Guest Post by Shanan Sorochynski

The other day I read that higher education consulting firm, Noel-Levitz, found that more than three-quarters of students and parents it surveyed never or only rarely read blogs on college websites.

I manage a blog for a mid-sized Canadian University.

The study was listed as one of the bullet points in Academica’s Top Ten, a daily scan of the news stories in Canadian Higher Education.

Anyone worth their salt in our organization subscribes.

So, you can imagine my chagrin finding this.

It’s August. Both the campus and the blog are less active than normal.

Content submissions have dropped and with that conversations in the comments section.

So I’m feeling a bit defensive.

Image: Abdulmajeed Al.mutawee via Flickr, CC 2.0

Higher Ed is also still an environment where mumbles and snark can undermine your efforts.

A fine example of this is in an article I read on CollegeWebEditor.com where Rick Stutz, Coordinator of E-Communications at Juniata College, talked about the redesign of the school’s homepage.

“It was great to have such a supportive administration behind the work – suggestions were always very minor and approvals took place over the phone or in person, not in committee. And only two professors have complained about the new design.”

And only two professors have complained.

That line made me smile.

The complaint count matters. And pointing out that many university blogs are collections of hand-picked student testimonials or boring administrative news items doesn’t matter.

What matters is if I can defend the effectiveness of our site.

And rightfully so. I need to be able to do that.

It is why I think having your cage rattled on a semi-regular basis isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If nothing else it makes you stop and re-evaluate if your program is working.

If it’s not, then you need to fix it. You can’t be married to the tools.

In my case, I can still defend the castle. The blog wasn’t created with recruitment in mind (though the inquiries that come in through the site are great). Its goals are entrenched in reputation and community-building.

I need people inside and outside the University to know about the great people and work happening within our community and we need to hear from our stakeholders, their ideas, their concerns … and the numbers are reflecting that.

On the whole, people are engaging with the material. They are reading, commenting, and sharing the U of R story.

With that said, I’m still looking for better performance metrics.

Right now, I can’t tell you if a blog story about U of R research made post-secondary education an important factor in a local voter’s decision at the ballot box.

I don’t know if someone read on our site about an upcoming event and then told a friend over coffee about that thing, they heard about, somewhere, but can’t remember exactly where but think it is this weekend at the University.

I don’t know if I was able to save someone time because they found the answer they were looking for on our site.

I don’t know if I made someone’s U of R experience a little better because of the blog.

And it drives me nuts.

Do you feel my pain? Is there a performance metric that eludes you?

Shanan-SorochynskiShanan Sorochynski manages the University of Regina’s first official blog: YOURblog. Previous to this she was the managing editor of U of R Report, the University’s faculty and staff internal publication, and a print journalist in Manitoba.