Lightning talks

Getting Your Point Across (and Down): What Crossword Construction Can Teach Us About Content

Donna Talarico — Donna Talarico: Stories & Such

Crosswordease : NYT puzzle :: academic jargon : college website. If you've been solving crosswords for a while, you might have noticed clues and answers becoming more relevant and more inclusive. As in puzzle construction, content writers must choose each word carefully -- and each word also contributes to a cohesive whole. Sometimes we can be clever, sometimes we need to be straightforward; typically, we must follow the rules, but if we know them well enough we can break them. And in our line of work, we certainly have to work within constraints.

In this fast-paced session, you'll take away high-level tips about creating clear, accessible, and compelling content using best practices from the crossword construction community. The talk will culminate with some word/writing research resources you might not have heard of yet! This lightning talk might not “solve” all of our sector’s content problems, but it will help fill in some blanks! 

How to (Virtually) Train Your Clients: Top Ten Tips

Charlotte Bradley — Carleton University

At Carleton University, our web team manages over 600 websites in our content management system and supports over 1000 clients who manage the content on those websites. When the pandemic hit and we were all forced to go virtual, we had to quickly figure out how we would continue to train and support our clients. Little did we know, this was a huge opportunity! Virtual training allows us to share information with a large number of people, empowering them to build awesome web content. It engages different learning styles, provides self-paced delivery and is a great way to stay connected to our clients. Join us for our top 10 virtual training ideas – a tip a minute!

Cheat Sheets: Collaborating with Non-Web Folk to Bring their Data Online

Jonathan Tegg — Worcester State University

Let's say a department needs to display some data on the university website, but they need that data updated on a frequent basis. You don't want your job to become "the full-time data updater", but at the same time you can't just give them the keys to the website to do it themselves, so what can you do?

Did you know the Google Sheets API allows you to take advantage of the simplicity of a shared spreadsheet whose data can be piped right to your website?

This presentation will show you how you can provide access to a Google Sheets spreadsheet which will house the data, and use either client- or server-side code to consume JSON data exposed via the Google Sheets API.

Learn how Worcester State University used this exact approach to solve these kind of challenges for projects ranging from fundraising competitions to the dreaded COVID-19 dashboard. We'll talk about how to set things up, some recommended practices to prevent problems, and some technical limitations to consider.

Calm, cool and collected communication: but better!

Camile Turner — University of Kentucky, Gatton College of Business

Communication channels continue to disappear and reappear like '80s hairstyles! At times, we all question implementing new channels due to lack of knowledge, audience insights, changing trends and more. Whether creating a single post for an event recap on LinkedIn or determining what size print materials for the upcoming career fair, this session will aid you in consistently working through where to place communications and deciding who it is intended for. You have the power to deliver the key to strategic communication integrity to each channel, effectively and with confidence!