the look, not the technology. None of that was important at the end of it. It was really truly the content. The content drove everything. And how now are we turning and leveraging this platform that we've built that is the second most visited website on our campus? How do we make things happen from that? For those of you who have a laptop would like to, you know, get a sneak peek for the end of the presentation. You can go to uky.edu.com. You can find it there. But if you want to wait, don't ruin the surprise, hold off. I promise it's worth it. So, start with the first question. What is the academic exploration tool? AET is, I'll refer to it for the rest of the presentation. To answer that, AET is a campus-wide, Drupal-based platform that allows users to use their interest to find majors offered at the University of Kentucky. So what does that really mean? Right? That's sort of like the quick term. How does that really iron out at the end of the day? Well, what we did is we developed a site to allow students to go in and say, you know, I like to work with my hands or I like to be outside or work with technology or something like that. And we've been using taxonomy to tie those academic programs back to those keywords. And those students are able to then find something that interests them rather than searching for a marketing major or an engineering major or something along those lines. It's an interest-based or career-based search instead of, you know, finding the major name and searching it that way. You can still do that because we still have users that do that on a regular basis. But we found that people like to search more than they like to go out and just scroll through a list of majors. So, second question. Why did we need this platform? What did we have? And when did we go, oh my goodness, how did we get to this point? We need to fix it right now, right? So, question, what needed to change? We needed one way to search and explore majors at the university. Back in 2015 we found that there were multiple ways. Each college had information on their sites. The registrar's office, which we maintained their website, had a listing of majors there. There was all different categories of data at all these different places and we needed to rope them all together and make one platform. Again, there was not a centralized listing. There was all kinds. There's a majors list, a minors list, a masters list, a PhD list, an online learning list, a certificate list. There's all these different types of programs out there but there was no one way to have them all under one roof and be able to search them all at once. We were back in 2015 using PDFs to maintain all of our major information. There was one man who took a summer, took time every summer, two months and updated 120 major sheets as we called them and then sent them to me. I would literally bundle them up, put them in a directory, uploaded FTP and then batch update all the links and then publish that webpage. That sounds insane. It was horrible. It was cumbersome. It was just bad. And so we needed to change that. We were also building a platform called the Graduation Planning System using our student records database. And what that does is we built this platform so that all the information that is on a major sheet is now dynamic. There is someone who's entering it into SAP and a student can go in and build their, oh what's this word? They can create a degree on it and see all the courses that they need to take for their four years on campus. And so we can now harness that information and put it on this site. We knew that was coming and we wanted to leverage that and so we built in a way to leverage that information. What we were using in 2015 was not mobile friendly. You know, you had to pinch and zoom and it was horrible and obviously looking at a PDF on a six inch iPhone is one of the most miserable experiences in the world. And so we needed to change that. At the time, the colleges and programs were controlling our content. So it was all different. There was no template. There was no baseline. Here's the information you must have to put this out there. And we saw that that was kind of a weird user experience, that there was no baseline sort of, hey, here's your box and here's your five pieces of data you need to have before you can launch a page and it made it hard to understand and compare things. And also we didn't have a site that was really driven by any sort of research. It was like, oh, let's do it the way that when you go into a room and you can look at a wall of all the files of pieces of paper for all of the majors, that's how we put it out there. It was alphabetically done and then sorted by college. So here's what it looked like. It was a Drupal 6 site and it literally, like I said, was sorted by college and alphabetical or you click on one of those colleges, you get a twirl down and then there's the name of the program there and you click on it and you get what's on the right. And that's, those on the right are what the poor man had to spend the summer updating using Adobe Acrobat and then sending to me and then I had to, you know, back to that story, right? Back to that vicious cycle. And so as you can tell, that's not fun to look at. There's no images. It's very bland. It's hard to read. It's written by someone with a PhD level sort of writing ability that an 18 year old coming to college is going to read that and say, what does that mean? You know, what does that mean for me over four years? And so we decided this needs to change. It's literally that simple as we looked at each other and said, this is bad. There's some really great tech coming on board. Let's find a way to harness it. Let's build a platform that can truly show students and show, you know, our quote unquote customers what we have to offer in a better way. And so before I go on, any questions? I'm not confusing everyone. Everybody good? Okay. So how did we make these changes happen? How did we go from 2015 into today? How did we get here? We first had to ask ourselves a major question. What do academic programs mean to university? They helped us frame this project to help us understand the scope of what we were doing. We weren't just talking about college information about what they have to offer. We're talking about the the meat of a university. It's the academic program that's what students come to the university for. It's what they they really, you know, look at when they when they visit and try to pick their college, which is a huge decision at 18 years old, right? And so we started looking around the higher ed space. We looked at Clemson, looked at Arizona State. Both of them had really great starts to this this this database of this information that was super accessible and super nice looking and and you could it was all there and it was it made sense and it all was in this sort of template that that you could understand. And so we we we took what we learned from them and then pivoted and went to the private sector and looked and and we were you know how how do other private companies handle their their products? How do they how do they show you know the worth or the value ad that you get from buying a you know the new 2016 MacBook Pro with 15 dongles? Like how do you show how do you show that value, right? And so like as I go through these next few slides and kind of fire through them once you all take a look and and try to to understand what these pages are trying to accomplish and then I'll quiz you afterwards. Here we go. Here's the question. What do those have in common? What's the goal of all those pages? What is the action? Correct. So what they're doing is they're all it's different types of commerce you know you won't buy hard drive, you won't buy a pair shoes, you want to buy a laptop, you know anything, any sort of tech, any sort of clothing, you go to you go online and you shop and you compare and you see these things and then guess what happens when you're found what you want? You click put in my cart, you put in your credit card information and you buy it and then two days it shows up on your porch, right? While we can't package up our academic programs and put them in a box and ship them out we can at least show this this information that same way. We can really treat our programs like products and that was the core of this idea is that at the end of the day while we're you know a higher ed institution and we're not technically selling anything to anyone students come for an education that is our value add to their lives that is what we do we educate them and we provide them with the ability to with the opportunity to learn right and so for us to do that the best way we had to really rethink it it wasn't that information didn't need to live in a PDF it needed to live in a dynamic living breathing site that we could edit that we could maintain that we could continue to iterate on and make better when new technology comes out when things change in the programs and so on and so forth. And so another really important question to this and kind of the meat of what I want to talk about today is why was the content important? Well when we when we took a step back and looked at at some of the data sources we had at our in our grasp right that we had the ability to get on get it get in digest and then reproduce and surface on this site there's five major ones right so you have with that information that's available in those major sheets that those PDFs that don't look great but technically are really all the true core information we have on those programs we have what's on their program websites the college maintained websites we have um and then that GPS information like I talked about where the that very specific course information that a student registers for their courses for every semester and then they can they can plan out their four years and then know what they're going to be taking and then we had and those are our three you know sort of internal sources we had complete control over those but then there's those two on the outside the BLS the Bureau of Labor and Statistics information from their website and then what can I do with my major let's start with BLS what we decided to do is use their API they have a great API it's free that you can update their information every two years so this information is pretty pretty you know up to date and what they do with that data is it's it's career information it's you know what does it what's the average average salary for a web developer you know what's the job outlook for the next 10 years where some similar roles and things like that and so we use that API and we brought that information in and so what a user can do on the back end looking at the content is they can select from a list of a couple hundred different actual jobs out in the real world and pick one and tie that information to the web page and so when a student's on there and they're looking at I want to be a business major oh look I can be you know a CEO of a company they make $100,000 a year the the job outlook over the next 10 years is there's going to be plus 4,000 you know however that looks and here are some similar jobs is what you'll be doing on a day-to-day basis and all that information is something we don't touch but BLS keeps up to date it's a dot gov site so it's the trusted source right and then that last piece is the what can I do with my major we didn't we wanted to be kind of an organic experience we wanted to so as I get a little farther into this there's one of the content experts to to to live and breathe on this page and do what they think is best and so let's say it's an ag something something in our college of ag right and it's a ag econ major while there may not BLS may not have that we wanted to give them the opportunity to say at least give them like an economics you know something in an economic world to put on that page we wanted it to be that sort of experience to where the the author of the page gets to pick it not we're not having like the machine do it itself that makes sense but the so the UT UT Knoxville created a database called what can I do with my major and what that does is it ties information it's not sorry ties it has jobs to majors so you know director of marketing is obviously you need a marketing degree or I'm trying to think about like biology you probably end up pre-med like things like that and so what we did is we on the back end we tied we took all of those thousands of entries out and thanks to a lot of hard work by some interns in our office we were able to map those two majors and literally like hard input into them into the back end of the system as keywords and so you're able to now search those keywords through the back end of the system and I think it's what's really really important here is that our office doesn't own this content we don't want to own it we let like we don't have any desire to own it we want to give a platform to the colleges to those to those people out there who are day to day with these programs with these program directors and things like that to own it we wanted them to build a platform that said hey here's your box here's your five things you need before you can launch you know basic basic program information a big hero image a contact email those kind of things we wanted to make sure those were there and so we sort of kind of did a federated model to where it's we use revisions very very heavily so we have someone in a college publish a piece of content they save it it triggers an email to a few of us in our office to say hey so and so published to this page we go in and we check it we're not reread we're not reading it for what it says we're checking for for major like formatting errors for pictures being broken and things like that and then we publish it because we trust that's the one thing we said throughout this whole process is we are not here to be some overlord of your pages and your information we're simply here to provide the technical expertise that we have while you own your content like I was saying we really allowed the experts to develop and maintain the content but we when they came to us and said hey here's this information what do I do with it we gave them some some guidelines of you know don't write 15 sentences let's like cut those last 12 of them and only write three or that image is three gigs like that's insane we're not putting that on the web let's downsize that and crop that or that's a really bad picture we shouldn't put your selfie up as your contact image that kind of stuff so we went through and did that we found those things but again we let them own it at the end of the day they own it we just maintain the platform and so here's an example of some some content that we found here's one of those major sheets a lot of big words it's hard to read it's hard to really understand what that major means for an 18 year old today I remember our target market is not someone who's been you know has a bachelor's or a master's or a phd while we do intend in the future to we're bringing onboarding our master's programs right now and we're going to turn around and pivot and bring on our phd programs right now is just is just undergraduate majors and undergraduate minors so that's this is a somewhere between 16 18 year old student trying to read that you're not going to understand that and so here's what we asked them to do we took that and made it this it's a lot easier to read while the link is similar the wordings a lot easier to understand it's less large phd you know wording of something and it's I'm 18 years old I need to read that in under 30 seconds because that's my attention span here you go and so one of the great things that we've noticed since this product this platform is launched is that the programs are truly understanding that this is a great platform in the leverage and they're actually linking directly from their site to 80 when you go to find major information our College of Business is a great example of that the menu items on their site don't go to something under there in their directory they come to 80 right now I mean I guess that masters is currently working on we're building out programs as we speak in our master's department to where there you know it's all going to be one central thing so when you when you you're done with your your marketing degree you can then pivot and look in the College of Communication and see oh there's a marketing masters or communication masters that is tied directly to what I've already done in undergraduate so why not just go ahead and move on and so hopefully this is going to turn into this this experience to where a student can plan instead of four years and like explore what those offerings are for four years it can be 12 years or however long it takes to do you know your masters and your PhD and then onward and maybe a couple certificates or whatever that may look like and so what we did we took a look to start this whole project off let's get to take a step back is we we looked at content we looked at what was necessary we met with stakeholders across campus and said here's this idea it seems really big and scary because we're going to get rid of you know your major sheet PDFs and you're going to have to explain this you know send a student to a URL instead of a PDF on a website but what are the what are the necessity whether the items of necessity that have to be on this page and refer us to continue to show the correct amount of information to these students what it what does that look like and and the planning process of this probably took longer than the build and I don't want to say we did this and I only worked with a great organization called up and up out of South Carolina they helped us build this platform but we what we did is we took a lot a lot of time to to really think about the structure of the URLs and being able to so the marketing looks really clean when you send someone to you know the business management major or something like that the URL string looks really nice the design of every page makes sense and that every every major can fit inside this box that we've built because you got to think each college is going to come to us and say oh I have this one little piece of content that that you know this other college doesn't have and I need that on those pages how do you solve that flexibility is how you like that's that's that's what we found is that we built this very flexible content types to where you know a lot of it is just twirl downs and paragraphs and embed options is really what it is because that's at the end of the day you can get almost everything you need done in those three things you can the stuff isn't really important you can do a twirl down like you can embed your videos that you've worked really really hard on that are great like marketing pieces and all that kind of stuff and so this is I kind of look back in the archives here back in 2015 this is our planning document not all this made it to production but this was the planning document this is what we looked at to say you know here are the the sixteen things that we thought were necessary at that point obviously like I said not all the made it to the live site but this is what we did we took a step back and said every program is a little different but to get everybody into the same system let's make it as broad as possible and help them sort of find a way to fit find their their their fits here and so this is what we came up with I want to kind of share this wheel so you can kind of see it under the hood thinking I don't remember the beats radio but this is kind of the way that we viewed the searching of everything thinking about you know how you interact with the site and so we have those content types but how do we take those content types and make them searchable how do we make those those that ability to to find and explore instead of directly search for a program and we thought this was a great you know I'm on the subway and feel like saving the world with my lover to 90s pop rock like it's it sounds kind of gimmicky but it makes sense when you're like I don't really know what I want to listen to how should I find out what what music I should listen to today 18 year old kids are doing the same thing when they come to college I don't know what I want to do with my life but I know I like to work with technology or I like to be outside and things like that and so I guess to kind of wrap up that thought is that like everyone out there has something to sell like I said we don't technically sell anything as a public institution right but we have programs that offer value add to someone's lives and I think they want that education so they come to college and that is our cell right effective web content drives that that drives the cell it drives your ability to you know to close on that deal per se there's lots of different ways to say you know we have effective web content but what the way we built this is is we wanted to be able to say our content is is the king of this platform and we're going to make like take what you had and make it a thousand times better by optimizing it for the web and I think I could be wrong here but from what I what I the way I feel about this project is that we've kind of changed the way campus writes for the web we showed them how important it is to be succinct to not have walls of text to add images to add videos to have interactive pieces through this project and I think it's it's helped the overall health of web content across our campus as a whole just because having an exercise like this to where you have to you know quote unquote fit in our box again they understand that they're they're limitations and things that you should think about when writing and creating content for the web I just want to share this this is pretty cool little piece of content here we have on on AET right now our mathematics department so those three figures you see those mathematical elements you see there are actually you know mathematical notations when in reality those what we call statistic callouts so they should be saying like number one math program in the world or a hundred students a hundred percent of our students get a job training at college obviously these aren't true but you you get the gist right well they took it and got effective and creative with their content instead instead of putting up stats about how great our program is let's show we have a little flavor or flair in what we do and so they put mathematical notations up there to say hey you know we can make jokes too even though we do math all day right so pretty cool and here is the big reveal this is what AET looks like today so as you can tell there's three there's four different search options there it's I like to with those options I like to work outside I like to you know work with technology work with my hands work with others that kind of thing there's another option that's I want to be A you can search for I want to be a CEO I want to be a web engineer I want to be a mathematician whatever that may be you can search and find that information and then there's I'm searching for so I'm searching for the mathematics degree or I'm searching for the the ag economics degree or I'm searching for the design degree whatever that may be you can search directly for that and then you can do browse all programs because now we're seeing that a lot of students come and they're like well what you know what do I do I don't know exactly what even with all these great search options I don't know what I want to do I just want to browse and so we allow them to browse and they get this but then on the right hand side over there you can actually go in and sort based off college based off degree type based off of program type and things like that and you're able to to really get down into like here's you know if I know I want to be in the business college but I don't know what I want to do inside that business college here are your options and so here's one of the the landing pages looks like there you go that's a big I'm zooming in a couple of times here but so you see that obviously you have those those call outs you have a big picture on the right hand there that's the contact information you have a couple paragraphs of some information about the general program you have a student picture with a quote saying how much fun they had while learning and then you get into some cool stuff like that the GPS data and so using a custom module that was built we're able to port that information out of SAP into the site and so students can explore and say oh I'm going to do a forestry degree and I want to do the BS option Bachelor of Science and so you can go in and actually click on each of those courses and see a very brief description of what that course means because what in reality what is chemistry 104 mean to an 18 year old who doesn't have any idea like you know what those tags and things like that with that with that module they're able to find that information and really get that one to two sentence brief of the top here's what it looks like again name of the college name of the program some of those stat callouts about the program then the breadcrumbs to get them around really easy basic program information some what how they grow how the college of ag does and like growing their careers of the students the guy on the right as you contact about it has his phone number has his email has the website all those things that was a big thing that we found is that there was no face with these programs students are out there and they see this PDF and they're like well that's great I know I want to do forestry but who do I talk to about it I have some general questions now they have that ability to say I know I need to go talk to Wayne there and so they'll call up call Wayne up they'll send him an email they'll do those things they'll interact with him and so that helps that sort of that undecided nature to where they can get those questions answering like okay forestry is for me now I know that for a fact just want to share some other cool things people have done you know the number one most popular major UK's biology because that kind of leads into the the doctor nurse sort of what that's pre-med for us and then on the right there is the BLS module as you can see the free to career is a biological technician you see their salary you see the jobs you see the job outlook you see some related jobs you see some what do you do on a day-to-day basis sort of thing and so here's some of the analytics that we've had since launch we have 50 authors across campus getting into this site this is since February of 2016 50 authors building this content changing this content updating that kind of thing we have 6,000 keywords in the site and so what that means those keywords are those those words were I want excuse me so it's like I'm searching for biology or I'm searching for trying to give another great example instead of mathematics math or you know something long like to work we don't the fuzzy logic we found wouldn't really work with this site because there's a lot there's so many different options out there that we couldn't really do that fuzzy search logic and so we had to go in and think about you know oh my goodness if someone searches math there's nothing because we need to put math on the mathematics page and maybe on the you know business page or whatever that may be and we've had 100,000 keyword searches and a little over a year which these numbers still kind of I can't wrap my mind around these numbers are kind of incredible 90,000 total career keyword searches that's I want to be a CEO I want to be an engineer I want to be a biologist whatever that whatever that may be 50,000 interest matches so that is I like to those those eight or nine keywords that's those we've had 1.3 million page views that's unique page views that's pretty incredible and then the one that gets me every time is 260,000 unique users and that's blocking internal IP addresses that's total external off-campus traffic we're really proud of that we think it's like I said it's number two visited site on campus as of a couple of weeks ago I don't know if that's changed but it's pretty incredible and to kind of wrap everything up I just kind of want to show how we're leveraging this platform because we built this great tool but now how do you really get production out of it how do you grow enrollment how do you make sure that students aren't undecided when they come to college and they understand their their programs when they get here some of the current initiatives we're doing is doing postcards of students who are interested in a certain college you know we're working with our engineering department a lot to help them drive their enrollment to say okay we have these students have been flagged coming into our system as they're interested in engineering what to drive them to AET those engineering pages so they can really understand the offerings that we have we're doing email communications the same way you know we see that you flag yourself as you're interested in communications here's the communications AET page here's some related majors that you also may like if the communications isn't really your thing we developed short URLs so all the colleges can put see blue.com forward slash whatever that college name may be to where they can go out and put that on print material and that'll never change and it's always going to show all their degree options and minors and eventually master's programs it'll all get there and recruiters when they meet one-on-one with these students are using AET in those meetings to help them figure out what they want to do we're moving to sales force and we have plans to integrate with sales force integrate this data we're pulling all this this analytic data out and be able to say oh you visited this master's program for business 15 times but never applied what can we help you you know send them follow-up emails hey like how can we help you those sort of things and we're integrating the data so that we'll be able to understand where students are interested and where they end up some quick takeaways I know I'm running out of time so I'm kind of speeding up here I really like the Bill Gates quote from 1996 an article it was titled content is king that quote is content is where I expect much of the real money to be made on the internet it drives the internet websites are great but the content is truly the meat of those websites and that's what is most important whenever you develop something content is king we found and something else to do is always think about finding those who know and own the content and get them to understand and make their content better and then publish that content because well you all may may have a great view of the overarching idea of the institution you work for or the company you work for there are those in those smaller departments are doing the day-to-days that know the content best utilize them they're great at what they do you're great at what you do be a team do it together define the content before you build always find what content is needed and then build don't worry about what it's going to look like worry about what you're going to put in at first and find ways to leverage the platform because you could build the best website or platform in the entire world but if you don't leverage it it won't be used it's as simple as that here's that quote I was going to kind of expand on it but I'm out of time any questions comments anything no yes in the catalog so so what's going to happen is that GPS that I've talked about is actually you're going to be able to generate PDFs out of that on the fly and so the historical PDFs will be there we're going to like sort of bury them on that page so where you can always find them and they'll be tagged to that page but at the end of the day that content that those courses are going to change so much and be updated so much that we're going to generate PDFs out of that as quickly as we can does that make sense yes and we struggled with that we did yes and we still have that I don't want you to think that we got rid of that it's just it's it's handled in that GPS module we're no longer updating those PDFs and maintaining a big database and directory of those that's gone that model's gone and we've moved to the digital so and that's still their binding contract but we've just moved away from maintaining it as a PDF any other questions yeah I'm sure there's a lot of Kentucky specific things in here but you guys interested in sharing some of this data structure or yeah no absolutely absolutely I feel free if you want to meet after this or you can email me alex.macky at UKY I have business cards or whatever just come talk to me I'm more than happy to share I mean it was a long process more than happy to be there so feel free to ask any questions you may have so anything else I guess I'll put it on that the node for the thing I'll update that for everybody so awesome thank you all very much