Designing a digital skills strategic review and transformation programme

Tracy Playle and Richard Prowse

@tracyplayle�@richprowse

#HEWeb18

#MPD4

Hi

I’m Rich, Head of Digital at the University of Bath, where I lead a multi-disciplinary team of content creators, designers and developers responsible for bath.ac.uk.

For the past ten years, I have led on digital content at top-ranking English universities. Most recently, working on a programme to transform the University’s digital marketing and communications platforms at Bath.

Founder of Bath’s first content meet up, I regularly talk about my experience of adopting an agile approach to content development, content strategy and user experience design.

I love Disney, Lego and cats.

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Hello there

I’m Tracy, founder of Pickle Jar Communications and a content strategist to the education sector.

After leaving an in-house role at the University of Warwick in 2007, I set up my own consultancy and have since worked to help over 170 schools, colleges and universities in more than 25 countries advance their approach to digital content and content strategy.

Two years ago I set up the ContentEd conference - Europe’s only content strategy conference for the education sector. You should definitely join us in Edinburgh in June 2019 (www.contentedlive.com)

Also… this is Scout. She’s the true love of my life. We love hikes, snuggles and popcorn.

Bath’s authoring community

• Approximately 90 marketing and communications professionals
• Supporting 53 departments, including academic schools and support services
• The site is made up of approximately 11,000 pages

Bath’s Digital team is unique in the UK higher education sector. It is one of the only teams to have adopted an agile approach to content design and production.

Bath’s digital principles

1. Start with people’s needs
2. Use data to make decisions
3. Advocate standards and structure
4. Make things simple and intuitive
5. Release iteratively and often
6. Provide support
7. Share

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Go to: https://www.bath.ac.uk/publications/digital-principles/attachments/digital-principles.pdf

Background

• 2015 University of Bath begins a project to transform its digital marketing and communications platforms. The goal was to:
• develop an author-focused content management system (CMS) called Typecase
• devolve publishing to subject experts
• 2016 Digital team and early adopters push the first sections of the new website live, built around:
• user-focused content
• defined measurable user journeys
• topical and departmental information

Background

• 2017 Digital team continue to devolve publishing, by:
• providing training, including ‘writing for the web’
• organising joint sprints with departments to transition content
• giving ongoing support to authors using the new CMS
• 2018 Digital team identifies a requirement to enhance the digital marketing skills and knowledge of marketing and communications colleagues

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To give people the opportunity to enhance their digital marketing and communications skills, it became clear we’d need help to develop and implement a programme in the timescales we’d set.

Staying true to who we are

To help colleagues create great content we needed to understand their training needs first. The programme had to:

• be designed based on data
• had to be a shared experience, so that colleagues had a collective understanding and vocabulary
• respect people and their right to privacy

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Brief for Pickle Jar Communications

Deliver a digital marketing and communications skills programme, to equip marketing colleagues with the practical skills and expertise to help them make effective use of digital platforms and tools.

We asked Pickle Jar Communications to:

• audit job families to map current levels of digital marketing and communications literacy
• create a programme that boosted the capability and confidence of colleagues, by enhancing their existing knowledge and addressing gaps in their practical skills
• deliver the planned training programme to an identified target group
• evaluate the success of the programme

Types of people

Digital professionals

Marketing professionals

Occasional marketers

Digital is a substantial part of their every day role or their primary focus

Primarily marketing or communication roles, may have a digital component

Marketing, communications and/or digital is an add-on to their role

Subtle misjudgements ignoring data can roadblock an entire approach

From another university’s project a few years prior...

Halle-frickin-lujah

Research design: choosing an approach

Examination

Self-Assessment

Affirm lack of confidence�Induce anxiety�Papers to be marked

Empower honesty�Aid self-reflection�Possibility is transparent

Shaping the study: structure and meaning

Capability - Confidence - Capacity - Application

Defining scoring criteria: what is “great”?

• 1-6 scale
• Ended up 0-5
• Clarity between each level
• Knowledge, skill, insight, business impact, etc.

Designing the questionnaire: framing

“We’re not testing you”

“You’ll get a personalised training plan”

Designing the questionnaire

• 6 sections (the 6 Ps)
• Introduction to each section (what it means)
• 1 question block to assess:
• Capability
• Confidence
• Capacity
• Application
• 10 questions to assess skills
• Answers align to levels 0-5

Designing the questionnaire

Designing the questionnaire

Designing the questionnaire

Engaging colleagues

One of the key aims of the project was to make sure that participants saw the programme as an opportunity to enhance their skills

To do this we explained that it was:

• optional
• self-paced
• delivered by a friendly third-party

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Go to: https://www.bath.ac.uk/projects/digital-marketing-and-communications-skills-project/

Go to: https://mailchi.mp/5a3e37ba091a/digital-marketing-skills-programme

We found that...

• Skills varied across the group
• Promotion and performance emerged as key areas to focus training on
• Enough other areas emerged to force us to need to design training for other areas too (specifically planning and production)

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• Understanding of audiences
• Why audience insight is important
• Interactive content production
• In-depth measurement
• Specific promotion methods
• SEO
• digital “jargon”
• Influencers and advocacy
• How to create strategies and plans
• How to use them
• Not why they’re important

Capacity underpins everything

Overall...

109

completed assessments

31 minutes

to complete

Planning - 68%

People - 59%

Platform - 60%

Production - 57%

Promotion - 50%

Performance - 55%

Planning - level 5

People - level 4

Platform - level 4

Production - level 4

Promotion - level 3

Performance - level 4

Training design

Strict budget

Different learning styles

Availability of staff

Embedding learning

Training design: blended approach

Custom full and half-day workshops

Custom pre-recorded webinars and series

A $99 Nielsen Norman webinar

TED Talks �VR category

Free guides e.g. Moz SEO PDF guide

Free courses on YouTube

A Higher Ed Experts $400 online conference

LinkedIn Learning courses

Custom

written

guides

Self-led research (wiki jargon activity)

Next steps

• Re-evaluate the knowledge and skills of selected participants
• Report on the success of the programme against its stated objectives
• Make a recommendation on the future of the Digital Marketing and Communications Skills Programme

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Q&A

Tracy Playle and Richard Prowse

@tracyplayle�@richprowse

Shameless plugs...