Explore these resources from Stamats content experts:

• Connect with Jeff Dillon on LinkedIn
• Visit the EdTech Connect, Inc., website

Mariah Tang: Did I say that out loud? Welcome to “Did I Say That Out Loud?”, a podcast where Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang reflect on agency life and answer questions from our higher ed and healthcare clients about the latest in digital marketing, content and SEO.

 

Hey, welcome to Did I Say That Out Loud. Jeff Dillon, thanks for joining us today. Jeff is the Founder of EdTech Connect, a one-of-a-kind platform that brings together higher ed leaders with verified experts to solve problems with technology solutions. With over 20 years of experience in higher education digital services, Jeff has worked with institutions around the world on strategies ranging from planning and execution of digital initiatives to enterprise business transformation. Welcome to the show, Jeff!

 

Jeff Dillon: Yeah, sure. Thanks! So I have a higher education background. For 21 years I was, I was in higher ed, both on the marketing side, as a webmaster, as the first webmaster for Northern Arizona University. I won’t date myself, but way back in the day, the first webmaster the job got pulled out of it, put into marketing. So I was the one guy who had to work with the disgruntled IT team to build a new website, and so did that, then moved to Sacramento and became the web and mobile director for Sacramento State. On the IT side, had a team of developers, and we managed the portal and the website and the campus search and legacy applications, learning management system.

 

But come the pandemic is when I had this idea, and I was tasked with finding a cloud workflow solution to replace our on-site kind of legacy workflow solution. Yeah, no problem. I’ve been doing this for 15 years. I’ll go find us some things to look at. And I struggled to narrow down my choices, like there were so many options. Even though I was plugged into the CSU, on-site the biggest system in the country, all the Slack groups and the EDUCAUSE community groups, I still couldn’t narrow my result set. I couldn’t go back with eight solutions to review. So I said I got to build this idea, which is crowdsourced EdTech Connect, which I started in 2020. It’s a crowdsourced technology search engine, basically. So, anyone higher I can list their software, and it kind of took off. And that’s what I do now, is I connect higher ed with innovative solutions. And the crowdsourced platform is a big source of my information.

 

Stu Eddins: That’s very cool. Do you get directly involved with helping people maybe assemble their tech stack, or are you just asking acting more as that reference engine for them to make their selections?

 

Jeff: I do. I do actually, this wasn’t even planned to be a business in beginning. It was a platform. So the business side of it was kind of a consulting side, either helping solution providers position their products and review, you know, kind of a consultation on that side, but also helping higher ed choose the right technology based on their technology stack, what their peers are using. So, yeah, I do. I do love doing that, too.

 

Stu: Very nice. Yeah, I was looking through some of the solutions and services you were offering. And one thing that I’ve always had a hard time with is you hear about solutions that sound wonderful. It does everything I need, and then you hear about something else, and it does the other thing that you desperately need, and the two never talk, can’t talk to each other. So integration has always been a little difficult for a lot of us to tackle, and I see that you’re you’ve got some things going on around those around that, as far as information sources and so on. I guess I’m still a little pleased that “tech stack” is still something people are pursuing now 10/15, years down the road, when it became a coined term. And I’m also seeing another thing creep into some of the stuff you’ve got, which is AI. Now here’s my question, does AI solve the problem or complicate things, do you think?

 

Jeff: Yeah, wow, that’s a really loaded question because it’s a spectrum, right? And I think what I’ve seen, I’ve worked in, I’ve worked with some other industries, too, but primarily I’ve been in higher ed for my whole career. And I really think, I think it stems back from, if you look back 10-plus years ago, when you think back when we were, probably closer to 15 years ago, lot of schools didn’t have content management. Content Management Systems, right? We’re bringing on our first one. There were not a lot of choices out there. So we had, a CIO had to, had to worry about, what CMS will I use? What? What’s my next SIS integration? You might have a data warehouse, an email system. There were a handful of things a CIO worried about. If you look at the EdTech Connect website, there’s a periodic table of technology now, and it’s 90 categories of software, and we have a whole AI section.

 

So, you know, I think hired is so far behind kind of the world, because when it first, when we first realized Gen AI was possible in 2022 or so, it was an if, like, We cannot let this happen and that now we’re like, figuring out, okay, how. So, I do believe there’s more benefit than a downside to it, but the attitudes and the the maturity are really kind of all over the board.

 

There was some research that I was part of this year, earlier this year, where the Chronicle of Higher Ed worked with a company called SearchStax that I work with to ask hired professionals across the board where they felt they were with their digital experience, and where they wanted to be an AI was part of that.

 

And one of the gaps we discovered was, the data says 58% want AI tuned relevance for their search, but 84% rate their AI maturity as early or not started. So they always see, I use search as an example. They always see, okay, we know like search is affecting the world, whether it’s LLMs, ChatGPT is out there, or even your site search, but they’re so far behind that they want this thing way off, way out here, but, but if you come down to it, they can’t take that big jump. It’s too risky. So we got to meet them where they’re at, but I’m always, I’m more of an optimist. I think, I think, I think we have so much potential, and it’s going to just really change things. And that’s all over the place, though.

 

Stu: Yeah, and much like the audiences we try to serve when we’re looking at our clients, so many of them, all they’re really looking for is less friction in their lives, and if we can pick the correct technology parts to put together, and maybe, if AI can be the lubrication between those gears, maybe we got something. But what I’m seeing is kind of like you just mentioned, I don’t want to call it a pipe dream, but there’s this thing off on the horizon that everybody wants to reach out and grab, but they’re not accounting for the space between themselves and that object right now. And I think there’s so much more that people can people have to have an idea what they want, because that’s the thing that never changes, really. We don’t tend to have our wants and needs don’t change, just how we get there does.

 

So have you found that when you’ve been working with people or talking with people about the tech stack they want to put together, do you find a lot of wishful thinking in the beginning that then gets refined? Or do you think they are coming to you with their needs clearly defined in the beginning, and then trying to solve it with tech?

 

Jeff: They do not come with their needs clearly defined for the most part. I feel like I got to challenge that one assumption, I think you made there was that they know what they want. And I always go back to Henry Ford or Steve Jobs and saying, like, if we would have asked people what they wanted, you know, they would have said, I want a faster horse, you know?

 

And so I think, I think that’s part of the challenge now, and that’s what I’m trying to do, is show the art of the possible. Like, we don’t even know what questions to ask, because this is moving so fast. The more I learn, the more I realize I don’t know either.

 

So number one, they’re not they don’t know what’s possible. And number two, the evolution of the technology side, the vendor side, these solution providers are merging, and there’s so many startups, it’s hard to keep track of who does what, like, what is it? What’s a digital engagement platform? Well, this one is actually a personalization AI layer over here, and this one’s a portal. And so the language has changed so much that it’s very difficult to keep up. So yeah, I feel like we’re kind of in a scramble at that point. And it takes some courage, some bravery to just say, to really go after and learn what these systems can do. Learn how it fits into what you have. Learn, how deep are you entrenched in your current, your current environment? You know, people are always afraid. Some SISs are so deeply entrenched that schools are afraid like we’re never leaving this SIS, it’s been too big of a project, which is kind of scary, scary and sad, but, yeah, I kind of rambled around that one, but, but overall, I think these AI enhanced platforms are going to dominate the tools that marry these. I’ll talk about SEO the, tools that marry SEO with next gen AI research or search like ChatGPT, will change the game. And we’re seeing that. I’m seeing that already. And there’s, there’s ways you can make these steps that are once a school sees it, they understand how they can, you know, again, go back to content discovery and how they can enhance take the next step with our content discovery.

 

Stu: Very good. Thank you. The other thing that we’ve kind of gotten around with some of the discussions we’ve had when clients are talking about, we still have clients that do not have a CRM. In fact, there’s a good number of them out there, they still do not have a CRM and yet they want to catapult into more advanced ways of communicating, either their marketing message or with their with their existing students, for example. I wonder if, if there’s a if, if this radically changes that instead of a digital maturity path, as you mentioned, the maturity toward the technology itself, is that path more accelerated now? Is it? Is the need to be on the path and get it completed, get that tech stack together? Is that a more accelerated process now than what you felt maybe three or four years ago?

 

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. I think it definitely is. And I’m glad you said process. I feel like people tend to label that as a project, like, let’s get this done. I think we just have to put ourselves in the mindset of this is new, it’s an iterative world. Now. We’re going to constantly be changing, even with the simple project as or a could be a large project as a website redesign for university. These shouldn’t even be projects anymore. This should be at this year. You build this into your annual we should make iterative progress, because the world’s moving so fast, you know what we don’t even know what’s going to be available in six months right now.

 

So I think it has accelerated. But there’s ways schools that only have, I mean, such limited budgets they can’t afford the fancy AI powered CRM. I’m doing some demos with some things you can do just within your tools you already have to, you know, what’s at the core of some of these CRMs, these AI powered CRMs, is, for example, like an RFI form comes in, and you’ll see what they’re interested in, what the students said, like you can have Google Sheets create, you know, really friendly responses, really very quickly that are in the same tone and consistent to help speed things up. I mean, so I think there’s just the spectrum of ways we can evolve. And I think a school has to determine what, where they start. You know, if they, if they, if they even have a budget or the political capital to bring on a new system, and when.

 

Stu: Yeah, and you mentioned the slower adoption rate of higher education. We are blessed to work in two different verticals, healthcare and higher education that are seldom on the bleeding edge of things that on the one side, healthcare tends to be very conservative because of the depth of private information that they are involved with. And on the other hand, higher education seems to be slower because of budget; it does tend to be the first thing that’s out there. I don’t think it’s so much conservatism very often as budget preservation; I think that they’re very willing to take some if they, I’m talking about the clients I’ve spoken to, not everyone out there (oh, I knocked over my lamp). But it just seems that their first bit is budget preservation and application, and that may make them slower to this your point. I think it was just terrific. There do with Google Sheets, if you have to in the beginning.

 

Jeff: Right, learn the basics.

 

Stu: Yeah, because, again, you have this need that you have to get accomplished, use the tools you’ve got. The other thing that we’ve been talking about a little bit also as part, as a, I don’t want to call it a new part, but a refreshed interest in things like website personalization and how all these parts and pieces can come into that. One part of website personalization or automation. I mentioned earlier, site search, and I have had a lot of people asking about AI as it applies to their site search, and I think that that may be something of an untapped resource. But my feeling is, if you’ve already qualified the audience because they’re on their website now, they’re telling you exactly what it is they want.

 

Jeff: Yes, you’re hitting the nail on the head. This is what I spend all my time talking about!

 

Stu: The thing that always disappointed me is that Google Analytics, or whatever analytics package you have built in, does not automatically report on what we call a null search, something that yielded no results. That’s I always love that, that nugget of information, because I’ve worn this, this story out to the point where it’s a trope. We worked with a hospital, getting a new website set up. Beautiful website, wonderful, high engagement rate, but we started looking at things, and the podiatry department was getting no traffic to the web. They’re part of the website. Turns out, when he started looking at the null search, people look for foot doctor, and there was no connection to that part of the website because they hadn’t taught their internal search engine to match those two to solve the problem. But that’s forever the story in my head about why site search can really point to your gaps.

 

Jeff: I love that story. I’ll have to take a mental note of that one. I have a similar story I’ll bring up, but you hit the nail on the head, and that everyone’s concerned about the LLMs and what’s happening out there with the ChatGPT and even Reddit and but you can’t control that, right? We want to try to monitor it. We can’t control it.

 

So when they get to your site, although maybe the traffic’s dipping a little bit, I can still see because I work with dozens of schools in the last few months that I’ve seen, there are still tens of 1000s of queries on your campus, your search bar, on your campus, search and that is a very poorly performing tool right now. In general, for higher ed there’s not a lot of time spent into it, often it’s being handled by a free tool. So when you brought up the no results, we call the no results terms. That same research I mentioned with the Chronicle, when they interviewed all these digital leaders, found out that 64 64% never look at their top queries, and 92% ignore those no results search terms.

 

So these are people in the myth that the myth is that people the internal people at a university will think like, well, no one’s using that search anyway. That’s just for our internal audiences. That’s what our faculty staff are using. But you know what I can see? We can see the data, the client, the people that have already enhanced their search, can say, Guess what? I can tell you right now that it’s about 25% of your traffic that’s using your internal search on your home page are prospective students or their parents, because we can tell by the keyword, you know, current students aren’t searching for, you know, chemistry degree or, you know, nursing. They might get more specific, but the general program searches are taking up a big chunk of those site searches. And these are more qualified, these are more qualified prospects now, and it’s a missing, yeah, it’s kind of the missing piece, and it’s even low hanging fruit, because it’s not a big lift to enhance your search.

 

Stu: No, it’s not. And I’ve been, I’ve been working with websites for an amount of time that I, too, won’t mention, and site search has always been, if not overtly stated, it’s always assumed that site search is the place you go when navigation fails, right? And I think that we could probably pair that with AI and actually make it into an assistant feature that’s confined to the content of your website and so on. So it still provides that search function. But I see a lot more opportunity there, instead of just simply saying I don’t have that information. But did you really mean this?

 

Jeff: Right? We’re there. We have the AI tool. We have the logic out there. And you’re right, because you know what, navigation will almost most of the time fail because we’re trying to satisfy students. And just think about the types of students, right? Current students, prospective students, graduate students. We’re trying to satisfy parents, community members, alumni, donors, internal audiences. Layer on top of that, all the content silos we have so and the subdomains and and the content management systems. What I’m saying is it’s such a complex place, digital ecosystem, you can’t really, whether you have a great agency that does all the card sorting and the focus groups, they are still, students are relying on search more than ever. It was years ago.

 

I discovered this firsthand because I watched students. I would do I give them pizza. They would show up. Have them do some tasks, and pizza was only way to give him show up like it was. It was amazing, though. And you say, do this task? Go find where this event is on campus, find out how much when the financial aid deadline is, and often the answer was right in front of their face, like on the page or a link to it, like the actual language on the page. They wouldn’t even scan the pages. They would go right to the search results. And this was 2020, 18, before they were maybe so accustomed to all these new things. And they probably, that’s probably when they all got started on this, the Spotify environments, and, you know, Spotify, Netflix, and so they’re used to that. But, yeah, search needs to be treated as not just an afterthought, but really the primary tool.

 

Stu: Yeah, it’s not a bounce-preventer. It’s the thing that helps people actually get their stuff done. Yeah, and by the way, on the pizza reference, that’s how they keep me showing up here every day, regular application of pizza. The other thing that I kind of found, we did some studies on this, too. Most of the websites, let me back off that you would said about 25% of people who use search do turn out to be your best prospects, as far as students. And yet, with the websites I work with, search is only used like three and 4% of the sessions. It is not used that often, because, quite frankly, it tends to be tucked up in an upper corner, if you even notice it there, you got to click to open and so on.

 

My opinion, as you can probably tell from the conversation, is that I think that we could spend three hours talking about site search. There’s a lot to be discovered. There’s a lot of information that can be gleaned from it. What I’m anxious to figure out is how I can use that best to inform the rest of the tech stack I have. If I can take this information from that and perhaps either use it to filter through my CRM, huge amount of data, use AI to do that, perhaps, and find the commonalities to start developing the personas and addressing that. Have you had any conversations about that, about how to use that data outside of the website?

 

Jeff: Oh, yeah, yeah, this is, that’s a great question, too, because that’s the other areas, area I’ve spent a lot of time with is helping schools move to their next digital, their next CMS or DXP. And what it comes down to is, like, there’s monolithic solutions, right? Like, in a like, I’ll say right now, Adobe is a monolithic, huge, expensive, amazing product. Most schools can’t afford it. It’s monolithic. It’s hard to kind of plug and play with things. But then there are, there are platforms. Like, a, you know, DXP is kind of an older term now, but you what you need is an integration platform, right? A lot of schools are using Zapier. There’s many others. So it’s figuring out how to, how to kind of stitch together that environment with best of breed systems. Because we know big overhauls and big, let’s say replacement of systems is kind of hard and kind of rare, like, you know, your campus, how hard, that’s what I’m seeing more of is, how do we take what we have? Maybe we’ll replace something here and there, but we really need to make sure we can create a true, create once, publish anywhere, everywhere, model.

 

And back to your personalization. We can talk about personalization. How is AI fit into that? I dabbled with personalization 20, over 20 years ago. We’ve had it for a long time, and the difference now is AI can do it a lot better for us. Because why it failed back then, we bought a fancy CMS that was doing personalization was called Liquid Matrix back in, I think, 2003, and we won the first schools at NAU to do this, and we thought, what a great idea. Like, if someone predefines they’re interested in biology, we’re going to have a bank of biology content and photos over here, and they’re going to feel like this websites for them. It was a great idea. But why didn’t it work? Well, guess what? We loaded up with all the photos, and the biology team, the biology department, called us and said, hey, it those aren’t the type of flasks we use, or that’s not the right photo. We’re like, okay, great. Then you go update the photos. That never happened. It’s never going to keep up the content. But now we can do that with AI and so now we’re, we can, we can definitely personalize, but it’s fun to watch the evolution of how things finally happen.

 

Jeff: I think the common roadblock in higher ed I think, is just fear of the unknown or fear of change. People say budget. They’ll say something else. But if you. Really, you know, kind of can bring it down to an ROI type of conversation. You often can, you often can justify the budget, but I think it’s just fear of losing control. I think people are afraid of of losing their jobs.

 

So that’s what I’m saying. Is kind of a and there’s kind of an attitude sometimes in higher ed, I kind of get reluctant to say this, but when I was in higher ed, I felt like, you often need to stay in your box and do your job and like, this isn’t this is all new stuff. How do I go out and try something new? Often, there’s more and more champions I find that, like, yes, we need to do this. It takes that strong personality to say, let’s whether you’re a staffer or director or a VP. You know, it’s more challenging at different levels, I think. But I think, I think it’s just a perfect storm of being such a difficult challenge in the environment higher ed just has created with its traditional model, really.

 

Stu: Yeah, yeah. And for so many of them, everything digital still falls under expense instead of capital expenditures. Yeah, capital investment. So, yeah, I don’t, I don’t know how soon that would change. We’re coming right down to the end of our time together. Jeff, if there’s one or two statements you wanted to get out there that might really help the audience that we speak to. What would you say to them if you could just give them two pieces of advice right now?

 

Jeff: I would say, I would say, don’t be afraid to try something new. And then, you know, AI isn’t here to replace us. I like to say it’s a it’s, it’s here to make you superhuman. So whatever you’re, if you’re kind of one of those people that’s like, not on the, not using it too much, or not knowing where to start, I would really encourage you to try to use AI to help you in your current role, and just pick up, pick a little project that’s, you know, maybe not necessarily have to go do some training session, but try to pick something useful that you can, you can tangibly have a have a win with.

 

Stu: Very good thank you.

 

Jeff: Thanks for the talk. It was fun.

 

Mariah Tang: Thanks for listening to “Did I Say That Out Loud?” with Stu Eddins and Mariah Tang. Check out the show notes for more information about today’s episode. And if you have any questions, concerns or comments, hit us up anytime at stamats.com.