Portfolio Case Study · Indiana University
The Recruitment Machine Was Already Running, and Nobody Had Asked the Students
The visible problem
Indiana University had a recruitment operation that had been running for a very long time. Staff, budget, print, campus visits, a website, email campaigns. Nothing about it was failing in a way that showed up on a report.
The question on the table was how to use digital media to get more students to attend IU.
The real problem
That was the wrong question, and it was wrong in a way nobody could see, because it was the question everyone had always asked.
Nobody had asked prospective students what they actually wanted to know, or who they would believe when they heard it. This was not research that had been done and set aside. The activity did not exist. A missing step leaves no evidence behind. Nothing fails, nothing gets flagged, and there is nothing to point at.
So the first job was not designing anything. It was making a blind spot visible to people who did not know they had one.
How I made the case
I did not argue from my own opinion, because an opinion is easy to dismiss and I was asking people to change how they thought about their own jobs.
I used the Hobsons Report on Undergraduate Student Recruitment, an annual industry report written specifically as a guide for enrollment management teams. It was freely available and every team in the country could read it. Two findings from it did the work. Communication that succeeds is differentiated to the individual rather than broadcast to everyone. And the institution's role is to support the conveying of campus culture by providing students, rather than by describing itself.
That second one is where the aha moments started.
I also worked from Brian Solis on the proliferation of channels and how the right ones keep changing.
One slide carried a single line from Lev Manovich's book The Language of New Media.
"We are in the middle of a new media revolution."
I used it because of what sits underneath it. The way we do things is being transformed, it is not what it was five years ago, and it will not be this in five more. So the question for a recruiter is not whether that is happening. It is what we do about it inside our own jobs.
A second slide carried a line from the book Naked Conversations.
"Authenticity is the core value that makes blogs such a new and different way for businesses to communicate."
The word doing the work there is blogs, and it is the word people hear wrong. A blog is not a style of writing and it is not a diary. It is a structure. Before it, a website was a megaphone. It projected whatever the owner wanted to say, and that was the whole arrangement. A blog let the writing come from someone other than the owner, and let anyone pass it along. That is where authenticity became possible at all.
Authenticity is what buys credibility, and credibility is the only reason a prospective student would believe a word of it. Most people reading a site like that never know they are reading a blog, which is exactly the point. They are just reading someone who sounds real.
I used design research methods to surface the assumptions people were already bringing to the decision, so they could be addressed rather than argued with.
The point of using an industry report that everyone already had was that it took the argument out of my hands. I was not asking anyone to trust my judgment. I was asking them to read what was already on their desk.
What the research changed
We started over from a blank sheet, deliberately ignoring the existing campaigns, and asked a different question. Not how do we get them to attend IU. How could we use digital media to help a prospective student with their college choice decision.
That reframe is the whole project. It puts their job first instead of ours.
The finding that followed was that what makes a university different is not its academic programs or its student organizations or its career services. Those are real, and every school has a version of them. What makes it different is the students. And school culture is whatever a student thinks is important, not what the institution thinks is important. If a student says something is the thing, then that is the thing.
What we built
WeAreIU.com
Current students writing for prospective students, in their own words. It launched on March 1, 2012.
Two design decisions came straight out of the research rather than out of preference.
It was a standalone site, not a subdomain of iu.edu. Students told us that anything under the institution's domain reads as institutional. A prospective student would look at it and see marketing. Credibility required the separation.
And it was student voices only. Not the institution talking about students. Students talking.
The conflict nobody knew was there
That first decision, the separate domain, is what surfaced the hardest problem on the project.
Registering a domain outside iu.edu collided with two sets of university policy that contradicted each other. The IT team's policy said one thing. The marketing team's policy said another. There was no version of the project that complied with both.
Nobody had noticed, because until then nobody had tried to do anything that touched both policies at once.
There was no process for resolving it either, so I made the case in writing and took it to the Vice Provost, and then to the legal department. Both approved it.
That is the same shape as the missing research. Something was wrong, nothing had failed yet, and it stayed invisible until somebody tried to move.
Running it
My title when we launched was Data Manager, in the Office of Enrollment Management, on a three person team. The job I was hired for was keeping the CRM clean. This was not on the job description.
Recruiting the writers started with a one time approved email to the entire Bloomington undergraduate population, more than 35,000 students, with a Google form to apply that asked for their major and two questions. We had not contemplated the level of response we got, and we gave every single person who applied an opportunity to write. In later years we recruited at the student involvement fair with a notepad on a table.
400 students signed up. 310 of them actually wrote and published. I reviewed and approved every application, and I recruited, trained, assisted and managed all of them.
I also moderated and published every story, and organized them by keyword so they could be curated onto topical pages.
I selected the vendor, negotiated and managed that relationship, and secured budget approval for it.
Onboarding ran through a Basecamp project so documentation lived in one place and new writers could be added without resending everything. Training sessions ran at the Union, and most students needed very little of it.
The publishing workflow was built so other departments could participate without giving up control. A student submits a story, it goes to that department's moderator, they approve it, it comes to us to schedule and publish. I worked with Admissions, Scholarships, the Office of the First Year Experience and Housing.
Search optimization was built into the platform rather than taught to the writers. Students never had to learn keywords or meta descriptions.
The obstacles worth naming
Beyond the policy conflict, two more, and neither was technical.
Digital fluency. Some people I needed did not understand how digital media worked. Raising that took time I had not budgeted.
Marketing technology. Same problem, further along. The biggest challenge there was accepting how long it takes to bring someone up to speed, and doing it anyway.
There was also one that looked like a crisis and was not. The alumni association had branded around the tagline We Are IU with a nearly identical logo. We addressed it directly instead of waiting to see. They liked the logo enough to use it.
What changed
March 1, 2012 to May 31, 2015, from Google Analytics:
- 1,700 stories published.
- 520,000 visits.
- More than 1,000,000 page views.
- 50 percent of traffic from search, 38 percent from social.
On a domain that launched with zero traffic and no search history.
Search traffic started in month two, which I did not expect. I had built sites before and had always planned for a long silence on a new domain.
One student's story took off about a year after it was published. Daily traffic went up tenfold. It finished with more than 12,000 shares, which we put at a potential reach of 2.4 million. Nobody asked for that and nobody could have engineered it. We had built the place where it could happen.
The signal that mattered most was not a number. Freshmen began applying to write for the site because the site was part of why they chose IU. Some had never set foot on the Bloomington campus and said it already felt like home. Most of the student authors in the later years came in that way.
What happened afterward
In March 2013 Indiana University created a new position, Assistant Director of Integrated Media, and moved me into it. The role existed because of this work. That is the outcome I point to first, because a university does not invent a job to keep doing something that did not work.
That same year the project won Most Innovative Campaign at the Crossroads Marketing Awards, sponsored by the Masters of Business Online, Vitamin Talent and the Indianapolis chapter of the American Marketing Association.
In July 2015 Marilyn Cox at Oracle wrote a recommendation calling the work best in class content marketing. That September she put me on a 53 minute Oracle Marketing Cloud webinar to walk through the whole thing, titled The Digital Transformation of the College Recruitment Process. She ran the interview and I supplied all of the content. It is still online at https://vimeo.com/138886318
I stopped running it in 2015 when I moved to another team at Indiana University. The site kept going until 2023, eight years after I handed it off. I do not know why it ended and I was not part of that decision. The domain now belongs to a law firm in Boston.
Why I still use this one
The machine was already running. The budget was already committed. Nothing was broken.
The thing that was wrong was not something anyone had gotten wrong. It was something nobody had thought to check, and the evidence that it needed checking was already published and sitting in everyone's inbox.
That is most of what I do now.