This post was written by Matt Herzberger. Matt is the Director of Web Communications at Florida International University and co-founder of http://BlogHighEd.org/

164 total responses

I wanted to thank all of you for filling out this survey. I hope you will all find this information as useful as we do. As you have noticed by now this survey was focused on web services teams or groups for hire to provide help for websites.

For those of you hungry for numbers we have provided the raw data. Here is an excel sheet and csv and the Google response summary

How large is your enrollment

Type of institution

There is a large amount of public schools who are represented here.

What is your offices name

Other names of note include four offices don’t have a name, five are named Marketing and Communications, six named Web Development and five named web team

How many full time staff are on your team

There is a great deal in 1 or 2 those are mainly from small institutions, in “other” there are between 8-17, which corresponds with the larger schools in the survey. An interesting thing is that there was one school with 0 and another with 0.5.

How many part time staff are on your team

Similar to the full time question you can see most have 1-2 part time staff. In “other” we found that 38 schools have zero part time staff. The largest segment was 12 part time staff for two different institutions.

What skill sets do your team members have?

Overwhelmingly design and programming are the two most common skills, followed by IA and UX.

Do you run core university web properties? IE homepage, calendar, directory

The results point the fact that web teams are involved in many if not most core university web projects. A few others worth mentioning are campus tour, catalog and CMS.

How do you prioritize or choose which projects or clients to work on?

It seems most group choose their own prioritize based on the need / value to the institution. The responses under “other” consisted of 9 for all of the above and many combinations of the others.

What project management tool do you use

Basecamp seems to be the predominate project management tool, there are many in the others category but none stood out.

Where in your organization is your office located

Going along with the growing trend over past years most are located in Marketing / Communications followed by IT.

Do you charge for your services

If “yes” to the previous question, please explain how you charge, hourly rate, according to project, etc and any other relevant info, are there any pro bono

• We have an hourly rate competitive with many local design/development firms. A portion is billed at the start of the project and the rest after completion. However, we also occasionally receive requests for projects that aren’t funded but are high priority. These need to be approved by senior leadership and accounted for in the budget.
• We charge a per project fee for departments outside of the Development and External Affairs division.
• Our funding works as follows – some headcount (salary & benefits) are funded by University dollars and some which are not funded. We have a target cost recovery dollar amount to reach every year to be able to cover our budget for the unfunded headcount and other costs.
• We charge hourly, but are moving towards some fixed cost agreements for building some applications. We have different hourly rates for different levels of programmers. There is flexibility in what we charge – as long as we meet our recovery target. We can charge no more than our published rates, but they can be adjusted lower as needed for projects. Some projects are completed for no cost.
• We also do not charge for any of our core service work (homepage, campus map, CMS hosting and support, etc). This work is “purchased” by the University by funding a portion of the headcount in the department.

Do other groups on campus offer similar / competing services? If “yes” to previous question, why?

Most others referred to why they serve; some are academics vs. business, or colleges only.

Do you use or recommend third party services or vendors?

You can see that most of the web services teams don’t have the resources to meet all their needs, either because of a lack of resources or that they don’t have a certain service to offer.

What services do you offer?

Not surprisingly do to the main skill sets of the team mentioned earlier design is a main skill set offered web design is the main services offered. Something that I think is good to see is in second place, information architecture (IA) followed by CMS implementation. Which shows a swing in the level of sophistication of web services teams.

Wrap up

As mentioned earlier we have made the raw data available to you to use and remix as you see fit. If you find anything of value please let us know and we would be glad to share it.

The things to take from this survey are the staffing numbers for these types of offices are not meeting the needs. This can be drawn from the staff numbers as well as the fact that most groups do recommend third party vendors and some have competing groups on their campuses. Another interesting thing to note is most all of the groups are university funded with very few that are funded from project revenue. Depending on your size of school it might be worth noting that most schools in the survey are approx. 1501-4500 students.

Raw data

Here is an excel sheet and csv and here is the google response summary

This post was written by Nick DeNardis