“If They Would Just Listen to Us…”: Turning Client Relationships into Collaborations
Tuesday, Oct 23 10:45 - 11:30
Presented by Michael PowersYou’re smart. (You do work in higher ed, after all.) You know your stuff. You have ideas. New ideas. Good ideas. And yet—your clients (internal or external) don’t want your ideas. Or your style guide. They know what they want: the same thing they’ve been doing for the last ten years. Why won’t they just listen to you?
The answer is finding ways to turn to client relationships into real collaborations. When we move from a conformance mindset to a collaboration mindset, we can find ourselves in the position to do our best work—work our clients will love.
What you’ll learn:
* How to move from a conformance to a collaboration mindset.
* Using workshop techniques (like job stories, pair writing, mad libs, and more) in meeting settings.
* How to uncover the real problems your clients are facing, and solve them—together.
About
Michael Powers
Executive Director of Marketing and CommunicationsMike Powers is Executive Director of Marketing and Communications at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He used to be an English professor and wrote about people like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. Mike has worked for IUP since 1999, and started managing its main website in 2007. Since then, he has overseen IUP’s transition to a content management system and then to a responsive site, put IUP on social media, worked on IUP’s smartphone app and student portal, and managed many other projects. He has been using the term content strategy to describe much of what he does since sometime in 2010. Powers has presented at eduWeb, at the Penn State Web Conference, online for Higher Ed Experts, at several varieties of Confab, and at ContentEd. He designed the Higher Ed Experts course “Web Writing for Higher Ed,” a four-week course on web writing for higher education. He’s also a dad, a musician, and a co-founder of Westsylvania Jazz and Blues Festival in Indiana, Pennsylvania.