Background

When I’m asked how I got into the world of higher education digital communications, this is the project that started it all. As a first-year undergraduate student at the University of San Francisco (USF), I received hundreds of anonymous questions to my personal Tumblr account. After being recruited to join USF’s Office of Marketing and Communications, I worked to make the energy behind this Tumblr Q&A more official. Partnering with the Office of Admissions, I launched a collaborative admissions blog called Ask Dons in 2012 that is still active 6 years later.

After I migrated content from an underused Admissions WordPress account to the revitalized Ask Dons blog, I assembled a team of Admissions Ambassadors to contribute written content to the blog and continued answering questions from prospective students. Using content tagging, I created a FAQ to make searching for answers more simple. Topics ranged from admissions requirements, student life, campus housing, financial aid and more. I analyzed the content we received and created a USF Q&A Report documenting which questions were the most frequent and which time of year specific topics tended to arise.