A school website that engages in welcoming conversation

My final assignment for marketing class was to consider some steps that a school might take to "improve its fortune" based on topics and themes that we looked at in class. My favorite part of my paper was inspired by a post (serendipitously) by our professor a couple of days before the project was due.

Here is a selection:

Print communication and personal campus tours provide elements of the experience that the school should strive to mimic in the experience of visitors to the website. Mailings can be tailored to the person to whom they are mailed. Similarly, when someone comes to tour the campus, the tour guide engages the individuals in conversation and finds out a bit about them in order to personalize the tour itself.

A visit to the web site should offer that same style of welcome and invitation to see the school through the lens that is most compelling to the visitor. Currently,[...] to an external visitor, the web site is akin to welcoming a visitor to campus and throwing stacks of paper and photos at them, pointing to a signpost with locations, and taking off. A schoolʼs website should present the opportunity to engage these electronic visitors in conversation, and should not be just an electronic library of facts and news about the school. This is not to say that there is too much information on the website, just like when you come for a tour, you want your tour guide to know about many different elements of school life, but you donʼt want them to scream them all at once. You want to be able to access and highlight information that has meaning to you.

The school should establish a number of lenses through which to view the school that could serve as more personal tours through the information on the web. This could be based on a number of the initiatives, like the virtual tours at Dickenson College. Even better, the website could invite first-time visitors to share a little it about themselves that would then lead them to the possible content that might be of interest to them (while still having the rest of the site accessible and searchable).

The school should present a website with better manners. The external website should introduce itself, welcome the visitor and then provide a more tailored communication. Technologically, we are in an age in which a web site can say to the viewer, “Welcome, what would you like to learn about the school?” And the presentation of this can reflect the warm and inviting manner analogous to the ways in which all guests are welcomed to the actual campus.

I'm loving the idea of a simple welcome to a community by a website. As on-line content becomes more and more about authentic communication, it seems so crucial that we reflect this in the way we tell the world about our work at schools.