Dear Mike, enjoyed your presentation at IWMW – thought your slides were very beautifully designed and put together.

I’m not going to justify why we were invited to speak at IWMW (you’ll have to find that out from the organisers). But I will point out that the intention was to do a two parter with our client from the University of Southampton – and when she was unable to make it at the last moment, we had to improvise a different kind of presentation.

You say that ‘brand and design don’t necessarily sit comfortably or naturally with many university web teams’ but that hasn’t really been our experience. Universities tend to have large web presences, much of which is made up of research and other materials created and managed by semi-autonomous Faculties, Schools and Departments. Those responsible for these materials often come from the academic side, and do often have reservations about marketing and brand. But corporately most University websites are managed by marketing and communications departments, and tend to be staffed with web professionals (who have often come to HEIs from the agency side or the private sector).

Modern Universities are – amongst other things – big, complex businesses. Most have dramatically expanded their capacity in recent years in order to create the financial strength to sustain their many activities. University websites are critical to these business strategies, and have to perform to the University’s needs as a business. That is, they have to recruit students, raise funds, promote ‘third stream’ initiatives (knowledge transfer, ‘spin out’ enterprises, consultancy, continuing professional development and short courses), forge strategic alliances with other partners and act as a shop window for the many other business activities Universities have (Science and technology parks, conference facilities, movie locations, catering, creches – even functions such as wedding venues).

Academic web publishers may – and, in my experience, often do – grumble about the University being ‘taken over’ by suspect private sector brand and marketing thinking. What they often aren’t willing to see is that the ongoing viability of their activities depends, critically, on the University’s ability to promote itself in increasingly competitive markets.

I doubt there was a single institution represented at IWMW this year which isn’t working with agencies on their brand and website development (indeed, we’ve worked with many of them ourselves). Understanding the connection between brand and web is a hot issue for University marketing departments and many of the conversations I had suggested that sharing some of the tools we’ve developed to facilitate this (like the SAFE matrix) was much appreciated.