How SPPA Profiles Student Experiences
Looking for simple ways to create unique and interesting content? How about having your students write a few words about their experiences in your program?
The School of Public Policy & Administration (SPPA) has done just that. On their Student Experiences page, SPPA highlights what motivates and drives their students, and gives them a chance to talk about their experiences during and after the program!
Why this Approach Works
- You can curate user-generated content that both benefits the contributor (they get a spotlight) and is of interest to potential students.
- The content can be evergreened. This is something you can build upon with new posts as new students work their way through the program.
- We know that people like to read about people. The Meet our Team feature in Web Services is always the top hitter in our newsletter. And retirement and service anniversaries always top the Top 5!
This is also a wonderful way to showcase your program and what it has to offer. Plus adding new content regularly is great for getting found on Google (SEO) and gives people a reason to come back to your website.
How? Use Posts and Categories
We really like the way that SPPA has used a news post to create a unique profile for each student, and then brought them all together onto one page.
Step 1 – Gather Student Info
Use a form to gather information from your students.
For example, SPPA asks students to fill out a form to have their profile featured. It includes a blurb about their experiences, a photo, some details about their program and contact info, and consent to post.
Step 2 – Create a Post for each Student’s Profile
Create an individual post for each student. Make a template so that you have an outline to follow for each post and they are similar in appearance. Include things like:
- A student photo
- The student’s bio or writeup
- A unique category to pull all the posts together (e.g., SPPA uses “Student Experiences”)
- A similar title for each
Step 3 – Create a Page for the Profiles
Now that you have a few student profile posts, you need to create a page to hold them all:
- Create a new page
- Pull posts onto the new page based on the category
- Pro tip: add a button to this page that allows students to request their own profile
You’ve just created some brand-new content for your site as well as a great little system for continuously updating it. Every time a student submits the form, you make a new post, then categorize it appropriately. It will magically appear on your new student profiles page!
Thanks so much to the folks at SPPA for sharing your idea of creating a Student Experiences page. We love seeing how our clients use the web template for their purposes 🙂
If you are new to our template or would like a refresher, please be sure to have a look at our recently revised CMS training to learn how you can best use all the features.