I’m a week or so into building our new department here at Keene State, which I am proposing we call Online Communications. I actually like some of the more trendy names, but sometimes it’s good to use the idiom common in the field. Makes a lot of things simpler.

Now to the hard part — defining what we do.

I think the key here is it’s not just about technology. We want to be involved primarily in designing online approaches to communication — the construction of those approaches is something we may or may not do — the implementation might be handled by us, or by others at the college, by a third party vendor, or most usually by some combination of those three options.

So in that somewhat annoying 80s parlance it’s a “solutions” business.

Which leads to the question — why seperate online communications from traditional communications at all?

I think the answer to that is that in five to ten years these things won’t be separated out. There’ll be a person who manages community — both online and offline. There’ll be a communications director who came up through the ranks both blogging and pushing stories to TV News. Your fundraiser will talk about recent advances in distributed online fundraising with the ease they talk about the mechanics of capital campaigns.

But we’re not there yet. There are people with a wealth of experience in traditional media and fundraising who have very little idea how online media works.

In fact, a number of things in online media are counterintuitive to traditional media types. Radical transparency. Community contributed content. Conversational talk with bylines.

I’ll give just one example from the political world. And I’ll make it a small example. Not earth-shattering, but just enough to show what I mean.

Last year, Tim Tagaris, Internet Director for the Chris Dodd campaign, revolutionized the way political fundraising emails were sent out.

How? Political fundraising emails were highly formatted affairs — they had graphics, big header, carefully crafted prose. They looked like marketing web pages. They talked like marketing pages, in that conversational but not conversational way:

I’m not saying anything about Hillary in particular here, it’s just an example — this is how all campaign fundraisers looked.

And to be fair, these work, and they’ll continue to work. There’s a place for the well-polished semi-conversational fundraising email that isn’t going away anytime soon. You’d be crazy not to base the majority of your email campaign on solicitations such as these.

But solicitations like these were really the *only* thing in the mix until last year.

Then Tim changed things, and added a new sort of email to the mix. Here’s what I got September of last year from Team Dodd:

from: Chris Dodd <Chris_Dodd@chrisdodd.com>
reply-to: Chris_Dodd@chrisdodd.com
date: Sep 27, 2007 9:43 AM
subject: Real quick

Hey,

I only have a few seconds on my way back to Washington from last night’s debate.

The fundraising quarter is wrapping up and we’re just short of hitting our goal. Will you chip in $23 and put us over the top? You can contribute here:

http://www.chrisdodd.com/deadline

I’ll be in touch soon.

Chris

It didn’t stop there. Here’s what Tim encouraged Chris Dodd to send out on November first last year:

from: Chris Dodd <chris_dodd@chrisdodd.com>
reply-to: chris_dodd@chrisdodd.com,
date: Nov 1, 2007 11:22 AM
subject: Fw: Re: Update?

Dear Friend —

I only have a few moments on my way back up to New Hampshire.

I asked my Campaign Manager for an update on what we accomplished online during the month of October, and I was so pleased with her response I wanted to make sure you saw the email chain.

She tells me that in addition to a spike in traffic and mentions on progressive blogs, we could beat John Edwards October online fundraising goal if I emailed a few people and asked them to help get us there.

So, it might be one day removed from October, but if you chipped in $27 right now we can pass another campaign in this important indicator of support.

You can contribute here:

http://www.chrisdodd.com/contributions

I’ll be in touch,

Chris

—–Original Message—–
From: Tim Tagaris [mailto:ttagaris@chrisdodd.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 10:18 PM
To: scohen@chrisdodd.com
Subject: Re: Update?

Hey Sheryl,

Here’s your update:

For the month of October, we raised right around $400,000 on the internet alone.

By contrast, Biden set a goal of raising $500,000 online by the middle of November. He is halfway there, having raised $246,270 as of Tuesday morning.

Even more impressively, Edwards set a goal of raising $500,000 online in the month of October. For all the hype their internet team and Joe Trippi gets, we finished the month nipping at their heels.

Frankly, we’ve been so successful online over the past month because of the Senator’s leadership in the Senate.

People really responded favorably to his stand on preventing “retroactive immunity” for telecommunications companies that helped the Bush Administration spy on Americans.

They appreciate his Iran vote, consistent leadership on Iraq and really are beginning to recognize that when he takes a position on an issue, the rest of the candidates seem to follow his lead.

We are really on the verge of something special online — a tipping point, almost:

* Our web-traffic rankings have shot past Biden and Richardson.

* We have seen an almost universal surge of support in online polls. From 21% at Daily Kos, to winning the PA Dems online vote after Tuesday’s debate.

* References to his leadership on blogs across the country have spiked in the month of October, and I only see that number rising between now and the Caucus.

So … there is a lot of encouraging information coming out of the tubes. We’re gonna do everything we can to keep growing — something that is made easy as he continues to lead on the issues important in this race.

Tim

—–Original Message—–
From: Sheryl Cohen [mailto:scohen@chrisdodd.com]
Sent: Wednesday, October 31, 2007 7:18 PM
To: ttagaris@chrisdodd.com
Subject: Update?

Hey Tim,

The Senator is looking for an update report of how we did on-line in October. He knows we did well, but he’s getting a lot of questions about it on the road from reporters and supporters. Please send me some additional information/data for him — thanks much.

Sheryl

OK — does that seem gimmicky? Maybe. It doesn’t to me. But if it does to you, it’s because it’s so obvious when you see it that you can imagine it being easily copied.

The weird thing is that before Tim the idea of a candidate sending a plain text conversational email, especially a FW: RE: subject type — it just wasn’t done.

I actually know Tim, and I can guarantee you that he had an honest inspiration — why not treat email like, well, email? I’m not going to guarantee that a couple rough corners in the forwarded emails were not smoothed over.

It is, after all, politics.

But that Web 2.0 desire to deinstitutionalize communication, and make it more about people — to show some of the rough edges, to tie trust to people over brand — that was a breakthrough. And the minute the other campaigns saw it they recognized it. They all began adding plain text emails to their mix, directly from the people involved.

Tim’s not a marketer. At least not by traditional standards.

He’s, for lack of a better word, an online guy. His background is as a blogger and a video editor. Other stuff.

So why did the idea of sending a plain text forwarded message occur to him, and not the marketing folks?

I’m not sure. But I think it’s because a lot of traditional marketing teaches you to do exactly the opposite of what works on the web — or, as in this case, that traditional background prevents you from adding important tools to your online mix (after all, you are still going to send the traditional email appeals — you just need to broaden your approach). And until that changes, we’ll need the specialized online communications teams.

So starting today I’m the new Interim Director of Technology, College Advancement, Keene State College. I was promoted Friday afternoon to the new position.

I have mixed feelings about this. I was hoping my next major career move would be back into net-enabled learning. It’s been almost five years since I left Cognitive Arts, and I have spent much of that time figuring out how I would get back to my passion. I found the recent 20 percent appointment I had with Academic Affairs to assist in the creation of their new Learning and Teaching Technology Plan invigorating, and was hoping to move more in that direction.

This promotion will, temporarily at least, cut into the amount of time I can spend working on net-enabled learning.

Additionally, being webmaster allowed me enough free time that I was able to pursue political blogging. And I had a good deal of success. Blue Hampshire received repeated prominent coverage in the Washington Post, New York Times, and the Boston Globe. The Hill scoured our pages daily, and we even got astroturfed by Hillary’s staff. We received feature coverage in Campaigns & Elections magazine and The Wall Street Journal. Laura went on CNN, Dean on Fox, and I did commentary for WCBS in NYC. Our features went even further — I wrote front page pieces for Huffington Post and syndicated pieces for Newsweek.com. Not bad for a part-time evening and weekend effort.

Oh, and there was this very cool statement:

“Blue Hampshire…has quickly become one of the most influential blogs in the nation.”
– Markos Moulitsas, Daily Kos.

But my political blogging will probably go on hiatus for some time as well, given the immensity of the initial challenges the Director position presents (I’ll probably do a post a week, but that’s it).

All and all, though, I’m excited by the new position though.

Why?

Because the challenges are not wholly divorced from these other pursuits. What is “Advancement Technology” after all?

It’s Online Outreach.

It’s E-Organizing.

It’s plugging into the the Media Machine and learning how to move a story into national media.

It’s Grassroots.

It’s Fundraising.

It’s Issue Advocacy.

It’s Public Relations 2.0.

In short, having been on the cutting edge of what is essentially Political Advancement, I find myself in a unique position to try to bring Keene State College toward the state-of-the-art in Institutional Advancement. Some methods are different, but the ultimate goals are the same: build a strong supportive community, raise money, and increase the reputation of the institution. [It’s a little different in that you can’t raise Keene State’s reputation by going negative on Plymouth State — but I never claimed a perfect analogue 😉 ].

In short, the parts of the Director job that are new are closely related to what I have been doing as a side pursuit. And I’m excited by the possibilities there.

In any case, for the next year or so, this blog may shift off of Academic Technology to Advancement issues of public relations and fundraising. We’ll still have much of the same focus on using new decentralized community-based approaches to approach these issues, and I hope y’all hang around. It’s gonna be a wild ride.