Expanding the Portal’s Reach
August 4, 2005 | Leave a Comment
As part of my duties lording over our institution’s portal, I am also charged with expanding the reach of the portal. This involves the creation of new roles, new features, improved functionality, and in general anything to make the portal better. Over time I will explore and outline all my plans in these areas.
Interesting of late is the addition of new roles, and more specifically, ones with populations we are not currently serving in the portal. This last January we extended the portal out to all our alumni. A huge undertaking, not technically but more along the lines of determining what content to make available and who will maintain it.
The huge advantage to extending personalized, web based, self service functionality to alumni is in the associated engagement that follows. There are many studies in higher education that show engaged alumni being much more willing to donate time or money back to the institution. How better to keep them engaged then to provide them a portal with integrated email, news services, bookmarks, and entertainment. All while continuing to keep your institution in the forefront of their minds. Additionally the more personalized this feels the more they are likely to stick around and continue using the service. I also like the idea of deploying the alumni portal in the same infrastructure as the existing faculty, staff, student portal. This allows you to present them with a seemless experience and transition them between roles without interruption of service. So we’ve done that and the benefits are obvious. Once someone becomes a student, assuming they graduate, we attempt to keep them engaged online for life.
More recently discussion is now centered around a prospective student portal. Once again, an integrated solution seems best. If this group can be rolled in with all the others, content can be shared, resources pooled, and the experience can remain seemless. Now you have the basis to establish “consumer loyalty” at an even earlier, and arguably, more impressionable age. If the right product is delivered to them at this point, it is likely they will convert into students and go on to alumni who remain engaged.
When we get there, we will not be first, even on this platform. La Salle has already paved the way here, understanding the significant advantage of keeping all the data and users centralized.
Of course this is all theory and institutions nationwide are betting on this. However I feel many of them are going about this all wrong. Any time you make users switch systems or change where you’re pointing them, you are bound to drop engagement. This means once you choose a portal technology, you need to commit to it and do the best you can including all your groups in there.
Beyond these two groups which clearly extend the core student population earlier and later in the relationship, there are other groups who will see value in being members of the portal as well. Parents, visiting faculty, guests, or other population we’ve yet to think of.
I’ve had colleagues argue that these smaller, non-paying constituents are not worth the time and effort to get them integrated. I argue that one central authentication and authorization point, one simple location where all resources can be accessed, one location for all support documentation, for 100% of all users on campus is not only “worth it” but also required.
Tags: alumni portal, identity, portal, role, roles