Do It Yourself Content Management (CM) – Available Sources Planning

Do it yourself content management (CM) is all about graduate program directors and their team members using the principles of CM to create content and then directing that content toward end-users or audiences with precision, ease and purpose. The underlying principle for graduate program CM is the content must add value for the recipient.

The first article in this series introduced a six-part CM life-cycle: Plan, Create, Manage, Warehouse, Share, and Assess. In this article, I want to focus on the planning part of the life-cycle to help create a framework for your graduate program’s content management system (CMS). The plan is simple; it starts with purpose and needs and then expands the needs into a list of questions that start with content and information sources you can use to uncover topics around which to create content you think would add value to your many potential audiences.

CMS Purpose

The CMS’s purpose is to collect and share value-added content with audiences or individuals within an audience that will help them decide about a program offered by your B-School. It’s not about pushing as much information as possible to as large an audience as possible. It’s about sharing information that helps the recipient decide. If it does not help with decision making, then don’t send it or share it. So, it is less about selling and more about learning and relationship building with long-term benefits accruing to the program. For that reason, creating content and directing it to specific audiences requires more planning and a deeper understanding of an audience and the decisions those audience members are trying to make.

Needs

The complexities of graduate program management can overwhelm new program leaders or team members. One way of reducing these complexities to something that is manageable is to create a system, in this case a CMS, to help simplify content management for your program or programs. CM planning starts with the identification of a set of needs. One way to identify these needs is to answer the following questions.

What content and information sources are available to you?
What audiences or end-users will you want to direct content toward?
What steps will you follow to match your content with your audience?
How will you create content?
Where will you store or warehouse your content?
How will you share content with your audiences or end-users?
How will you assess the effectiveness of your CMS?

There are two levels of answers for each of these questions. The first level, the one I provide, is your starting point. The second level is where you change and expand my answers to fit your needs and resources.

Content and Information Sources

From a planning standpoint, the first thing to consider is question one, the content and information sources available to you. The following first level sources are available to most all graduate programs.

Accreditation body websites provide access to industry research and their promotional and public relations efforts on behalf of the industry.
Applicants that are in process, accepted, and enrolled.
Competitor program websites can provide information for repurposing.
Curated news sources can provide content you can repurpose.
Curriculum and individual courses that make up the program.
Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) offers a rich source of information they gather via their administration of the GRE and GMAT.
Employers that have hired or are planning to hire your graduates.
Faculty based on their teaching, research, and service roles.
Graduates from your program or programs can prove a useful content source.
Leads and inquiries that opted in for any reason are wonderful sources.
Regulatory agencies are a valuable source because of their compliance standards enforcement and reporting requirements.
Speakers invited to speak to a class or student organization.
There are various other graduate education resources and organizations that you may want to add to this list.

Getting to the next level can be a challenge when starting. Let me illustrate the process I suggest by selecting one source, faculty. Most faculty members divide their job into three roles, teaching, research, and service. Annual faculty reports often summarize the accomplishments in each role. Many B-Schools and Higher Education institutions use automated solutions for faculty related data collection and reporting. Automated solutions for such faculty reporting include ACADEM, SEDONA, Watermark, etc.

To better understand how a faculty member can be a source, select a faculty member that is teaching one of your graduate program’s courses. Access that faculty member’s current report via an automated platform, if possible. Review the report looking for activity you can convert to content for an audience. For example, a published article by that faculty member may be useful for alumni that took a course or courses this faculty member taught. Repurpose the article to update former students on course content or to show how faculty research is helping practitioners, or any other relevant purpose. Or the faculty member may have made a presentation to a local business group, which you could convert to a blog article for the B-School’s website. A lack of automated faculty reporting means you will require more effort in gaining access to the information.

Take this one example and multiply it by the number of graduate faculty and then add to it all the other sources listed above and you have an almost unlimited number of information sources available for creating content that is shareable. However, the best approach is to start small by selecting one or two first level sources and develop them as sources. Then add other sources as time and resources permit.

Content written by Rodney G. Alsup and published by the MBA News Digest Academy on November 20, 2020.

You can share your comments in the Community Forum or email them to me at RGAlsup@MBANewsDigest.com.