Communicating with multiple stakeholders: building effective university Web sites.

Schneider, Gary P. ; Bruton, Carol M.

ABSTRACT

Most organizations use their Web sites to communicate in some way with their stakeholders. For-profit companies use their Web sites to sell products and services, not-for-profit organizations use their Web sites to communicate with their constituencies and supporters. University Web sites have a more complex communications role. These sites must convey information to a broad range of constituencies, each of which has significantly different information needs. Further, universities have been slow to recognize the need for a comprehensive high-level strategy for managing the design and implementation of their Web sites. This paper offers an analysis of the issues universities face in designing and implementing their Web sites and presents some solutions to problems that universities face in these undertakings.

INTRODUCTION

The World Wide Web (Web) has rapidly become one of the most widely used communications media in the history of the world. The number of Web sites exceeds 45 million (Netcraft, 2003) and the number of Web pages is well over five billion (Bergman, 2000; .OCLC, 2003). These numbers are increasing at an increasing rate each year (McCollum, 1997; Netcraft, 2003).

The purposes and scope of Web sites have increased greatly, but few businesses today manage them well (Ramsey, 2000). The tools that companies have developed over the years to manage software development projects are designed to help those companies meet the needs of their current customers and operate more effectively within existing value chains (Schwalbe, 2001), not to create new ways of communicating via the Web.

Today, businesses use their Web sites for everything from selling products and services to ordering materials and supplies to communicating with employees, customers, and vendors (Ruud and Deutz, 1999). Other organizations use their Web sites for a variety of communication and marketing functions with their constituencies (Schneider, 2003). Universities are unusual because they have a larger number of distinct constituencies than other organizations. In addition, each of a university's constituencies has differing information needs. These differing needs mean that university Web site users each arrive at the site with a different set of expectations.

This paper offers an analysis of the issues universities face in designing and implementing their Web sites to meet those varied user expectations and presents some solutions to the problems that universities face in meeting the communication and marketing challenges of this new medium.

BUILDING USEFUL AND EFFECTIVE WEB SITES

The task of building a good Web site is not easy. Many companies have found it difficult to develop new information systems and Web sites that work with those systems to create new markets or reconfigure their supply chains (Tattum, 2000). In the past, companies that have had success in exploring new ways of working with their customers and suppliers by reconfiguring supply chains have had the luxury of time, years in many cases, to complete those reconfigurations (Keil, Cule, Lyytinen, and Schmidt, 1998; McConnell, 1996). The user demands of today do not allow any organization that kind of time to build an effective Web site.

Designing useful and effective Web sites is not easy for any entity (Nielsen and Tahir, 2001). It becomes especially difficult for organizations that need to meet many different site visitor expectations (Nielsen, 2000). Universities have been widely criticized for not understanding the needs of student Web site visitors (Agosto, 2002; Giving the Web the New College Try, 2000; Raisman, 2000), for failing to include development and fund raising opportunities on their Web sites (Bjorhovde and Dietlin, 1999; Rolnick, 1998), and for missing important points in Web site architecture (Chen and Macredie, 2002; Middleton and McConnell, 1999). Some critics have even criticized universities for simply having "bad Web sites" (DeSimone and McRae, 2002; Raisman, 2003).

UNIVERSITY WEB SITES

In the early days of the Web, many universities launched a simple Web site that was designed by a creative information systems employee or student intern. Some university Web sites were even the results of class projects. As such, these Web sites were often a demonstration of the students' use of the latest technologies rather than an effective communications device on which the university could rely. As more universities realized the marketing potential of the Web, they began to hire professional Web development firms to build their sites (McCollum, 1999). Larger schools began to build their own staffs of Web designers (University of Georgia, 1999). Unfortunately, hiring Web development firms or creating an internal staff of Web designers each cost a lot of money and, are seldom found in university budgets as continuing line items.

Despite these attempts to professionalize the development of Web sites at universities, most schools still had inadequate Web sites (McCollum, 1999; Mechitov, Moshkovich, Underwood, and Taylor, 2001). Many schools created their Web design team within their information systems departments, reflecting a common misunderstanding that Web design was a technical process rather than a communications process. This misunderstanding was prevalent early in the Web's history, but most for-profit organizations changed their approaches long before universities did. As company Web sites became important engines for creating sales and reducing costs, for-profit organizations moved the responsibility for Web design and operations out of information technology departments and into operating departments.

At universities, a similar shift took place, but it occurred much later and was not as widespread. Many schools still have not moved the responsibility of Web site design and operations out of their information technology departments. Even worse, some schools have not recognized that the Web requires a strategic response and have allowed each department and academic unit to create their own Web presences. This Balkanization of the Web communications effort has led to uncoordinated, poorly performing Web sites for many schools.

MULTIPLE STAKEHOLDERS

A university Web site must meet the needs of a diverse collection of stakeholders who might visit the Web site for a variety of reasons. Internal university users of a campus Web site might include students, faculty, and administrative staff. However, McCollum (1999) reports that between 60 and 70 percent of the Web page accesses on university sites come from outside their campuses. Thus, students, faculty members, and administrative staff members together make up fewer than half of a university site's visitors.

The largest single group of off-campus Web site users are prospective students. A recent study found that a school's Web site was the third most important sources of information for prospective students (Educause Review, 2000). As the level of computer use by young people increases, that ranking will only increase (Raisman, 2000). Also, the use of university Web sites by parents of prospective students is increasing, too (Luna, 2002). One innovative example of a university Web site element directed at parents of prospective students is the portion of San Diego State University's (SDSU) Web site that includes admissions information in Spanish (Sanchez, 2002). A significant number of SDSU's potential applicants have parents who are not fluent in English. Despite the importance of this stakeholder group to universities, many schools do not use their Web sites to communicate to that group effectively. For example, Raisman (2003) found that 86 percent of the university Web sites he surveyed did not provide any e-mail addresses or other contact information for admissions staff members.

Another important stakeholder group for undergraduate programs includes the parents of current students. The parents of current students are interested in a much different information set than their children. Schools that have large graduate and professional programs have yet another slightly different group of stakeholders; the spouses and children of current graduate students.

An important constituency for any university is its donor pool. Once again, this stakeholder group can be divided into alumni, area businesses, and other friends of the university. Each of these subgroups has somewhat different interests and can be best served by a separate set of information in the university Web site.

In addition to being potential donors, members of the local business community can be important sources of jobs for graduates of the university and for internships. Members of the business community are also prime candidates for research funding and joint research projects in many cases. These information needs can be targeted with a specific section of the Web site. Prospective employees of the university are also an important external constituency.

To summarize, the main categories of stakeholders who might visit a university Web site to obtain information or interact with the school in some way include: current students, current faculty, current administrative staff, prospective students, prospective employees (faculty and administrative staff), parents (and other family members) of current students, parents of prospective students, alumni, friends of the university, and the local business community. In certain cases, other stakeholders might be present and very important. For example, a school with a religious affiliation might want to address church, denomination, or religious order constituencies on its Web site.

We have identified some overall quality issues and some specific stakeholder issues that a university Web site must address to be truly effective. In the next two sections, we outline some strategies and solutions that schools might use to deal with these issues.

STRATEGIES AND SOLUTIONS FOR OVERALL QUALITY ISSUES

Quality assurance is extremely important for a university site. Spelling, grammar, or factual errors cannot be tolerated on a university Web site. Few persons would send their children to an institution of higher learning that signals its lack of quality in this basic way. More easily overlooked are the problems presented by broken links or pages that do not work in a particular browser. Quality assurance should be centralized to ensure that a high level of consistency and quality is maintained in the site. Every Web page should be cleared by a quality assurance person (or department) before it is added to the school's site. Link checking programs should be run at least once each week to ensure that any links on the site are working. If they are not, a stub page should be created that explains why the link does not lead to a currently active page.

Timeliness and currency of information included in the Web site is very important. The university should establish a policy for the rotation of dated material and for the deletion of historical information that is no longer timely or relevant. Search engines will index most of the pages on the school's Web site and a prospective student could easily find herself directed by a search engine to an announcement of an "upcoming" campus social event that occurred three years ago.

The enforcement of a consistent look and feel is a key element in the communication of an image of quality. Thus, the basic format of all Web pages should be specified and monitored by a central authority. One good way to do this is to provide templates of the approved basic page layouts to all academic units and university departments that will be developing content for the Web site.

Other than specifying technologies and helping with things such as the Web page templates, the Chief Information Officer and the information systems departments of the university should not be a major part of the Web site policy setting and strategy development effort. These activities should be driven by the mission and goals of the university and should be undertaken at the highest levels of university administration with contributions by marketing, development, alumni relations, enrollment management, and other relevant university administrative departments and academic units.

Many members of the academic community will bristle at the enforcement of uniform standards for Web pages. The tradition of academic freedom often seeps into the dialogue that occurs at universities about administrative actions that have little to do with academic freedom. Web page rules are often one example of this. A good way to handle the issue if it arises is to allow faculty members to place Web pages in sections of the Web site that are protected by a login requirement and a password. This is easy to implement and prevents non-conforming Web pages from being perceived as part of the intentional public image that the university is communicating to its external stakeholders.

A good search engine for the site is extremely important and fairly hard to create. The intelligent indexing of the pages and content on the site is important, but can be difficult to do well (Nielsen, 2000). Most good search engine tools cost money and they all take time to install and configure properly. Very few schools have devoted the time and money to the creation of effective search engines and other site navigation tools, such as site maps and breadcrumb headers.

Like it or not, it is time for universities to bite the bullet and take Web site design and implementation seriously. Major corporations have realized that the only way to maintain a respectable Web presence that generates sales and reduces operating costs is to spend some money. A typical commercial Web site for a company with the revenues and employee headcount of a medium-sized university would cost between $100,000 and $2 million to create and between $50,000 and $1 million annually to maintain (Barsh, Kramer, Maue, and Zuckerman, 2001; Randall, 1999; Rogers, 1999; Schneider, 2003).

STRATEGIES AND SOLUTIONS FOR SPECIFIC STAKEHOLDER ISSUES

The most important thing that a university can do is to identify each category of stakeholders that are essential to its mission and goals. Once those categories have been identified, the Web site can be designed around the needs of those stakeholders. A common mistake made by many universities is to model the Web site after the internal organizational structure of the institution. The home page has links to each school or college and to various administrative departments.

Although such a design might be helpful for internal constituencies (and there is some evidence that it is not even particularly helpful for them), it is completely useless for external constituencies. A prospective student visiting the Web site who is looking for a class in computer graphics would have no idea where to begin searching a site that is organized by internal function. The computer graphics class could be taught in the college of arts and sciences, in the business school, in a college of art and design, or in the department of extended studies. Thus, the most important element of a university Web site is to have a branching home page.

Visitors arriving at a site's home page should see a series of links that direct them to the part of the Web site that has been designed for them. The home page should have a link for each major category of stakeholder. Any critical action that a visitor is likely to want to take on the site should be no more than three clicks from that home page. For example, a donor should be able to charge a gift to her credit card, a student should be able to enroll in a course, and a corporate recruiter should be able to schedule an interview with a graduating student with no more than three clicks from the home page.

Accomplishing this design feat requires that the Web designers put themselves in the shoes of the site visitors. In turn, this requires the design team to have identified each category of stakeholders and learned about their needs before beginning the design of the Web site (much less its implementation).

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

This paper has outlined some of the problems and issues that universities have faced and continue to face in designing and implementing effective Web sites that meet the needs of their varied constituencies. The paper offers some suggestions for strategies and operational solutions that can help universities create useful Web sites that convey a suitable Web presence to internal and external stakeholders who visit the site.

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Gary P. Schneider, University of San Diego

Carol M. Bruton, California State University San Marcos