How have I been working in marketing, communications, and web strategy for over five years without knowing about Confab? Not sure how this abundant wealth of knowledge existed outside my realm of awareness, but I am so glad to have discovered it this year, just in time to attend the 2016 Confab Higher Ed conference. Last week, I packed my bags, said farewell to the office for a few days and headed to Philly to take in two amazing workshops, three inspiring keynotes, and as many breakout sessions I could attend without cloning myself.From the time I got on the train Sunday evening, to the very last keynote, to all the discussions and sessions in between, I was learning. Unfortunately, my first lesson was not content-strategy related. Free tip: always sync your phone to iCloud prior to traveling, because you never know when your phone will surreptitiously freeze in the middle of a strange city. After a quick four-hour factory restore upon gaining access to Wi-Fi at the hotel, it was back in business. By Monday morning, I was ready for the conference and my phone was ready for my excessive tweeting throughout the event. (See: #ConfabEDU.)I learned so much at this conference, from higher education-specific strategies to general writing and content-related tips. The best part is that I can start implementing most of my takeaways right away and improve my work for our clients. It will probably take our entire weekly meeting to share my learning in my obligatory recap presentation for my team. I know my coworkers are excited for the PowerPoint slides that await them! Don't worry guys, I'll be sure to incorporate a generous number of cat memes and GIFs as my esteemed Confab mentors did (See: Amanda Costello).As I sat in the workshop sessions on the first day, I felt an overwhelming sense of community as I met content strategists from other agencies and higher education institutions across the world.I heard more than one person remark that they enjoyed being surrounded by others who understood the unique challenges of working in higher education. I bonded with more than a few people over frustration with inconsistent comma usage. Furthermore, this is an event that embraces cake! Where else can you get that kind of camaraderie? Here's why I think the conference was so successful: the keynotes, workshops, and talks not only provided heaps of inspiration to make me want to do better; they also delivered hundreds of tangible tips, tricks, and insights to help me improve right away. As a copywriter, there is the temptation to reuse the same tried-and-true strategies and approach projects the same way over and over because that's "our process." I was challenged to venture outside my comfort zone, think bigger, ask better questions, and seek to understand stakeholders' points of view instead of making assumptions. I was challenged to take a step back and identify the inherent bias embedded within my writing and to consider all audiences when developing content. I was challenged to write and organize content more purposefully, and to communicate and collaborate more intentionally. I've been back for less than a week, and I'm already putting my learning to work across a range of topics, including structure and usability; brand strategy; voice, tone and inherent bias; communication with clients; and project management. I hope some of my takeaways help you as you navigate your higher education website strategy.Every page is a homepageOne of the presentations that is sticking with me the most is Lisa Maria Martin's "Better Strategy Through Structure." Lisa emphasized the need to look at content through the lens of structure, noting that structure helps us to understand organize and connect content. I could not agree more. Since I'm part of the User Experience (UX) team, this was extremely pertinent to the work that I do collaboratively with information architects and web/visual designers on our team. In his talk "Writing Content for Findability," Rick Allen said one of my favorite quotes from the conference: "We shouldn't be optimizing content for search engines; we should be optimizing content for people." That caused me to take a step back and think about goal-setting and purpose-driven content.The phrase "every page is a homepage" was thrown out a few times, highlighting the fact that we don't know what page users will first land on, so we need to consider how the content fits in the site. When I'm writing content for a program page at a university, I need to first understand how the program fits into the website structure. Is this major part of a department? Part of a school? Are there other, similar majors? What key points need to be included in the content to help prospective students understand where this program falls within the university?Collaboration is not just a buzzwordIt's not just about writing content that makes sense within the information architecture (IA), Lisa asserted. Structure also requires collaboration with developers, early and often. Ideally there should be collaboration among designers, developers, and content authors from the beginning of a website project to establish content types and the new IA. Once these frameworks are established, the content will answer the right questions, send users on the right paths, and ultimately help users reach the desired action (contact us to learn more, schedule a tour, apply, etc.). I loved this little nugget of wisdom from Bon Champion of the New York Times: if content strategy starts at the beginning of project, the last phase can be used for refinements instead of scrambling. While we as a team already collaborate at some level, this takeaway reinforced the need to collaborate even earlier during a project to improve our deliverables for our clients.Show, don't sellHigher education websites are brimming with possibilities. The subject matter is constantly evolving and the opportunity to produce fresh, relevant content is a huge boon. Student-generated content, like photos, videos and blogs show the best qualities of your college or university's far better than generic marketing claims. Words like "unique student experience" and "innovative learning" are tired. By conducting keyword exercises with stakeholders and doing the legwork to understand our subject matter, we can create better content that serves our website users in meaningful ways.In the spirit of showing instead of telling and/or selling, the topic of visual content came up more than once. Knowing what we know about Generation Zs and their affinity for video and images, paired with decreasing attention spans and limited interest in reading web content, I thought it was really interesting to hear from renowned Philadelphia photographer Melissa Kelly. She shared several photography tips that were huge "aha!" moments for me, such as: Don't just show the dean standing there, staring at the camera with his arms folded. Get him in his element-talking with students at lunch or walking the campus. Words simply conjure up an image in the imagination; photographs capture the essence of an idea and support the message.Visual Storytelling in Action:Find your voiceOne of my favorite topics in life, or at least within the workplace, is brand strategy. I believe it is the basis for strong writing, the foundation for an effective website and a crucial part of content strategy. I was excited to learn a few ways we can improve brand messaging for our higher education clients, like keyword exercises, card-sorting, and stakeholder workshops. During a great talk about using an organization's mission statement as the basis for content strategy, Devin Asaro outlined several benefits for using an organization's mission statement as the starting point for brand messaging. The key benefit? The political legwork is largely done; and when the goals of your message are already identified and approved by stakeholders, you can start writing sooner.Devin identified some interesting questions to ask stakeholders when furthering brand messaging based on a mission statement: 1) How do we embody this as an organization? 2) How does our content embody this? 3) How does our content further this? I'm super inspired to start considering these questions early in the content strategy process!Lastly, just for fun, I scrolled through my tweets from the conference and compiled a list of my favorite nuggets of wisdom.Top 10 Confab Higher Ed Conference Takeaways.1. Buy notecards. Start incorporating card-sorting exercises into content strategy efforts. Jot words and ideas on index cards, then sort, discuss, re-sort, discuss again and then label notecards to organize thoughts. You can even use them to record notes during meetings with stakeholders.2. Keep a work journal. Make notes on what you're doing while you're doing it, day in and day out. Conversations about projects happen in Slack, over email, in the hallway, etc. This method helps to manage all the different communications in an ongoing log of all conversations around a given topic. 3. Findability is crucial. If prospective student visits a college website and can have a fancy VR experience but can't find out how to apply, something is wrong. 4. Create a spark file. Keep a single running collection of all miscellaneous ideas and unused concepts. Take some responsibility for the stewardship for unused ideas. 5. Learn to COPE. "Create once, publish everywhere." Can I get an amen for reusable content?6. Teach faculty to get social. Many institutions are cultivating and elevating conversations through social media; take advantage of this! They teach and train faculty to use Twitter and Pinterest to show off what they're doing in the classroom. In doing so, they make engaging content and support admissions, advancement, and marketing efforts. 7. Embrace different types of content audits. There isn't just one all-encompassing content audit. Content audits can be focused on items like site
