Monday, 09/16/19    //     2:30pm - 3:00pm     //     Room 219 - Olympus 

Note Taker: Haley Johnson

Presenting: Ben Leimbach

About This Meeting

The annual strategy meetings are an effort to get all the teams and any interested CECE staff updated on our program and partner units. Our goal is to communicate the importance of work being done and how everyone else can support those efforts. For the strategy meetings, unit leads are expected to present on their units vision, goals, and strategy.

The Marketing Survey

Marketing recently sent out a survey to all CE staff. Thanks to everyone who participated. It provides a lot of valuable insights to the marketing team about how they're performing in terms of customer service.

Ben measured responses across four domains: productivity, accountability, customer service, and transparency. Customer service was the strongest domain and transparency had the most room for improvement. 

If you'd like to see the survey results, those are available here. You will be prompted to enter an access code (540) and then you'll be able to see the report.

Ben is really using these survey results to inform the marketing strategy moving forward. The entire marketing team participated in a retreat where they went over all the feedback and discussed how they could do a better job of supporting our programs here in CE. 

The survey suggested a few areas of improvement:

1. There's a sense that marketing isn't fully utilizing some of the tools that they have access to. Programs would like marketing to be well versed in these tools and be able to pitch better utilization to the programs. 
2. It has become apparent that many programs are struggling with marketing missing their deadlines. So commitment to deadlines is going to be a big deal moving forward. 
3. We're also seeing that programs would like for marketing to have a more proactive role in helping develop strategy and marketing materials. How can marketing help the programs reach their goals without asking for such a level of specificity from marketing materials that makes the programs feel like they're doing all the creation work themselves? We'll be looking to have marketing lead these strategy conversations and really be on the front so that programs don't have to poke and prod us.

Marketing Action Plan (Annual Strategy)

Next 3 Months - Commitment to Deadlines & Project Management

• Ben has restructured meetings with his staff to focus on priorities and new requests. This way, Ben can see what Riley, Katie, Tony, and Andrew and are working on currently and see if that fits into the larger marketing and CE goals and priorities or if they need to be re-tasked. 
• Marketing has migrated their ticket/request system from Teamwork and into Jira. They're now in the same help center environment that IS&T is.
  • This helps because now CE staff only have to be familiar with the one system to see all of their various requests throughout CE.
  • We also already have a lot of experts in the IS&T team when it comes to Jira, so they can help ensure a smoother transition.
  • Marketing is officially not taking any more requests via Teamwork. To submit a request, please log in to the help center. (There is also a link to the help center on the KB Home page - UCL Knowledge Base)
  • Categories available under the marketing service desk include:
    • General help (if your need doesn't fit into any of the other categories)
    • Schedule a Meeting
    • Email Blast
    • Design (Digital & Print) Request
    • Social Media/Digital Paid Ad Request
    • Unpaid Social Post
    • Web Update/Edit for Existing Page - New Page Request
    • Delete Web Page
    • Promotional Merchandise Request
    • Tabling Support
    • Event
    • Video

Next 6 Months - Share Ideas, Innovation, & Best Practices

• Marketing will begin hosting a monthly training series modeled after the data team's trainings.
  • Topics may include Emma, Hotjar, Jira, Analytics, Copy (by special guest Matt George), social media, design and branding principles, and conference summaries.
  • Conference summaries will specifically allow you to see the value that the marketing team is getting out of the conferences they're able to attend and how that value directly applies to the work they're able to do for you. 
  • This will provide the opportunity for marketing to let teams know what's available to them (in terms of tools) and introduce new ideas. 
• Marketing will also begin to utilize the Knowledge Base more heavily to share general information, best practices, and marketing resources.

Next 9 Months - Putting Marketing's Work in Context of Your Goals

• Marketing will use the annual program/marketing meetings to create a strategic marketing plan. This creates a specific outcome to these meetings.
• They will connect the marketing plan to the budget to generate measurable goals.
  • You'll be able to see what the marketing budget is for your unit, where that money is going, and what you can expect to get out of the money you've spent.
  • The goal here is to make what marketing spends their money on less opaque.
  • With goals and budget in place, determine ROI metrics.
• Continue to reference this annual plan throughout the year in regular meetings. Determine deliverables and report on spending.
  • Regular check-ins during meetings will go over what we're seeing as results, what's coming up next, and address the question of whether or not we need to pivot strategy based no how things are going.
  • Deploy creative brief for both overall campaigns and specific deliverables.

Questions & Answers

• Question: are projects in progress still in Teamwork or have those already been moved over to Jira?
  • Answer: Existing projects have not been moved over yet, but we'll be working on that in the next couple weeks. And moving forward, all new stuff will be entered into Jira.
• Question: do we need to be added to a group or anything to use the help desk?
  • Answer: Most CE staff should already be in the system. You definitely are if you've submitted tasks to IS&T previously. That being said, if you're having difficulty logging in or don't appear to have an account, please contact IS&T and they'll help get that set up for you.
• Question: Once we've submitted a request, we can go in and view those requests? How?
  • Answer: Log in to the help center and then click on requests in the upper right-hand corner to see all requests that you've submitted. IS&T has offered training session on the help center before and will again in the future, so please consider attending one of those to better familiarize yourself with the system. 
  • Note: Marketing uses 'waiting for support' to mean that you are waiting on marketing to respond to your ticket and 'waiting for customer' to mean that marketing is waiting on a response from you to move forward. 
• Question: Are there any service level agreements in place for marketing?
  • Answer: not really. Design requires up to three days notice. Web changes will also require some notice. However, if you have an urgent need, feel free to talk to anyone in the marketing team.