The aim of these posts is to show you the support and functionality that is available for you in a standard configured NE/5 portal when it comes to working with content. We will begin this series with how to organize your content, followed by different ways of producing and sharing your content in upcoming posts.
Please note that the exact functionality and look & feel of your portal will depend on the modules you are using and customizations you have made. NE/5 is meant to be adaptable, but in this series we wish to show you what is already available in what we envision to be a standard portal. This means that we could mention functionality that is part of a module that you do not have. If you have any questions regarding what is available in your portal, please contact your project manager.
When working with web content it is important to structure your content in a way that will make it easy for you to update and maintain, while at the same time making it accessible for your audience. Using our domain knowledge about alumni, career portals and web design we have prepared the NE/5 portal framework with the goal of making this as stress free as possible.
The design of the NE/5 portal comes from our ambition to help Alumni to develop professionally, Universities to succeed in an increasingly competitive market and Corporations to attract the best talents. This is reflected in the way we have designed the portal to help you organize your content around different areas, with the key areas being; My Network, My University and My Career.
Each key area is reachable from the main navigation and has its own introduction page. This page serves as an entry point to that area and is meant to give your audience an overview of the content available within that area. To make the key areas more identifiable we've added the opportunity for you to add visual cues like banner images.
Each area has its own subject matter and below we will explain how we suggest that you use them when organizing your content.
My University
As the name suggests this is all about your University and what your University can offer to your alumni and what they can offer you. The alumni should go here when they wish to find more information about current news, research breakthroughs, portraits of famous alumni and current and past alumni events.
When you publish news in the portal, they are collected here and the introduction page will take you to the news archive with the calendar available in the sidebar. In addition to the news archive you could for example create a newsletter archive using content pages or give access to the on-line University newspaper. Information on ongoing research and breakthroughs also belong here.
Modules that are suited for My University include calendar, event and photo album. If you wish to open a channel for the alumni to give feedback, this area is also a good home for the quick-poll module.
Sometimes if you have a large university, it is more likely that your alumni will feel more connected to a faculty or educational program than the university as a whole. In that case you could make use of the module Official groups. Official groups makes it possible to organize your content on more levels, for example publishing news targeted at former economy students, teachers or current PhD students.
My Network
My Network is the "social network hub" of the portal. The alumni should go here to interact and share experiences and knowledge with each other. It is here the alumni manage their contacts, i.e. persons in the portal that they wish to give more access to their profile and automatic emails on profile updates.
If your university has a facebook page, linked-in group or twitter account this is the area to promote it. You invite your alumni to add you to their other social networks. You could also showcase alumni using twitter by bringing their tweets into the portal. Another example of content for this area is information about mentoring programs.
This area is also home to the module Network groups. Network groups are meant to provide areas for a more informal interaction between members than in Official groups. You could even make it possible for your alumni to start groups themselves and invite other members. This makes it possible to use groups in many different ways, for example alumni could start a group in order to organize an event, to discuss philosophy or collect former members of the student orchestra. Maybe you have an event or conference with a large alumni attendance, then you could start a group to collect news and discussions about that event. Members of a group can subscribe to news and will get an overview of their groups on the area introduction page.
My Career
It is becoming more and more important to offer career services to alumni. In the portal this is the area the alumni should go to see career opportunities, get information about career events like "How to do a successful interview" and get in contact with the university partners.
When you publish career opportunities in the portal this is where they are collected and if you have invited corporate partners this is where they will go to send in career opportunities for publishing. In addition to publishing career opportunities yourself you could also activate feeds from Mira partners that will automatically populate the page with opportunities especially targeted for your alumni. Alumni can subscribe to career opportunities by job category and type and get email notifications when a matching opportunity is posted.
Apart from career opportunities you could publish information on CV-writing or career seminars. You could also provide links to the current course catalogue or supply information on special offers in further education.
If you have corporate partners then you could use the module Career Forum which gives selected partners the opportunity to present themselves for alumni. Alumni can then "follow" these partners and make their profiles/CV available for them. Alumni can also subscribe to announcements and career opportunities from the career forum. This is a good way for universities to build strong relations with partners and increase their brand recognition.
Looking back you can see how the key areas match the three circles in our diagram, with the portal providing a meeting place for the University, Alumni and Corporate partners.
The main purpose of the portal home page is to give the alumni a quick overview of what the portal has to offer as a whole with the latest announcements, upcoming events and career opportunities. They will also get notifications such as group invites, contact requests and new private messages. You could have an area on this page where you push for a specific event or new content and functionality.
So when you publish content ask yourself, which key area does this content belong to?
- If you want to publish information about a special guest lecture with the prime minister then "My University" is the perfect place for it.
- If you want to invite alumni to your linked-in group then "My Network" is a good choice.
- If you want to recruit alumni to your new MBA master program then "My Career" is the best match for this kind of information.
This was a brief presentation on how to organize your content in the NE/5 portal, please stay tuned for our next blog post about producing content.
By Maria & Brosk
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