You’re smart. (You do work in higher ed, after all.) You know your stuff. You have ideas. New ideas. Good ideas. And yet—your clients (internal or external) don’t want your ideas. Or your style guide. They know what they want: the same thing they’ve been doing for the last ten years. Why won’t they just listen to you? The answer is finding ways to turn to client relationships into real collaborations. When we move from a conformance mindset to a collaboration mindset, we can find ourselves in the position to do our best work—work our clients will love. What you’ll learn: • How to move from a conformance to a collaboration mindset. • Using workshop techniques (like job stories, pair writing, mad libs, and more) in meeting settings. • How to uncover the real problems your clients are facing, and solve them—together.

1. “If they would just listen to us...”
Turning Internal Client Relationships into Collaborations
Mike Powers • #heweb18 • #mpd8

2. Mike Powers
Executive Director of Marketing and Communications
Indiana University of Pennsylvania

3. Indiana, where?!

4. You are here
I live here

5. Here
Not here

6. Thanks,
Stephen App!

7. Clients?

8. THE PHONE CALL
A Play in One Act
HIGH ED WEB

9. 8:30 a.m. A busy university communications office.
A Web Person wearing headphones works at a computer.
The phone rings.
Web Person finds the phone under a pile of papers and
answers it.

10. I have sent you a picture
of two of my favorite
students under a tree.
Please place this image on
my department’s home
page forthwith.

11. Actually, we’ve designed that
page to show off your great
placement rate. That’s why
we’ve got a recent alumna
working at a Fortune 500
company in the hero image.

12. This new image is pretty generic, though. It doesn’t
show off what’s special about your department.
But she was a terrible student! These are good
students. Put them on the home page please.
These are NOT generic students! One of them won
a Fulbright!

13. I didn’t say the students were generic, it’s just that
your messag—
I ASKED YOU TO PUT IT ON THE HOME PAGE. I ALREADY
TOLD THEM THEY’D BE ON THE HOME PAGE. WHY CAN’T
YOU JUST HANDLE A SIMPLE REQUEST?

14. What just happened?

15. Just who do we think we are, anyway?

16. Who the faculty think we are
Who we think we are
Who the staff think we are
Who we really are

17. Who should we be?

18. Counselors?

19. Coaches?

20. Partners?

21. Collaborators

22. Collaboration before conformance

23. Collaboration
does not mean
“no conflict”

24. Why we fight
Pressure on us
• Show results
• Manage 1,000s of pages
• SEO, accessibility, content, etc.
• Help find students, donations,
etc.
Pressure on them
• Teach
• Research
• Get tenure
• Attract students to program

25. Your role: provide the structure
to make conflict productive

26. Guidelines for collaboration
1. Know who the final decision maker is
2. Find the real problem
3. Manage conflict
4. Be authentic
5. Embrace the theater

28. Know who the final decision maker is
Guideline 1
(then get them to a meeting)

29. “Don’t call it a meeting. Sometimes, a word like
workshop does the job, but it is overused and
can mean different things to different people…
you call it a decision-making session.”

30. TECHNIQUE
Set project goals (together)

31. Setting project goals together
1. Based on what you know, try writing down what you think their goals are
2. Print out copies with a big DRAFT watermark on them
3. At the meeting: present your draft goals, then listen and revise
4. Follow up with the now FINAL goals

32. Possible outcomes
You got the goals
exactly right
You were
partially correct
Abject failure
to predict
client’s goals
Yay, you! (But this
never happens.
Are you sure you
got them right?)
Cool. You’ve
learned something
and the client
learned something.
Rough. But it’s
better to know
this now rather
than later.

33. Find the real problem
Guideline 2

34. Department of
Various Things

35. i

36. Depar tment of Various Things

37. Gill Sans Ultra Bold
Gill Sans Light

38. Translating asks
What they say What’s behind it
“It needs to work for Gen Z” Maybe my users aren’t just like me.
“It needs to be a video. Kids don’t
read.”
Let’s choose formats based on user
preferences and needs.
“I just got a big grant and I need a
website.”
I’d like to help promote the university’s
research mision.

39. Nobody wants a website

40. TECHNIQUE
Co-design a top-task survey

41. What’s a top-task survey?
• Create a list of 40–50 tasks that users might do on your site
• Intercept users to your site
• Have them pick their top three tasks from the list
• Make sure your site design optimizes for those tasks

42. Co-designing a top task survey
• Brainstorm tasks with client.
• Run the survey
• Reconvene to share results

43. Top Tasks: A How-to Guide
Gerry McGovern

44. Manage conflict
Guideline 3

45. TECHNIQUE
User stories and job stories

46. User Story
• As a [person in a particular role]
• I want to [perform an action or find
something out]
• So that [I can achieve my goal
of …]
• Acceptance criterion: [when work on
this user story is done.]
• When [there’s a particular situation]
• I want to [perform an action or find
something out]
• So that [I can achieve my goal of
…]
• Acceptance criterion: [when work on this
job story is done.]
Job Story

47. Sample Job Story
• When I’m researching MBA programs
• I want to know how it will impact my life—location, commute time,
class formats—
• So that I can know if I can do this program successfully.
• Acceptance Criterion: This story is done when I know what the
schedule is, where I’ll take classes, and how much out-of-class work I’ll
need to do.

49. Co-authoring user or job stories
• Research your users
• Use a meeting room with a screen. Project a Word doc with the “As a,” “I want
to,” “So that” prompts.
• Work through tasks together.
• Bring in your research as needed to make sure stories are grounded in reality

50. Content Design
Sarah Richards

51. TECHNIQUE
Content strategy mad libs

52. Thing we’re going to make helps organization
accomplish business goal and business goal by
providing descriptive word or phrase and
descriptive word or phrase content that makes
audience feel emotion or adjective or emotion or
adjective so that they can user task or user task.

53. Our website helps the Department of Miscellanea
accomplish the recruitment of high-achieving and
out-of-state students by providing descriptive word
or phrase and descriptive word or phrase content
that makes out-of-state students feel confident or
inspired so that they can choose a college that
meets their needs or budget.

54. Content strategy mad libs
• Reproduce a mad libs handout
• Each person in the meeting fills out on their own
• Discuss
• Get to a final version

55. Content strategy mad libs
• Reproduce a mad libs handout
• Each person in the meeting fills out on their own
• Discuss
• Get to a final version

56. “Content Mad Libs”
Sara Wachter-Boettcher
http://www.content-workshops.com/toolbox/
2015/3/content-mad-libs

57. The Content Strategy Toolkit
Meghan Casey

58. Be authentic
Guideline 4

60. Take what your collaborators say seriously

61. TECHNIQUE
Pair writing

62. What’s pair writing?
• Choose a small piece of content to work on
• Set a time limit (one hour)
• One person types, the other asks questions
• Then switch roles frequently so you each write about half of the time
• When time’s up, set a next step

63. Pair writing can save time

64. Pair writing helps with ownership issues

65. “Use pair writing to
collaborate with subject
matter experts”
Jonathan Kahn
gathercontent.com/blog/use-pair-writing-to-
collaborate-with-subject-matter-experts

66. Embrace the theater
Guideline 5

68. TECHNIQUE
BrandSort

70. How it works
• Participants sort adjectives into
1. Who we are
2. Who we aren’t
3. Who we’d like to be
• Then group terms from the first two
groups to come up with key brand
terms

71. BrandSort
Margot Bloomstein
cards.appropriateinc.com

72. Content Strategy at Work
Margot Bloomstein

73. TECHNIQUE
Co-operative competitive analysis

74. —Your Dean
“I was looking at the site for University of Upper
Miscellanea. I like their site better than ours.
Make our site just like theirs.”

75. Make your competitive analysis cooperative
Job story 1 Job story 2 Brand attribute 1
School 1
School 2
School 3

76. How to do it
• Do this as a mini-workshop with your internal clients
• Invite them to bring 2 or 3 sites they like
• Have the client demonstrate the site on the screen
• Work together to fill in the matrix

77. THE PHONE CALL
A Play in One Act
HIGH ED WEB
Conclusion: Rewriting the script

79. Start now

80. Think of 3 people on your campus who
might make that phone call

81. Make a call, send an email, have lunch

82. Questions?
Turning Internal Client Relationships into Collaborations
Mike Powers • @mjpowers • #heweb18 • #mpd8

83. Photo credits
Slide 1 & 81: Toms Baugis,
https://flic.kr/p/9DPH1i
Slide 8: Matt Reinbold,
https://flic.kr/p/2zs5Ji
Slide 9: Image Library,
https://flic.kr/p/A8VXZY
Slide 16: http://bit.ly/2OccwcZ;
http://bit.ly/2SswaVn; Shutterstock
Slide 24: bark, https://flic.kr/p/8UuR2R
Slide 27: Fried & Hansson, Rework,
“Meetings Are Toxic”
Slide 58: Alan Cleaver,
https://flic.kr/p/a2niNr
Slide 61: isolationism,
https://flic.kr/p/7DMb4J