March2010

Posted by Carlyn Foshee Chatfield on March 12, 2010

March 2010

IT Communicators Virtual Coffee Shop

Communication Channels

Carlyn Chatfield shared some of the channels in use by Rice IT

See Educause resources, also see chat notes at end of summary.

Q: What kind of templates or standards does your institution have for surveys?

Larry - Survey Share tool, leave it to survey preparers to choose theme, then office that controls surveys on campus reviews.

Q: DOES IT require notification if over 1000 people will be sent survey requests via email? Do you use an application to merge email addresses?

Alison - several large groups do send emails, but our survey tool does a survey campaign through a batch email. It only lets so many go through in an hour, breaking up 3000+ survey requests go through at once.

Tina (?) - We're looking at a tool that combines the survey and mail merge tool.

Rice and UNF house their campus survey tools on campus servers. University of Hawaii

OK State - surveys are ad hoc, surveymonkey, anything free, what we are trying to decide is if we purchase a central survey system, how can we support the entire research community.

Pepperdine - every tool under the sun is being used.

Case - same situation (everything under the sun)

University of Colorado @ Boulder - IT uses a Zoomerang account. Send out link to survey through a mailing list.

Central Michigan - different tools in use, email function in those tools.

Rice and UNF both saw campus resistance when a campus-wide survey tool was implemented, but other campus offices were in charge of the change, not IT.

Q: what vendors did you select if you went with a campus-wide survey application?

Rice went with Inquisite, run out of our Office of Institutional Effectiveness

University of Hawaii Institutional Review Board, Committee on Human Studies controls our campus survey tool, Survey Share.

Back to talking about Communication Channels...

Review the Rice IT System Status page, then others which were posted to the chat notes.

https://my.rice.edu/ITAppStatus/

Question: what about pro-active announcements for things that will occur, not just defensive messages about what happened?

Answer: at Rice, we have two different message channels, because we found the people who were interested in what IT was planning to do didn't need the message to be written in plain English. These are typically faculty who are tech-savvy and just want to know what systems we'll be working on and when. See the Change Calendar for details. Again, this site may be publicly viewable, but the people who go there speak IT.

http://change.it.rice.edu/

Other institutions have combined their announcements with calendars or other channels:

https://app.it.okstate.edu/itannounce/

http://www.unf.edu/anf/its

http://www.hawaii.edu/its/

http://help.case.edu/

Calendars

Chat Notes

Subject: Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro - Chat Transcript from CG Meeting Room

ITCOMM CG Leader 1:Procedures...We have our own home-grown bulletin system and colleges and departments must use it or be blacklisted from sending future emails out on campus. It requires approval from their VP before it is released to our online bulletins web site. One weekly email is sent listing all the new bulletins with a link to the web pages with the bulletins (they choose campus, admin, general). If it is critical (and that term is vague) such as an event occurring too quickly for the Friday bulletins to help, a campus-wide vote, etc then they can request a "special" bulletin which goes straight to user email directly (just like they would see it online) and to the web site. (we use DotNetNuke for portal and campus web sites)

ITCOMM CG Leader 1:Notification - Yes, sort of:- if it is a major survey we are usually involved anyway- they must go through the bulletin system so we know about it anyway

ITCOMM CG Leader 1:Mailmerge App - - Campus to campus uses the bulletin system or maybe Banner Student System email so it auto-mail merges for us.- Some groups use Evite and Alumni use Constant Contact (usually these are because they are also including non-UTEP emails)

ITCOMM CG Leader 1:Mailmerge App - Easy Mail Merge, a client plug-in for Microsoft Outlook http://www.emailaddressmanager.com/mail_merge.html

ITCOMM CG Leader 1:Survey App - 1. Survey Monkey ($200-300 per year per user - I have one license and set it up for anything IT does, several other departments also have license)2. Qualtrics (College of Business uses this and it is very reasonable too)3. Research & Evaluation uses something too but I don't know the name. Probably more intense than what most of us use. It is online so only the marketing of it is emailed out.

ITCOMM CG Leader 1:Survey App - · Checkbox (http://www.checkbox.com/)· Constant Contact (http://www.constantcontact.com)

ITCOMM CG Leader 1:Additional note from UTEP - Just a note - many of our surveys are annual and we have written the applications internally to manage them. We are focusing on going paperless so we have that to deal with since paper copies seem to get a bigger response rate (especially with course evaluations - though there is some discussion as to whether 60% paper is really better than 35% online)

ITCOMM CG Leader 1:Office of Institutional Effectiveness

Larry Wiss, Univ of Hawaii, ITS:The Univ of Hawaii office which reviews/approve our surveys is The UH Institutional Review Board, Committee on Human Studies

Tina - OK State:https://app.it.okstate.edu/itannounce/

Alison CRuess - UNF:http://www.unf.edu/anf/its

Kirsten - CWRU:how many people on your team Carlyn?

Larry Wiss, Univ of Hawaii, ITS:http://www.hawaii.edu/its/

ITCOMM CG Leader 1:number of people on Rice IT Marketing & Communication team: 1.5 (laughter)

Kirsten - CWRU:http://help.case.edu/