Huron Education Survey Documents Increasing Use of Social Media in Higher Education

Social Media &
Advancement:
Results 2013
Thursday, 18 April 2013

mStoner.com
HuronConsultingGroup.com
CASE.org

Overview
• Fourth annual survey
• Sponsors: CASE, Huron Consulting, mStoner
• Method: survey mailed to 18,144 CASE members;
tweeted by Michael Stoner and other mStoner team
members
• 1,080 response (a 6% response rate)

Demographics
National originNational origin
US/Canada 89%
International 11%
Institutional typeInstitutional type
Private 54%
Public 45%
(U.S. only) What type of institution do you work at?(U.S. only) What type of institution do you work at?
Doctoral/research university 32%
Baccalaureate (four-year) college 23%
Master’s college or university 17%
Independent elementary/secondary school 16%
Associate’s (two-year) college 4%
Other 8%
Which best describes your unit (immediate department or division?Which best describes your unit (immediate department or division?
Communications 45%
Alumni Relations 38%
Development (including Annual Fund) 36%
Marketing 26%
Advancement Services 22%
Enrollment/Admissions 4%
Other 10%

Social media “traditions”
• Top goals: engage alumni, strengthen brand image.
• Most commonly used channels: Facebook, Twitter,
LinkedIn, and YouTube. But: year-over-year growth has
ﬂattened, except for LinkedIn.
• Management diversity: social media is centralized at
some institutions & highly dispersed at others. This
diversity of management shows no sign of diminishing.
• Most (83%) departments handle their own social media
activities, usually with input from others.
• Comms/PR depts. most likely responsible for creating,
monitoring compliance with, & enforcing, institutional
SM policies (73%).

What’s new in 2013
• SM is increasingly woven into campaigns,
particularly for alumni engagement and brand/
marketing campaigns.
• The majority of respondents say their institution
uses SM for fundraising & development, often to
update donors on institutional news, solicit annual
fund donations, and thank donors. Facebook
predominates.
• We use SM more commonly to connect with
current students & their parents, prospective
students & their parents, and faculty & staﬀ.

• Facebook still predominates, but the SM landscape
is diversifying, with channels such as Instagram and
Pinterest gaining share of voice.
• Use of Flickr and blogs declined, as did the use of an
institutional website that aggregates social content.
• More institutions are investing in SM as a
communication tool for higher education, as
evidenced by increasing average FTE in this area.
What’s new in 2013

The Changing
Landscape

Audiences
2013
Growth or
shrinkage
Alumni 97% 2%
Current Students 89% 20%
Faculty and Staﬀ 86% 20%
Friends and Supporters 82% 1%
Prospective Students 74% 18%
Donors 72% 2%
Parents of Current Students 67% 16%
Parents of Prospective Students 58% 13%
Media 51% -2%
Employers 42% 2%
High School Guidance Counselors 31% 8%
Government Organizations 25% 2%
Use of social media is growing quickly for outreach to
certain audiences but it’s ﬂat for others

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
YouTube
Blogs
Flickr
Web.edu
Vendor community
Home-built community
Geosocial
Pinterest
Instagram
Google+
Tumblr
-25 0 25 50 75 100
0
0
0
0
-2
7
-1
-9
-13
-13
-2
7
2
0
9
22
27
28
15
20
32
34
38
42
71
75
82
96
% Use % Growth
Channel use/growth

Responding to options
• Many recommend a thoughtful approach about whether to adopt
new social media channels:
“Attempting to be everywhere by jumping on the latest platform without a clear
sense of purpose is wasted eﬀort. This is a case where more is not better.”
• A sense of how the platform connects with your audiences is key:
“Research where your audience is, and survey where they want to see you! If no
one is on Google+, then it is a waste of time to add this to your eﬀorts.”
“Targeting platform to audience—i.e. current students via Facebook, alumni via
LinkedIn and Twitter, integrating strategy and selecting what platforms make
sense and what platforms not to utilize, don't be on all platforms in small ways,
strategically select key platforms and focus resources on those few.”

Responding to options
• Respondents also caution that new tools mean a need for more
dedicated human resources:
“Don't bite oﬀ more than you can chew. If you can't dedicate personnel to manage
the tool properly (e.g. answering @-replies on Twitter) then don't use the tool.”
• However, one quick action may be necessary when a new channel
appears:
“Across four of our platforms—Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest—
someone else owned our name. Our lesson learned is squat on your name on all
platforms. Even if you don't plan to do anything with it, you should own your
name.”
But: “If you reserve it, you'd better be ready for followers. We signed up for [our
name] on Twitter to hold it and suddenly found ourselves with 1200 followers
without marketing our presence at all. We had to get a communication strategy
together, quickly.”

For instance: Instagram
• Early institutional adopters of Instagram report good results:
“Students love our use of Instagram and love when we ‘regram’ their photos.”
“We had a very successful Instagram scavenger hunt as part of homecoming. Our goal
was 10 teams, but we had 22 teams of students and staff upload over 1500 photos to
Instagram and generate a huge buzz on campus. This was the first time we leaned heavily
on Instagram, and found that it was welcomed by the campus community as a new social
platform on which to engage.”
• Careful planning helps to capitalize on a new channel’s inherent buzz:
“When deploying a new platform/tool, think before you act. And pick your launch time
wisely. For example: we launched Instagram with the beginning of the school year. This
was a great time to garner followers as the first years began and people were in the ‘fresh
start’ mindset.”
• Respondents also note advantages in the way Instagram fits in with existing tools:
“Just try it! Last year, we launched our Instagram channel. To date, we have not
promoted it anywhere on our institutional website. It has only been promoted
organically via Twitter integration. However, our follower count has spiked and, more
importantly, it has become one of our most engaging channels with an average
engagement rate of more than 7% per post.”

Website 90%
Email 88%
Social media 79%
Blogging 27%
SEO or search engine marketing 24%
Internal publications 68%
Direct print mail 54%
External publications (not your institution’s pubs) 22%
Outreach and marketing at events 59%
Radio 7%
TV 5%
Other 3%
Promotion & marketing
We use mostly online tools to promote your social
media initiatives, but also many oﬄine ones.
Up 7%
from 2012
Up 4%
from 2012

Social woven into campaigns
2013
2012 41
52
Roughly what percentage of your campaigns*
included social channels?
*campaign deﬁned as “a focused eﬀort to achieve goals using a variety of channels
appropriate to the results sought”

Social media in
fundraising

Social use in fundraising
Does your institution use SM to raise
money?
20%
39%
41%
yes no unsure
Does your institution use SM for
stewardship or donor communication?
18%
47%
35%
yes no unsure

Social use in fundraising
For which types of development and fundraising
activities does your institution use social media?
Keeping donors up to date on institution news 77%
Annual fund solicitations 58%
Thanking donors for their contributions 52%
Keeping donors up to date on campaign or
fundraising news
49%
Inviting donors to donor events 48%
Annual fund follow-up reminders 30%
Referring to or reminding about solicitations
received through non-social channels
25%
Capital campaign solicitations 14%
Other 6%

Most successful channels
Most successful for
fundraising eﬀorts
Most successful for your
unit's goals overall
Facebook 80% 90%
Twitter 34% 49%
YouTube 18% 22%
LinkedIn 15% 31%

Funds raised are small ...
Approximately how much money did your institution
raise through social media channels in FY12?
Up to $10,000 67%
$10,001 – $50,000 21%
$50,001 – $100,000 6%
$100,001 or more 6%

Metrics

Donations are not primary
outcomes for social
How do you measure success for your SM activities?
Outcome Measures
Rated in top two
(quite a bit/
extensively)
Number of active “friends,” "likes" 73%
Volume of participation 57%
Number of “click-throughs” to your website 53%
Event participation 40%
Anecdotal success (or horror) stories 26%
Penetration measure of use among target audience 19%
Volume or proportion of complaints and negative
comments 12%
Donations 15%
Number of applications for admission 10%
Surveys of target audiences 9%

Measuring ROI
“It is diﬃcult to measure ‘return on investment’ from
the use of social media”
2010
2011
2012
2013 38
33
32
34

The benefit of metrics
• Many of those who reported their social media initiatives have
not been successful noted that metrics were lacking.
• By contrast, those who report their social media use has been very
successful also say they have robust tracking mechanisms:
“We’ve created a weekly dashboard of target metrics for all of our social
platforms and our main websites that shows changes and topics that
resonated. This has greatly elevated awareness of our eﬀorts among
university leadership.”
“We don’t think, we know. Calculations and reports are submitted monthly
on SoMe successes and returns, both subjective and objective. We’ve
boosted ticket sales to events, recruited students, and increased awareness
about many diﬀerent things.”

And of multiple metrics
• Respondents note that having a wide array of measures, beyond
number of followers or “likes,” is helpful to seeing the bigger
picture. In particular, achieving a true conversation can be hard
to measure:
“Due to the changing nature of technology and the preferences for its use, goals
for social media often feel like moving targets. What's important in terms of
metrics one day, may not be the case the following day. Ex. One of our department
goals is related to direct engagement with posts. We've seen actual typed
feedback fall away in favor of the one click ‘likes.’ Is direct engagement via typed
feedback becoming a thing of the past, or are there new methods/suggestions
(beyond open ended questions) that truly prompt dialogue?”
“When students start using your page for their own conversations ... you know
you've hit success!”
“In the last two years, social media has been overhauled from stagnant and
sporadic event promotion to planned content planning with plenty of time for
listening. It has really become a conversation—key for alumni relations.”

Staﬃng

Greater time investment
More work hours are being devoted to social media
than last year. But: the change in number of employees
working on social media was ﬂat this year.
At the institution level:
• 34% have social media FTE between 0 and 1, up from 24%
last year.
• The proportion with 0 FTE is down to 5% from 9% last
year.
At the unit level:
• 62% have social media FTE between 0 and 1, up from 45%
last year.
• The proportion with 0 FTE is down to 7% from 17% last
year.

Barriers to success persist
% who see this barrier in their unit “quite a bit” or “extensively 2013 2012
Staﬃng for day-to-day content management 55% 49%
Staﬃng for site development 44% 42%
Lack of relevant human resources in my unit 40% 37%
Slow pace of change 31% 22%
Expertise in how to implement it 25% 23%
Funding 26% 22%
Lack of IT resources 22% 20%
Lack of institutional clarity about who is responsible
for social media initiatives
22% 20%
Concerns about loss of control over content and tone
of postings by others
19% 17%
Lack of commitment by decision-makers 19% 17%

Need for experienced staff
• Many believe that lack of staff devoted to social media hampers their
success and that they could improve with help from ... “Dedicated staff
person(s). Currently this responsibility is an add-on to current staff
positions and responsibilities . . . .”
• There are advantages to concentrating social media duties in fewer
staff people with greater expertise and sense of the big picture:
“I think we could do more to collaborate with other campus departments. In addition,
our small staff . . . does not allow for social media to be an explicit part of someone's job
description. If someone was able to focus on it day in day out, we would be pretty
amazing at it. As it stands now, we all collectively try to post when we can.”
“We do not have in-house expertise to help establish strategic initiatives or to ensure our
messages are consistent and aligned with other University messaging.”
“At our level (a college within a large university) we have been very successful because
we hired someone with solid social media experience who is in charge of all of our social
media outlets. This person has set clear goals and has integrated social media into the
majority of our campaigns.”

Harmonizing, if not centralizing
• While the survey responses did not indicate that social media has become more
centralized in its institutional use, some think that it should be. They advise:
“Centralize efforts instead of individual development units/officers creating their own Facebook
pages and campaigns.”
“Do not allow unlimited numbers of entities on a social media channel (in our case Facebook) to
dilute your brand. External audiences need to be able to find the official institutional page quickly.”
• We also see suggestions of other ways to reduce fragmentation without making
social media usage highly centralized or top-down:
“We would like for more cross promotion throughout the university, from other areas/units than
our own, and also from the central administration. It would also be useful with closer teamwork
with other units in terms of promoting and/or creating relevant content.”
“We are a decentralized university and all 12 schools, as well as most of the 24 departments, all are
managing a social media strategy. We have done an outstanding job of centralizing an otherwise
decentralized voice. Our most effective tool has been using Facebook Groups as a vehicle for
driving messaging from all of the disparate groups, upward to the main university profile
managers. Every day, anyone within the university can post their top stories to the internal group
and have a very strong chance of having their story posted that day, or the next on the universities
main profiles.”

Champion, expertise key to
success
2010
2011
2012
2013
80
72
61
63
52
“A champion is essential to the successful implementation of social
media in our institution”
“Expertise to help our social media eﬀorts is readily available”
2010
2011
2012
2013 34
31
28
26

Campaigns

www.bluevblue.com/
#goetownblue
mstnr.me/HGJb3H

mstnr.me/X53Tzz

FSU “Great Gifts” by info source

Cheryl Slover-Linett and Michael Stoner
#SOCIALMEDIA
AND ADVANCEMENT:
INSIGHTS FROM
THREE YEARS OF DATA
White Paper, 2012: #SocialMedia & Advancement
mstnr.me/TpQPTv

Social Works
mstnr.me/TkXwLu
Sample Chapter
[FSU “Great Give”]
mstnr.me/X53Tzz

Michael Stoner
president, mStoner
Michael.Stoner@mStoner.com
@mstonerblog
mStoner.com/EDUniverse.org
Cheryl Slover-Linett
Consultant
Higher Education Constituent Research
Huron Consulting
csloverlinett-c@huronconsultinggroup.com
+1 505.820.7256
Contact

Huron Education Survey Documents Increasing Use of Social Media in Higher Education

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