One of the most impressive sessions I had the privilege of attending at this year’s AMA Symposium for the Marketing of Higher Education was by Deborah Maue from DePaul University. In 2007, DePaul launched a proprietary social network application called “The Depaul Quad”. What makes this so unique is that it was targeted not at students, but at their parents! Read the summary in bullets below for a summary and for the TOP 10 Lessons Learned.
First plan – build out site to include all groups, start with parents for pilot. As it turned out, once the site established itself, it became very “parents” focused to the point that it was no longer possible to extend the network to the other groups of people. This was not a failure in the plan – this actually proved how successful it was!
Timeline
- Aug 07 invite parents of new freshman
- Apr 08 invite parents of deposited freshman (currently have freshman and sophomore parents)
- Oct 08 Invited junior / senior parents
- Jan 09 planning to invite parents of admitted students
Why did DePaul choose parents for social community?
- Strong DePaul affiliation
- Highly invested - emotionally and financially
- Scary time in their lives – separation anxiety from kids
- Parents are a credible source of higher ed. info for other parents
- DePaul had not previously done any outreach to undergrad parents
Main sections on the social network main page:
- Recent activity – from discussion boards
- Recent parent blog posts (only added a month ago)
- Quad News – news about DePaul – relevant to the students that parents want to know (ex: health insurance)
- Resources
- Featured member section
- Photos that parents can post
- A poll for voting on stuff (not much activity, makes it fun though)
Have hosted live chat sessions
- Get 25-50 parents participating
- Many more come later and review the logged discussions
RESULTS
- 1,863 members – 30% of invited parents
- Approx 167 new members per month
- Activity in September 2,794 visits
- 1,110 unique visits
- 2.25% participation
Popular topics
- Campus safety / security
- Health services
- Empty nest syndrome
- How much to communicate with kids
- How to support w/o meddling
- What’s going on that they don’t know
Top 10 Lessons Learned:
1. No matter how engaged they are, if you want people to come to your site, you have to constantly remind them to come back
Send 2-3 emails per week giving reasons to come back
- New content
- New parent issues being discussed
3 types of emails
- General parenting tips
- Site updates
- “did you know” about DePaul – helps with word of mouth marketing
When DePaul started emailing regularly, traffic increased
2. Communities gather because they have things THEY want to talk about, which are not necessarily the things you want them to talk about.
At launch, DePaul didn’t let parents propose discussion topics, mainly out of fear of what they might say. DePaul got past that fear and now they allow parents to propose topics and the discussions are much better and attract more traffic and participation.
The DePaul Quad is about THEM not YOU. It could not be scaled to other groups. It was too focused on the parents, would be irrelevant to other groups.
3. Most people who visit your community just want to read what other people say. This is normal
- Only 2.5% on the site are creators
- Most are readers and raters
- Have a few superusers who “Sheppard the other parents” – DePaul found these people and engaged them as bloggers on the site
4. If you ask for feedback on something, be prepared to ACT.
- If people are saying negative things, they are saying it off the site too…better to know about it and be able to respond and react to it.
- Thank them for their feedback, even if it’s negative
- If you can’t solve the prob, explain why.
5. Even if people have something negative things to say, they find a nice way to say it and they are respectful
- Disclaimer - Blogger commentary here: If you think about a social network in terms of a physical community, such as the neighborhood you live in. Chances are people are respectful of other people and property in your community. Even if they dislike each other, things are handled tactfully. Social networks are no different. If you establish a credible community with respectful individuals, you will enjoy the comforts that this type of community breeds.
6. Cash incentives won’t get people talking more. Instead…
- Send thank you emails to participants
- Send a mug or t-shirt as a token of appreciation
7. There is no need to develop your own propriety social network site. There are a lot of options out there.
The Quad Site is expensive, dependent on agency partner and has no content management functionality. DePaul is in the process of porting the platform over to something else that is less expensive and easier to manage.
8. People join communities to connect with people, make it easy
- Encourage people to submit pictures
- First discussion is asking parents to introduce themselves
- DePaul made it easy to connect offline too
9. Managing a social community takes a lot of time, agencies can’t easily do it for you
- Daily commitment
- Reading what people say
- Responding to what people say
It requires commitment and resources from people across the university
- Student affairs
- Students Records
- Financial Aid
10. It’s hard to measure
- Word of mouth marketing is always tough to measure
- Need very specific goals, metrics
- Industry is starting to gather benchmarking data
We will keep doing the Quad
- It’s critical to let people interact
- better to give people a place to talk where you can see it
- great way to do ongoing market research
- price-value is increasing as membership goes up and costs associated with managing go down
What’s coming down the pipeline?
- Just launched the Kellstadt Link (for alumni and students of the graduate biz school)
- Looking to migrate the Quad and link to anew platform in 6-12 mo
- Launching an internal WOM program targeted to faculty / Staff in January
Tagged as:
DePaul,
DePaul University,
Proprietary,
Quad,
Social Media,
Social Network
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