Episode 9: URMIA Website Updates

 One of URMIA’s most valued member benefits is full access to the higher education risk management resources available on the URMIA website. This includes professional development content, model policies and procedures, peer-written articles, discussions in online communities, and much more. Ronna Papesh, URMIA’s website & database administrator, talks with host Jenny Whittington about ongoing improvements to the website’s search functionality as outlined in the association’s current strategic plan. Hear how URMIA is making it easier for members to find and use these valuable resources.

Show Notes and Transcript [member-only content, login required]

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Transcript

Jenny: Hello everyone and welcome to URMIA matters! I am Jenny Whittington, URMIA’s Executive Director and I have the pleasure of having Ronna Papesh. She is URMIA’s database goddess as we like to call her in the office and today we're going to be talking about our search results improvement project so let me just give a tiny bit of foundation here- so I've been with URMIA a long time, 2005, and I'll turn it over to Ronna in a little bit to tell you a bit about her background. But, since day one when it came to URMIA in 2005, the message I heard from the board in the membership was “gosh, it's really hard to find things on your website”. So, last year in 2018 we did a comprehensive needs assessment and surprisingly, or not surprisingly, we got the same kind of feedback- that it is a hard for people to find things. So, this search results improvement project was really to address the feedback we heard from the needs assessment, and to make things easier for our members to make all of our resources easier to find like one to three clicks if they can. So, Ronna I'm going to introduce you now, please give us a bit of background about yourself, like how long you been with URMIA, your technical experience and then we’ll kind of dive into this project. Welcome!

Ronna: Thank you Jenny! I'm URMIA’s website and database administrator since 2015- time sure has flown; it's amazing. Before URMIA I was in other nonprofits basis, education and I even worked at the school of education at IU for a while, and just always techie. 

Jenny: Yeah and well I mean you have been a welcome addition to URMIA. We did have that one technical person before you at URMIA but having a technical person on your staff really is something that's very needed and critical and Ronna really thinks about things as processes and she's a big asset to our team. So, when we got this feedback in the needs assessment, we divided it into chunks and Ronna is really largely responsible for a lot of the technology support. So, let's talk about step one of the search results improvement project. Let's talk about how we determined how we were going to measure success, because as I said Ronna is very process-oriented, so we had to know what we were measuring what identifying the problem and trying to solve that exact problem. So, take it away.

Ronna: Ok.  After researching many different methods of evaluating search engine results we decided to follow the method described in the article entitled “Testing Search and Relevancy Precision”. It’s published by A List Apart. And so, after we picked our way to measure, then we went ahead and ran some baseline testing, so that we could find out where we are and where we're going to go. And that testing pretty much proved what everybody thought. There was lots of room for improvement with our site-search tool. 

Jenny: And let me just back that up. This is an obvious question, but we're talking about the search box that is on our website, and we're talking about the search box that’s in the library. Do they both search the same places?

Ronna: They do. So, any search that you find on an URMIA website is going to search the same set of resources and now you'll be able to pick different categories and different types of information that you’re looking for and kind of drill down in a search and that didn’t used to be very useful before and that's just one of our big improvements.

Jenny: Yeah, and you know Lou Drapeau, URMIAs resource manager, he's largely responsible for adding things to the library. So, not very many people know about the back in and out like what he does, but when Lou adds resources to the library, he does set some tags, right? Tell us a little bit about that structure.

Ronna: Yes, we’ve set a structure of tags that we just predetermined what people… categories that people might be looking for in different types of resources, and then we mark a resource that way and that tells the search engine when to produce that/include that resource in the results list. 

Jenny: Ok, so let’s continue down the steps. Are we going to talk next about the faceted search?

Ronna: Yes. Basically the tool that we were using and had available in our platform was an older tool and they had come out with a newer tool and we tested it maybe 2 years ago and it just still needed some work so we decided to wait and then again last year I gave it another try and then thought “okay. I think we can work with this as long as we are able to configure it to meet our member needs”. So, I was able to configure the tool and then test it and configure it and test it and configure it and test it round and round and round many different times. But, I’m very proud to say that we now have a tool that improved search precision by 33% and reduced total misses by 15%.

Jenny: That is amazing, and it let me just reflect a little bit on the past. So, I recall when Glenn Klinksiek was our resource and education manager that he and Luke Zimmer did a webinar about our library search function, I believe it was a whole hour of technique and how you could tailor your search and basically Ronna has cut to the chase here and she's helped, you know, make our search engine much more robust, and much easier because in the needs assessment our members, you all, told us that you have less time than ever, so the need to make the search function more robust and quicker was very evident. So, what's the next step, Ronna?

Ronna: Well, we also had some data from all of our members doing searches over the years and we identified the top five or six search terms that people have been using in last two years and that gave us an indication that those are the resources people want to see. So, to make it even easier to find those, we've concluded links directly to those resources for pre-configured searches that will get people straight to what they're looking for.

Jenny: And what's the best way to find that?

Ronna: You find that on the search tools page down towards the bottom. It's popular searches and there are several links across the page.

Jenny: And when you're logged into the URMIA site, everybody sees it in a box on the right-hand side of their screen, correct?

Ronna: Yes. There's a button called search tools that you can go directly to and it gives you a box that you can either type a keyword into or you can use one of the links for the popular searches.

Jenny: Awesome, and what is the little button right above that? Can you speak to that a little bit? 

Ronna: Oh yeah, you’re getting ahead of the script! No, it is our for ubiquitous ask Lou button right above the search tool. So, if you have trouble finding things with the new search tool, then you can still use the ask Lou button at any time and Lou will help you find what you are looking for.

Jenny: Excellent. Well, tell me a little bit about more about the steps.

Ronna: Okay, well after we configured it and thought okay, I think this is ready for us to release to the members, and now it's our turn to tune about some of the changes and we want to just make sure to get the word out to people so we, we've launched a holiday gift marketing campaign in December to inform the members about the new search tools and we had a lot of fun with this campaign and even produced a quick demo video to highlight some of the new features.

Jenny: Yeah and I would ask everybody listening to our podcast today to check out the video- we will definitely have a link to it in the show notes. And then, can we just speak just a tiny bit about the structure of the library? Like, I know on the website you have a couple options when you go to the library page. You can look at it by folder or you can look at the other page. Can you speak to that just a little bit?

Ronna: Yeah, it depends how you prefer to see your information there's one choice to look at the overview, library overview page, which has a nice feed of the latest and newest information added to the library. Some people really like that so they can keep up-to-date with what's going on and then others who know the kind of thing they’re looking for, they can just browse through a directory structure and find the resources that way.

Jenny: I'm really glad you said that because sometimes, there are two other organizations that I'm a part of of URMIA and they also use Higher Logic- that we use for our library. And sometimes I find those latest files that people shared are super interesting, like I didn't know I wanted to learn about that topic but if there's a template, oh I might download that, you never know when it might come in handy.

Ronna: Exactly. 

Jenny: Okay, anything else on the steps or the big gift reveal?

Ronna: No, but I would like to talk about the more things that we've been doing that should also affect the search results and improve them. The board has created some task forces to further improve the relevancy of the resources that are displayed in the search results. one group is working to identify and archive discussion threads that are no longer relevant and another task force is evaluating content in the URMIA library and archiving the resources that are outdated or no longer useful. Next year, another task force will reimagine our tagging the key word structure that we just talked about a few minutes ago and there's room for improvement there too and the goal is to make it easier for members to find the information that they're looking for.

Jenny: Excellent. I know, I mean, I know who Lou Drapeau is doing a great job leading those task forces and I think in this world of information that we live in, like I alluded to earlier, Ronna is all about process, and archiving, chooses an analogy with me. I thought your closet gets full sometimes and you have a hard time finding maybe the garments that you want the most often. So, that's what we're doing right now we're kind of cleaning out our closet and trying to make those really good resources easier for you all to find. 

Ronna: Yes and we've done a couple more things that hopefully will help too. As Jenny mentioned, we added to search tools button below the ask Lou button that shows up on any page that you're on when you're logged in as a member, and we also recently rearranged our homepage to highlight important member benefits and resources and put them towards the top of the homepage, just to make them a little bit easier to see and some of those examples would be a career center, events calendar and getting to the online discussion community. Now, my goal in this whole project is continuous improvement to make the URMIA website easier to use.

Jenny: Excellent. Well, I think that is an excellent goal for all of us because we do want to provide great customer service to all of our members. Any closing comments before we wrap this up?

Ronna: No, I just am honored to have been asked to share some of this project with all of the members.

Jenny: Well, that'll be a wrap for this edition of URMIA Matters.