Project Description


The English Department at Clemson University is in a period of cultural transition. They are quickly losing their enrollment numbers because of several cultural factors including the strong stigma around being an undergraduate English major. The stigma has convinced many prospective students that being an English major will lead to fewer job opportunities than majors in science and engineering. The humanities are facing the stigma, but the Clemson English department is seeing the effects in real-time with decreasing enrollment numbers. To combat this, the Clemson English department commissioned a class of students to study and recommend solutions in their marketing to prospective students to increase undergraduate enrollment. I enrolled in the undergraduate class as a graduate student with the goal of helping change the English department for the better, and to add content strategy as an item to my skills.

The English department sees an urgent need to increase numbers, with the funding of the department on the line. There were a few key constraints on the work of the class, making the task more difficult. For one, after interviewing key faculty members who would implement our recommendations, we found that sustainability would be a problem. There was a lack of staff infrastructure in place to properly operate a social media account and make website updates. For this reason, we had to make sure that our recommendations would be easily sustainable. We were also under a time constraint. The semester was just over four months long, and our class only met once every week. There were certain data and permissions, specifically from Clemson’s Office of Undergraduate Research, that we simply could not gather in that amount of time. We instead gathered our own research from current students, faculty, and staff.

At the end of the semester, we were to present our findings to a limited audience of the department chair, three faculty members, and the college communications director. Understanding that their time was valuable, they only gave us an hour to present. We did our best to present everything we had gathered leaving out only the information that was not important for their implementation of our plan. Afterward, we created a large report, containing everything we had found to send to the entire English department faculty for future reference and for following through on the recommendations. Understanding that the department will need to continue implementing the strategy that we recommend, we did our best to create a sustainable and useful plan that will be beneficial for now and years to come.

Process

Our methodology involved every step of what is called the “Content Lifecycle,” from Usability.gov:

  1. In step one, we conducted extensive research to find out the current state of content in and around the English Department to determine the environment.
  2. In step two we analyzed that research to decide how it could help us reach our audience.
  3. In step three we decided on the types of content that would work best, the outlets to use to reach prospective students. We also determined how we were going to create it leaving room for the content to be maintained after our class.
  4. In step four we began an ongoing process of creating content for the English department. Our class created new brand materials and guidelines as well as determining the messaging that the department could remain consistent in future content.
  5. The final step involves maintaining the content strategy lifecycle. Our class was focused on creating a sustainable plan for how to maintain what we have started. We created a calendar of content for what to post on what platforms and we also made recommendations for the future. I hope that this information can positively impact the department for current and future students.

Project Overview

  • Client: Clemson English Department
  • Role: Content Strategist
  • Duration: Fall 2019 - December 2019

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Tools

  • User Interviews
  • Surveys
  • Personas
  • Xtensio
  • Journey Mapping
  • Google Drive
  • Adobe InDesign
  • Adobe Spark
  • Site Mapping

    • Competencies

  • Professional communication processes, procedures and practices
  • Visual communication theories and practices
  • Technological and media production literacies

Credits

  • Students of ENGL 4890: Co-strategists
  • Dr. Tharon Howard: Advisor

Sources Used

Halvorson, Kristina and Rach, Melissa. Content Strategy for the Web, 2nd Edition New Riders; 2 edition. 2012.

Kalbach, James. Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams. O'Reilly Media. 2016.

Richards, Sarah. Content Design. Content Design London. 2017.

Step 1: Audit and Analysis

Step one of our process involved gathering information. So much information was gathered in this phase that looking back it’s hard to imagine how it was all completed. We began by meeting with the faculty and staff to gather notes on what they would like to be changed and how they suggested we go about doing it. These interviews were helpful to a point. It seemed that there was a common misconception about what our role was and how we were going to help the department. “Everyone has an agenda, but there’s something you can agree on: You want your content to succeed, both for your business and for your users.” (Halvorson 23)

After our meetings, we started on a research plan to gather information about who our prospective students are. It was at this stage that we refined our goal into three questions:

  1. Who are the Clemson English prospective students?
  2. What is Clemson English currently doing to market to them?
  3. What can Clemson English do better?

Richards defines this stage by saying: “If you want your content to succeed, you need to find your audience. You have to understand:

  • who your audience really are
  • what they want from you
  • and how to speak to them” (Richards 57).

We decided who to ask and what to ask them to get the best information about our prospective English students. In short, the answer we came up with was everyone. So we interviewed current students, alumni, faculty, and parents, trying to get to the ultimate goal of who are students are. Kristina Halvorson states that “most content problems exist simply because no one has ever asked the right kinds of questions” (Halvorson 10). We tried to ask enough questions to get to the bottom of who our audience is and what we can do to help with content.

Step 2: Strategy

In step two we analyzed our information and how it would fit into the current state of the content in the English Department. This meant taking our research and deciding how we were going to use it moving forward. In this stage, we pinned down where all of the content was with a content inventory, and how each was operating in its current form.

Another student and I contributed the content audit to this stage. Our content audit gathered all of the information contained on the website and summarized it in a big spreadsheet. We conducted Google analytics research and a Screaming Frog audit and added in that information. In the end, I went through each of the 41 pages on the website to evaluate and document what was contained there. Halvorson says, “website tends to take on a life of its own…” (Halvorson 6), which was more than true on the English site.

I was able to use Lucid Charts to create a color-coded site map for us and the department. Others at this stage analyzed the rest of the content that the English department was putting out, such as social media, blogs, videos, and print sources. They also conducted a competitive analysis to see how our website compared to others in the field.

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Step 3: Planning

We began step three by creating journey maps using the data that we had gathered in step one. Richards stresses the importance of these user stories by stating, “A user story is a way of pinning down what the team needs to do.” (Richards 92). We used our journey map to decide what type of content would work best, and what outlets to use to reach prospective students. We then discussed how we were going to create it and leave room for the content to be maintained after our class. Our plan came together when we outlined what each person was going to take on, based on their interests, and how the final presentation was going to look. This phase bled into the next as our final report outline began to take shape. Each student was responsible for presenting their research and volunteering for a section of the final report.

Step 4: Creating Content

Richards states that “...instead of saying ‘How shall I write this?’, you say, ‘What content will best meet this need?” (Richards 2) By looking at the needs of the users, we created a list of content that would most help them. My contribution at this stage was the creation of a new site map.

Our newly refined navigation menu gives each audience a sense of where the information that would most benefit them is most likely to be. We added a prospective students tab, and refined the alumni and current students tab so that each audience would find their information in their tab. We hoped to follow this principle as well: “Making your site easy to understand and interact with is the fastest way to a happy audience.”(Richards 24)

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I also created a new homepage layout in this stage. Following the Clemson recommended color guidelines, I created wireframes of what the new site color scheme would like like. We found the contrast between the orange and "innovation" (gray) to be a better fit to be eye-catching to prospective students. Also at this stage, I recommended to the department that they include the "English Unbound" student run blog on the homepage.

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Additionally, I created a logo for the English department to use in their marketing efforts. Again, choosing from the Clemson University Branding colors, I decided that the contrast between the orange and light blue makes the logo noticeable and colorful. I chose a quill as an icon because it is a symbol of communication, old fashioned enough to stand in for reading as well as writing in addition to calling out the power behind both. I created the logo with the audience in mind as well.

With a younger audience, color interest and contrast is a great way to add visual interest to a logo. Additionally, straightforward typography makes it easy to read in small spaces (such as social media icons). In this phase, the team also created a flyer, new branding, and a video.


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Step 5: Maintain

The Clemson English department is aware of the burden that creating content has become on their faculty and staff so it was acutely a goal in our class to create a plan that would be sustainable. Ely created an awesome calendar of content to post on various platforms and we also made a few recommendations on how to maintain what we’ve done including staffing recommendations. It would be a shame to see our work fall to the wayside, but in the end, we made our recommendations for how to maintain our content strategy and it is up to the department to follow through.

Reflection

I consider this project to have been a great success for me and the rest of the students. Overall, this class fully fulfilled its role in preparing me to work more with UX and content strategy. In a class like this, it’s important that the work that we have done gets to live further than the boundaries of our class. Even if our recommendations don’t move up in the English department as far as we had hoped, the chance to make a difference with our work is a rare opportunity.

One particular learning experience for me was the consideration we had to give to the politics of the English department. Every recommendation we worried about how it would be received by the department, and we were correct in assuming that there would be disagreement. I felt that this class gave a very realistic idea of what it will be like to work with people who do not fully understand the field of content strategy, the research that went into the work, and its value.

I am glad that each student was given tasks and groups were assigned based on interest. I think our class was very well broken down into who was interested in what. I was thrilled for the chance to work with one undergraduate student as the leader of the class report and presentation. I think it really gave us, two people who rarely consider themselves leaders, a chance to learn how to put together a group of people to accomplish a greater goal. I am more than impressed with how our presentation and report have come together and how we could lead the class to that point.

In reflecting critically on the work that was done, I am happy with how it all came together, but I understand that we could have done more to write content for the English department to fix some of their messaging. For example, I think a page about why it is great to be an English major would have been a great rhetorical tool that could launch into further messaging on various platforms boasting the successes of English majors and the skills they learn.

Read Full Clemson English Content Strategy Report