Registrar’s Link of the Week pick… very popular selection

Registrar’s Website is a Link of the Week Success

It surprised me.

When I was searching for a May 8 Link of the Week selection, motivation already existed to search among college and university websites for a strong example of a “service marketing” site that was oriented to students as the primary audience. We are about to rewrite the present content and recommend new pages for a public university’s registrar pages. My thought was that stellar examples would lend inspiration and insight to that task.

University of Missouri Leads Service Marketing Approach

Turns out that service-oriented Registrar’s sites are not easy to find. After visiting 43 websites in the U.S. and Canada and coming across a very few that were candidates, the University of Missouri site stood out from the rest. Visit the Mizzou Registrar’s page and see for yourself.

The search also helped me understand why in our CCI (Customer Centric Index) surveys the negative response level from current students has been much higher than the negative response level from “future” or “prospective students.” A marketing orientation of “let’s make this as easy to use as possible” hasn’t yet spread throughout most higher education websites. People have to use these sites on a regular basis. For most, the experience isn’t nearly as pleasant as it might be.

Why is that the case? Sometimes the answer is internal politics, sometimes it is staff time to make things work better… and sometimes it is just “Why should we make it easy to use? I had to struggle when I was a student.” Yes, I actually heard that sentiment at an on-campus presentation about 2 years ago from the chap who developed the website. Fortunately, not everyone thinks like that.

Lori Croy, director of web communications at Mizzou, said it well:

    • “Those types of sites are a pain to work on, no fun at all, but are the great workhorses of our universities. It’s seldom anyone notices them for the good they do. More often they’re noted for falling short of good service and usability.”

7 More Registrar’s Sites to Visit

Based on my experience last week, most often sites like this do fall short of good service and usability. But not all of them. Missouri seemed the strongest, but here are 7 other U.S. and Canadian sites that stood out from the 43 visited for various elements of their approach:

That’s all for now.

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