People visit your website looking for information. Maybe they’re deciding whether or not to attend your institution, or join your faculty or staff, or donate to your capital campaign. Unfortunately, many university websites include out-of-date, incomplete faculty web profiles. Why? Manually updating faculty web profiles is time consuming and inefficient for the marketing and IT teams responsible for your website, as well as faculty, who often have to reach out and request updates to their profiles.
Out-of-date faculty web profiles send the wrong message to everyone. Fortunately, there’s an easier way. Here are six reasons to use Faculty Success (formerly Digital Measures) by Watermark to power up-to-date faculty web profiles on your website.
Entering activities into a faculty database can feel like a thankless task to faculty whose time is already absorbed by teaching, scholarship, and service. Though you may already require faculty to enter data into Faculty Success (formerly Digital Measures) to support annual reviews, promotion and tenure, accreditation reporting, and other uses, faculty may consider that as primarily benefiting the university.
But public awareness of faculty accomplishments can lead to important opportunities to collaborate, publish, present at a conference, or become recognized as a subject-matter expert for media inquiries. Having automatically updated faculty web profiles ensures that your faculty’s most recent publications, awards, conference presentations, grants, performances, and other accomplishments can be immediately shared with your institution’s audience.
When current web profiles give faculty added incentive to keep their teaching, scholarship, and service up to date, you have a more current and complete database of faculty activities to inform accreditation reporting, strategic planning, and other vital tasks.
Faculty want to share their accomplishments judiciously. In Faculty Success (formerly Digital Measures), faculty can choose to display or hide particular accomplishments, tailoring web profiles to reflect the work they wish to promote. A simple opt-in opportunity in each activity record ensures faculty control their narrative, sharing the accomplishments that best represent their current scholarship and interests.
With a wealth of faculty activities in Faculty Success (formerly Digital Measures), your website can also support keyword searches, direct links to publications, and updates to in-progress research (as approved by faculty, of course). By adding these to your university’s website, you can share a rich and complete story of your faculty’s achievements.
Nearly 100 institutions have successfully built web profiles using the Faculty Success (formerly Digital Measures) web services API. Clients with the programming resources to use the API remark on its flexibility for building web profiles and integrating them into a website. For institutions with resource-strapped IT teams, the Web Profiles module provides a no-coding option for getting faculty web profiles integrated into a website in just hours to days, rather than doing months of coding. Web profiles can still be customized by college or department, and give faculty the control they need to determine which accomplishments will best represent their work.
The most important reason to maintain up-to-date faculty web profiles is sharing the most current, complete story of your institution on your most public forum: your website. Using the faculty activity data you already capture for campus processes such as annual reviews, accreditation, promotion and tenure, and more, is a win for everyone on campus—and your many stakeholders in the community.
Faculty web profiles are important for recruiting, fundraising, surfacing collaboration opportunities, and more. For the IT perspective on keeping them up to date with the no-coding-required Faculty Success (formerly Digital Measures) Web Profiles module, read what Montana State University and North Carolina State University have to say.
The post 6 Reasons to Use Faculty Success (formerly Digital Measures) to Power Faculty Web Profiles.
