The digital team in Public Affairs and Marketing has been hard at work over the past six months to improve several digital resources for our campus community and prospective students. Here’s an update on some of the improvements we’ve made and projects we continue to make progress on:
- Dynamic Labels on maps.hope.edu — If you’re an active maps.hope.edu user, you may have noticed new labels on our campus map locations. These new labels pull data directly from Open Street Maps, giving our team increased flexibility to add, remove and edit location labels. As you zoom in and out of our map, you’ll notice that labels appear and disappear depending on your zoom setting. In addition, we now have the ability to add labels to offices and services located inside buildings across campus, providing greater accessibility for our campus community.
- Virtual Tours and 360 Photography — We recently updated the campus virtual tour with updated 360° photographs. We also added 360° photographs to most of our residential hall directory pages giving prospective students the opportunity to virtually tour a res hall room. See the Dykstra example. In addition, we’re wrapping up creating fully immersive tours of several spaces on campus (a near VR experience). These spaces include the new Alumni/Boerigter Center/CFL space in the lower level of DeWitt, the Heeringa Athletic Facility, the Bultman Student Center, and Haworth Hotel. Watch for those tours to become available on our website later this fall.
- User Personalization — We are now piloting the delivery of personalized content on our website, thanks to a new tool offered by our CMS provider, Modern Campus. The new feature allows us to display variable web content based on a visitor’s geo-location, the previous page they visited, and the number of times they have visited the site. To start, the Admissions staff web page now displays Admissions reps based on the state a user is visiting from when there is a specific rep assigned to that state. For example, website visitors in Colorado will see Carrie Olesh appear at the top of the staff page because she is our rep assigned to Colorado. We are excited to see how this new feature enhances a visitor’s experience with our website and how it aids our Admissions team’s engagement with prospective students.
- Move to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) — The move from Universal Analytics to GA4 was a required move by Google for all of its analytics users worldwide to change the way we collect data on our website. While this behind-the-scenes update does not affect most of our website users or managers, the mandatory change was a big undertaking that required our team to engage with third-party analytics experts in order to meet the July 1, 2023 deadline. According to Google, the new GA4 environment will allow us to be more focused on user engagement, and provide greater privacy controls and cookieless measurement. We are still learning to navigate this new data-collecting process, so your grace is appreciated as we navigate the new GA4 environment.
- PAM Website — The Public Affairs and Marketing website received a facelift this summer that we hope will enhance your service experience with our department. The new site was built with our campus partners in mind to provide easier and more intuitive access for service and project requests. Check out our new event promotion checklist to guide the marketing of your next event or use our project request form to work with us on an upcoming project.
- Twitter X — Over the Summer, Twitter rebranded itself as “X.” While the domain is still Twitter.com, our team recently updated our social media directory and all visual referrals to Twitter.com with the new X logo.
- TikTok — As social media continues to evolve, so too does our strategy to engage current and prospective students. Over the past year, we’ve seen a sizeable drop in engagement on some of the older platforms like Twitter, with increased popularity for video-forward platforms TikTok and Instagram. Check us out on TikTok.
- We went viral! Speaking of TikTok, our video “Dads on Move-in Day” went viral in September with nearly 2 million views!
Looking for help with your digital marketing? Please feel free to contact us at web@hope.edu or social@hope.edu.