Workshops

Workshops are $175 for one or $250 for two.

See our below list of workshops and register today.

Pre-conference workshops: Sunday, October 13, 1-4:30 p.m.
Post-conference workshops: Wednesday, October 16, 1-4:30 p.m.

From Strategic Plan to Action Plan

Presented by: Alaina Wiens

Your organization’s Strategic Plan outlines goals, objectives, and priorities that set a course for future success. But with so many moving, and often decentralized, parts on campus, it can be hard to apply these high-level plans to day-to-day work.

This workshop will help you see yourself in your Strategic Plan. You’ll go through the steps of creating an Action Plan, setting goals and objectives for you or your team, and deciding what to measure—all in alignment with a Strategic Plan.

Together we’ll practice:

• Unpacking strategic planning documents
• Setting strategic goals and objectives (and knowing the difference between them)
• Identifying the right metrics to measure progress toward strategic goals
• Outlining tactics that impact metrics

Let’s Learn Git: No More Excuses

Presented by: Dwayne McDaniel

Whether it is for re-using the same code, experimenting with your code quickly and efficiently, or just for better document management, one of the most important leaps any site builder will ever take in their path towards becoming a developer is learning a version control system, or VCS. Since Git is the standard VCS over 80% of developers, lets roll up our sleeves and dive in. The benefits far outweigh the efforts needed to learn this tooling. Once you start, you will wonder why it took you so long to unleash the power of this awesome tech.

This talk will briefly explore the need for git, the history and use cases. Then we will jump into how to get started and the basic organizational concepts. We will also examine Github, the web based Git hosting service. Bring your laptops to play along at home and get started before you leave the room.

Content Modeling Will Save Your Redesign (And the Three After That)

Presented by: Amy Grace Wells

Content is often the culprit in redesigns that are over budget and past due, but it doesn’t have to be. All campuses have distinct content types that are repeated across digital properties. Courses, bios, programs, events, etc. These can be mapped, related, and easily turned into CMS requirements, RFP specifications, design systems, and, best of all, future-proofed content.

Content modeling is the linchpin in a content-first redesign that sets up all digital teams for success and highlights the needs of your audiences. Adapt to new designs and new systems without reinventing the wheel each time.

In this workshop you’ll learn how to:

• Facilitate content modeling discussions with stakeholders
• Create a deliverable that maps content interactions
• Define content attributes that inform writers, developers, and designers
• Use content spec sheets to pair write with subject matter experts
• Use related content to build a design system

A Gentle Introduction to Web UI Programming with React

Presented by: Jason Woodward

Are you building out interactive sections of your Web site with jQuery or plain JavaScript, but finding it difficult to manage the various states the user interface can be in and the transitions between states? React makes it easy to represent these states in your code as a series of templates which, given a set of current data, describe what the user should be presented. React then does the hard work of managing changes to the DOM to change what the user is presented as the user provides input and as the underlying data changes. In this workshop we’ll do a bit of lecturing on the theory of operation of React, then we’ll add a small React application to an existing Web page, keeping an eye on making sure it stays accessible. This in a hands-on, interactive format designed to not leave you behind half way through.

Understanding Web Accessibility Standards and Open Source Tools

Presented by: Jon Gunderson

Participants will learn how to use free and open source tools to evaluate and understand the accessibility of entire organizations to individual pages based on the requirements of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level A and AA requirements.  Participants are encouraged to bring and use their own devices during the workshop to analyze websites and pages of their choice.  The workshop will use the results of participants as a discussion point of how the tools provide information on accessibility and discuss the limits of automated testing.  The suite of tools can be used to evaluate and inspect entire organizations (e.g. collections of websites), websites (e.g. pages in the same domain) and individual web pages and include WebAIMs WAVE, Deque aXe, AInspector Sidebar, Accessibility Bookmarklets, FAE 2.0 and FAEAuditor.

The workshop will explore the reporting structure, especially how to interpret evaluation results.  Some tools focus on only tests the can result in pass/fail and other tools will identify results that require human evaluation to determine it an accessibility requirement has been addressed.  The workshop will help people understand how to use the authoring requirements of the W3C ARIA Authoring Practices techniques to meet WCAG 2.1 Level A and AA requirements.   The ARIA Authoring Practices provide design information to meet WCAG 2.1 requirements.  Many other automated evaluation tools are based primarily on the WCAG 2.1 failure techniques.  The failure techniques provide a limited view of WCAG 2.1 requirements and a limited understanding of how web standards can be used to create highly accessible and usable websites for people with disabilities.   The workshop will also be a listening point for participants to provide valuable feedback to improve the design of the tools and to guide development of new features.

Participants will learn:

• W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 Level A and AA requirements.
• Understand the strengths and weaknesses of automated tools to evaluate accessibility
• W3C ARIA Authoring practices for accessible design practices
• Capabilities of open source tools in auditing and inspecting web accessibility

Plain and Simple: How to Get Rid of the Jargon and Write for Real People

Presented by: Donna Talarico

Accessibility isn’t just related to visual and functional elements of a website; it’s also about readability. Aside from the running industry jokes about “what the heck even is bursar?” the words we put on the page matter. For SO many reasons. For traditional undergraduate students, parents are a big part of the decision-making process, but is our content written with parents of first-generation college students (or first-generation in the U.S. students) in mind? This session will show how and why to get rid of the alphabet soup, cash in those $5 words, and limit the formal and academic-speak that so often plagues our pages. The result is not just more accessible content, but also more clarity for all. (And then we can save our massive vocabularies for the Sunday crossword or Words with Friends!)

Analytics 101: Master the Essentials

Presented by: Joshua Dodson

Google Analytics can seem complicated, but it’s no black box. The data doesn’t have to be complicated. The key is getting the essentials right and deciding where you should spend your energy. By mastering the basics, you can go much deeper, faster.

This workshop will cover the most important considerations of Google Analytics. With efficiency and effectiveness in mind, we will spend our time discussing how you can turn basic data into action. In addition to the essentials, we will include some tips and tricks that even advanced users will find helpful.

Whether you’re a brand manager looking to understand the effectiveness of an awareness campaign or a digital marketer digging in on which channels delivered the most ROI, we’ll help you sort through the many metrics and KPIs to determine which ones are most important to you and what they mean.

We’ll also provide a high-level overview on the holy grail of marketing – true downstream measurement that allows marketers to connect digital marketing platforms and Google analytics to the data within their CRM, all with the goal of understanding the full picture of what drives people to apply. Given our multi-device world, it may not be possible to connect all of the pieces, but it is possible to connect more of them. We’ll explore how to implement end-to-end tracking so that you can connect your Web analytics with your CRM.

And you’ll learn how to leverage Google Analytics alongside other tools to get a better view of how your marketing campaigns impact inquiries, applications, and enrollments. While there is no one-size-fits-all option, the principles you will learn in this workshop will help you increase your tracking capabilities and get more from your data.

You Get a Framework! Crafting Strategy, Goals, and Metrics.

Presented by: Erin Supinka

A strong and thoughtful social presence can be a powerful supporting element in larger communication and institution initiatives. Oftentimes though, we’re left to build a strategy as a separate entity and left out of the larger strategic conversations, leaving digital communicators grasping at straws when it comes to proving the value of our work.

In this workshop, we’ll walk through how Dartmouth built out its current social media strategy and program using existing and public institutional statements, stories, and site structures, workshopped it with leadership, and built out an analytics reporting process to measure success.

Workshop attendees will learn how to:

• Identify and build strategic frameworks in line with their institution’s existing mission, values, and content
• Define or fine-tune their content shop’s mission
• Develop voice and tone documentation
• Customize template worksheets to fit their own reporting and analytic needs
• Use these frameworks, data, and templates to get buy-in from leadership

As a team of one, I’ve built out a handful of tools, resources, and workflows that help streamline and simplify this process as much as possible and can be applied to teams and workflows (big and small)! Attendees will leave with access to these resources as well as a foundation to build out their social media or content strategy.

Who should attend:
Anyone in charge of their institution’s social media content, management, and analytics or who wants to have a better understanding of what goes into managing an organization’s digital content and engagement. While this workshop will focus on social media strategy, the lessons and examples can be applied to broader content strategy as well. Writers, editorial staff, visual media producers, etc. are all welcome!

Prerequisites:
Attendees will need to be able to locate and work with their institution’s mission, values, and other guiding principles. Otherwise, all are welcome!

Hands On with CSS Grid and Flexbox

Presented by: Stephen Fornal

Have you been maintaining an aging website for your institution, based on fragile and cumbersome CSS for layout? Do you sweat bullets every time you have to add another hack to your existing CSS code base, waiting for the inevitable layout failures to surface? Is it long past due for a code refactor and refresh, or are you about to redesign your site from scratch?

This time, you need to do it with Flexbox and Grid. Your future self will thank you.

In this workshop, you will learn about the Flexbox and Grid modules. We’ll cover specs, syntax, use cases, and we’ll get hands-on with a variety of demos as we go. To conclude, we’ll build out a complete layout, based on a real-world page design, using the tools we just learned. And we’ll do it using a modern front-end build system, based on Node, Gulp, Sass, and Browser Sync.

This workshop is for CSS and HTML developers, and UX/Designers as well. Little to no Javascript required, no server side coding involved.

UX Bootcamp 101: Well, How Do I Get Here?

Presented by: Robin Smail

Five years ago user experience wasn’t even a phrase in our lexicon, but now you hear it everywhere, and highered is finally taking notice. Join us and learn the fundamentals of UX design, how it overlaps with your own job duties, and how to add the skill sets necessary to make yourself more valuable at work (or even pivot into user experience yourself). We’ll work through some real world examples, learn about user research, testing, software tools, and more. You’ll leave with an understanding of the process, what tools you should have in your toolkit, and how you too can incorporate UX into your professional skill set.

Optimizing Your Content for Search Engines

Presented by: Brian Piper

Are you putting out great content that doesn’t get the traffic you want? Do you wonder what content has the best potential to rank well on the search engines?

This workshop will walk through the entire content optimization process, including:

• Researching content ideas to determine what is currently driving online traffic
• Doing keyword research to find long-tail keyword phrases to target
• Learning how and where to include keywords in your content to make sure the search engines find your content
• Determining how to track your content after you publish it to measure it’s effectiveness
• Discovering how to promote your content to get the best reach
• Optimizing your existing content that has high search potential for organic and rich snippet rankings

This session will also address how social channels, AI, voice search and influencer marketing can help with search engine optimization. Come with some of your web content you would like to optimize and we’ll work through the process with your content during the session.