A couple of weeks ago, one of our teammates challenged us to think about a very basic question: Why does Bethel exist?

The question is poignant in its simplicity. And as we talked about why Bethel exists I found myself moving beyond mission statement and core values to an equally simple answer. Bethel exists because we believe we’re doing good in the world.

There’s obviously a lot more to be said about it, but at our core we want to make the world a better place by preparing people to add their own unique contributions to that end.

Why am I here?

My teammate’s question was one I needed to hear and spend time thinking about. It also got me thinking about why I’m here.

Working on a university website can be painful. It’s easy to get discouraged by the magnitude of our task or bogged down by the glacial pace of change or just distracted by the day-to-day. Sometimes I feel like I’m trying to knock down a brick wall with my face. Another teammate compared our work to the myth of Sisyphus (her metaphor was more eloquent than mine). We set a goal, struggle to reach it, and then start again at the bottom when a new group has new needs, or priorities shift, or the online landscape changes.

I bet all of you can relate.

But when I cut away all the confusion and frustration and complexity of writing for Bethel’s website, I know why I do it. I’m here because I believe Bethel is working to make the world better. I believe that our community is full of good people doing good things. I believe that Bethel can prepare those good people to go out into the world and make a real difference. And I hope my efforts to share that message will reach people who want to join us and add their own contributions to making the world better.

How about you?

I challenge you to ask yourself: Why do you think Bethel exists? Why are you here?

For me, answering these questions in the simplest terms possible was a breath of fresh air. It reminded me that we’re all on the same team, and challenges arise not because we have different goals, but because we have different ideas about the best way to accomplish the same goals. And our shared goals are noble, important, and worth working for.

If you’re anything like me, taking some time to think about these questions for yourself will energize you when you get frustrated, help you reach out to your audience in authentic ways, and inspire you to do great work.

Writers and editors constantly talk about style. We hash out what to capitalize, how to format dates, when to word mash, if we use serial commas, how to format room numbers, and on. Long-held obsessions and personal preference drive what we fight for and what we choose to let go.

These conversations might seem tiresome—even absurd—to the outsider (as a recent Onion headline illustrates), but my fellow editors at Bethel will likely agree that, most days, we enjoy debating the minutia of style.

Although we’re wired to nitpick, it’s all too easy to get lost in the details. When we spend too much energy on hyphen placement we lose sight of the bigger questions driving our strategy, and we run the danger of producing well-styled but pointless content.

Can print and web have different styles?

Can they? Yes. And should they? Probably, but it’s not that easy.

The simple answer is that print and web aren’t the same medium. Generally, print readers have different needs, goals, and expectations than web users. Think about how you read a magazine versus how you browse the web. I know I devote more focused attention to a feature story in my alma mater’s alumni magazine than the online schedule for homecoming.

Based on my experience, placing web writing in the box of traditional print doctrine can sometimes constrain the flexibility needed to construct actionable, scannable, info-rich language. For example, numerical digits (e.g. 1, 2, 3, etc.) make lists of stats easier to scan. Using postal codes for state abbreviations over traditional AP shorthand saves us characters when screens are small and space is tight. Web language, in most cases, is more conversational—starting sentences with “and” or using sentence fragments.

But the more complex answer is that print versus web might be the wrong question altogether. Perhaps the ways of traditional print are better suited for certain kinds of content—regardless of their medium—such as policies or campus safety reports. Maybe admissions postcards would do well to inherit qualities of the conversational web.

In our editorial shops, I’d like us to move away from the print versus web debate to think critically about what should inform our use of style. Let’s look more closely at the message we want to broadcast or the conversation we want to trigger. We need to consider how our goals and audiences should influence the tone and style of our communication.

How should we enforce style?

University websites, no matter how small the institution, are vast and complex. I constantly question how much our editorial team should (or even can) enforce preferred style within a massive distributed system.

Many hands touch our content, and with those hands come different levels of writing ability and attention to detail. Most web authors disbursed throughout our institutions are busy juggling duties that have nothing to do with their web responsibilities. Staying current with style shouldn’t top their list. That’s our job.

So should marketing teams put webpages through an editorial process to enforce style? The trick here is that web updates typically need to happen quickly. The beauty of the web is its speed and adaptability. Unlike print, content changes can happen fast. But detailed editorial processes take time, and they can strip the medium of its glory.

Here at Bethel, most webpages route through an editor on their way to going live. We don’t catch everything, and that’s not our intent.

It shouldn’t be an editorial team’s top priority to enforce preferred style in all nooks and layers. It’s more important for our web content to be current, useful, and compelling, which is already a huge challenge. That’s where I want our editorial energy applied. And that means the technicalities of style will sometimes suffer.

In the end, style is important, but it’s not the ultimate goal.

When do you break or change style?

In academia, it’s easy to slip into the trap of inertia. The rate of change is slow; we like to stick to our proven practices.

This can be a comforting environment for those who enforce style. We define our style once, and then make sure everything falls in line. Change rarely happens because change breeds inconsistency.

But as writers, we face a tension. We’re also called to be creators, pushing our right brains to craft engaging messages that meet the dynamic needs and hopes of our users. And, if we let our imaginations run, our creations might beg us to break the rules.

In his book 5 Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner identifies qualities of the creator:

“…strikes out in unfamiliar directions and enjoys—or at least accepts—being different from the pack.”

“…perennially dissatisfied with current work, current standards, current questions, current answers.”

If we are creators, we should, at times, feel constricted by the routine of style. A longing to step outside the boundaries should push against our efforts to enforce consistency. The two ideologies should clash.
The creator in us forces us to question what we’ve always done. It’s the part of us that makes mistakes for the sake of trying something brand new.

Just like any editor, I have a sweet tooth for rules and consistency. But when I believe consistent style is the mark of effective messaging, I’m no longer living out my role as creator. When this is the mindset, well-meaning standards and guidelines stifle our creative engines.

It’s challenging to live in the tension between wild creativity and rigid consistency. That’s why we need to engage these big questions and find the right balance for our work and our institution.

So what big style issues do you face? Where are your writers and editors putting their energy? Do you have any advice or stories about managing web style at your university?

There are certain university logos that produce immediate, almost subconscious thoughts and feelings whenever I see them. Put the Harvard logo in front of me and I think Ivy League, prestigious, exclusive. I associate the Alabama logo with football and the Duke logo with basketball. Stanford is innovative and high tech, the farm system for Silicon Valley.

I have deeply engrained, strongly held preconceptions about these schools even though I’ve never set foot on their campuses, and seeing the school’s logo is enough to bring those preconceptions to the surface.

My gut reaction to each logo is a reflection of that university’s brand.

What’s a brand?

When we talk about brands, people often think first of icons, color schemes, and typography. Indeed, I started this post by considering the power of logos. But logos and colors are merely manifestations of a brand, not the brand itself. Logos are symbols that marketers use to represent their brands and elicit specific emotions in their audiences, but branding goes much deeper and is far more complicated than selecting the right font.

Bestselling author and marketing guru Seth Godin defines a brand as “the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer’s decision to choose one product or service over another.

A good university brand connects with prospective and current students, alumni, staff and faculty, parents of students, potential employers of students, and people in the greater community who might not know much about a school, but still make certain associations when they hear the name.

Our brand is the promise we make through the story we tell. The promise sets expectations – this is what we do. The story is our enactment of that promise and proves that we deliver on the expectations we’ve set – this is how we do it. The fulfillment of the promise leads to trust and a sense of value. Emotional bonds are formed and long-lasting relationships are established

Why do we need branding?

Every university has features that make them unique: legacies, traditions, reputations, success stories. Don’t schools just brand themselves.

At Bethel, we have alumni doing amazing things in the world. We have incredible students who create a supportive, encouraging community. We have brilliant faculty members who genuinely care about their students.

We’re already walking the walk. What’s the point of taking a step backwards to think about how we talk the talk?

I’m glad you asked. Certainly, the walk is the priority. But we can’t do the things that make us great if nobody knows who we are or what we stand for. We can’t have a community of students, faculty, and staff without the students, faculty, and staff. Even more importantly, we can’t have our community without the right students, faculty, and staff.

Recruitment is important. But a brand goes beyond meeting quotas and filling seats. Branding is about finding the right fit people. The people who help build our community, support our mission and values, and want to make a difference in the world. The people who resonate with our promise and our story, and who will go on to further our brand just by the way they live their lives.

And we’re not interested in wasting anyone’s time. We want the people who will connect to Bethel, who will find their time here enriching and transformational, the community supportive, and their money well spent.

When we do branding, we’re specifying our promise and showing how we deliver on that promise, helping us find the people who resonate with Bethel.

Why is branding so hard?

Branding isn’t easy in any industry. If it were, every company in the world would have a strong identity and brand loyalty from customers. But only a select few have established that kind of relationship and emotional bond.

Adding to the difficulty, higher education faces unique challenges that make our branding efforts even more complicated than in other enterprises.

1) We’re tough to define.

Higher education is a difficult thing to describe, define, or categorize. Think about it this way: if I go to a gas station and buy a bag of Skittles, I know I’m getting delicious candy and I’ll experience a taste of the rainbow. It doesn’t matter which gas station I choose. Or if I visit an Apple Store and buy a new MacBook, I know the features and screen size and user experience I’m buying. I can easily compare the specs of MacBooks to Dells and ThinkPads to decide which is best. It doesn’t matter which Apple Genius rings up the final sale.

But if I’m a 17-year-old trying to decide where I’ll go to college, how can I tell them apart?

Every college claims to have exceptional professors, a passionate and active community, challenging academics, state-of-the-art facilities, study abroad programs and a global perspective, internship and research opportunities, and a wide variety of majors and minors.

So is it true that all universities are all of these things? Or is it more likely that we highlight these features because they’re safe, tested marketing points, and it’s really hard to figure out what actually makes us different?

What makes us different – that’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?

College is an experience, and each experience is unique to an individual student. How can we possibly pinpoint the parts of the experience that make us different from other schools when the experience is so hard to generalize from student to student? Can we make a promise to prospective students when we won’t know the outcome of their time here, or our ability to deliver on our promise, until they’ve already invested 4 years and a considerable amount of money? If each student experience is different, how can we identify a “typical” prospective student? Is there such a thing?

Does your head hurt yet?

2) We’re big and messy.

No matter how a university is organized, it’s always made up of subgroups: traditional undergrad schools, adult undergrad schools, graduate schools, seminaries, different academic departments (arts, humanities, sciences), athletics, student life, offices, alumni groups, etc. The list just goes on and on, and varies greatly from one university to the next.

University branding is confusing because each subgroup has slightly different identities and personas. Their people have different needs and expectations. For a university brand to work, it needs to capture the essence of all subgroups in a unified way while giving each the ability to adapt the brand to its audience and context

In other words, it’s extremely complicated.

3) We’re not a bag of Skittles.

There’s a hesitancy to run Bethel like a business or treat what we do here as a product to be sold. The fear, it seems, is that we risk compromising our integrity, restricting academic freedom, and cheapening the college experience by touting outcomes at the expense of life experiences, exploration, learning, and growth.

I understand the concern. But this isn’t the way it has to be, or should be. All groups at Bethel – faculty, staff, students – should be working together to define, establish, and support our promise and story. The idea isn’t that a team of marketers invents a brand and forces the rest of the school to conform.

We’re always making a promise to our community. When someone enrolls at Bethel, or comes to work at Bethel, there are certain things they can expect to get from the experience. And Bethel already has a story it’s telling. Students, faculty, and staff live it out every day.

We just need to figure out how to define those things. How can we be specific about our promise so we can differentiate ourselves from other schools? How can we tell our story in ways that resonate so our promise will be understood? How can we ensure we deliver on our promise time after time to create long-lasting relationships?

Those are the questions that branding asks. It’s not easy, but worthwhile efforts never are.