You made it! - Fine Point Communications

Congratulations on reaching the finish line this school year! While many of you still have commencement ceremonies ahead, the end of the race is nearly here.

At Refill, we know that communicators are prone to moving immediately to the next thing. But we also counsel comms leaders (and their supervisors) to pause when finishing a big project, for just a moment, and appreciate their accomplishment.

This year, you’ve achieved much, contributed significantly to your school, and kept parents, alumni and donors in touch with the things that matter. The school is better for what you made happen, and that deserves recognition. Raise a cold, bubbly drink with your colleagues in celebration!

Catching up with Google

Discussion about schools’ communications technology tends to focus on Blackbaud and Finalsite, the companies that dominate their market.

Yet a third company often goes unmentioned or even noticed, despite its crucial role for essentially every school.

Schools “hire” Google to handle at least three and as many as five critical external-communications functions:

Drive search-engine traffic;
Collect data about website visitors;
Host and present videos (through its subsidiary YouTube);
Email management; and
Pay-per-click online advertising.

Google’s primary virtue is that everything works just as expected — a massive benefit with technology.

But the company’s primary vice, its monopoly status, is now coming into play.

Google has begun altering its deal with users, incorporating or announcing significant adjustments in most of the above five areas.

With no serious alternative to handle, say, website analytics or enterprise-wide email infrastructure, schools must choose: either do without those services or swallow hard and work with the changes.

Let’s walk through what’s been happening.

Search-engine results

The feature best associated with Google, online search, got a significant update this month with the addition of generative AI features.

Phone shows text of an AI overview description The most noticeable has been the “AI Overview,” a summary that now appears at the top of many searches. Google believes this will help users get the information they want more quickly. Gemini — what Google calls its generative AI — has also been baked into the company’s Lens and Maps features.

The tech site the Verge summed up the changes as “nothing short of a full-stack AI-ification of search … whether you’re typing, speaking, taking a picture, or shooting a video.”

The news prompted two quick questions at Refill: Is Gemini ready for such responsibility? And won’t this affect supplementary landing pages?

It sounds like Google wants Gemini to replace Wikipedia as the arbiter of platonic online truth. That authority will take time to build; it won’t be earned by simply recoding a search-engine results page (SERP). And Gemini must be up to the challenge: Already, generative AI is earning plenty of bad press for its “hallucinations,” and a reputation for bogus or sloppy summaries will be hard to live down.

In the meantime, schools should prepare to address any misinformation captured in AI Overviews — much as they’ve had to fight against misinformation on Wikipedia. Hey, arguing with a robot will likely feel a lot like debating a Wikipedian!

The fate of landing pages is unclear, but the signs are troubling. SERPs are crowded already, and Google adding a new section suggests that something else must lose front-page placement. Secondary landing pages are the likeliest to go, which would remove one way schools can tell their story through Google.

While AI Overviews become more common, we recommend pausing any new pages that aren’t central to an upcoming advertising campaign. Let’s first see how this plays out.

Google Analytics

Last year, Google replaced its Universal Analytics tool that measured website usage. The new tool is called Google Analytics 4 (GA4), and its arrival was driven by growing international concerns about the privacy implications of cookies.

Nearly a year into the switchover, many schools are still unclear about the data collected by GA4 and how they differ from Universal Analytics. Web analytics contain lots of useful information, but panning for the gold can be laborious.

To learn more about quickly getting what you need, this summer would be a good time to dive deep into the YouTube collection of tutorials on GA4 that Google has created.

Email and DMARC

In February, Gmail began enforcing a new protocol for bulk email, one that pushed more of such mailings into spam folders instead of inboxes.

Theoretically, the email protocol known as DMARC — for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance — affects only those who send 5,000 messages or more daily. In practice, though, far smaller operations are finding their emails “quarantined,” marked as spam.

To learn whether your school has been caught up in the DMARC change, check your bulk-mail analytics for any meaningful spike in spam reports or declines in open rates that started this spring. If you find that you need a fix, bring in your IT colleagues for a chat.

Pay-per-click advertising

With the changes to Google Search, it’s not yet clear which will get the top spot on a SERP: pay-per-click ads or AI Overviews.

Google makes nearly $50 billion a year from Search ads, a strong incentive to leave ads where they’re most effective, on top of a SERP. Yet the company is also trying to establish its strength in the generative-AI arms race.

Right now, Google is placing ads within the AI Overview, a kind of compromise. Click-through results will likely determine whether this experiment sticks around. As with landing pages, this situation will bear watching.

See you in Baltimore!

Fine Point Communications will return next month to the International Coalition of Girls’ Schools conference, where we again will be a Bronze Sponsor. This year, we will also present to attendees!

On Tuesday, June 25, at 3 p.m., Scott Butterworth will lead a small discussion titled, “Searching for the Right Words: The Complexity of School Statements.”

This is part of ICGS’s “INSPIRE” sessions, in which attendees gather around tables in the conference ballroom to discuss various topics.

Scott’s presentation builds on October’s issue of Refill, with plenty of new information drawn from the past few months in education.

If we don’t see you on Tuesday afternoon, come by the Fine Point table in the Exhibitor Area on Monday or Tuesday to say hello!

Don’t-miss clicks

Speaking of statements, Harvard University announced this week that it would no longer “issue official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.” This follows a recommendation by a university working group, whose three-page report is well worth reading. In particular, the group drew a bright line against “official statements of empathy.” That recommendation put us in mind of this February op-ed by Macalester College President Suzanne M. Rivera, who noted the no-win trap inherent in such statements.
The Mastery Transcript Consortium was acquired this month by the nonprofit ETS (formerly the Educational Testing Service), a development that affects scores of independent schools. ETS has been working for a year on competency-based assessments, and MTC’s work will now fold into that. This is the second acquisition within the assessment space in as many months.