Zack Barnett

Philosophy

It’s important to tell the right story to the right people at the right time. Here are some samples — team efforts from UO Web Communications — which range of entire sites with millions of annual pageviews, to individual narratives.Together, we’re redefiing how — and when — we tell the university’s story.

University of Oregon homesite: In the fall of 2010, University of Oregon Web Communications led efforts to launch a brand new university homesite. The site targets external audiences with strategic storytelling. While the old home page allowed us to tell a couple stories a month using a tiny Spotlight area, the new site allows us to tell five stories at time, blending a slideshow with a spotlight. In addition, we’ve included photos with all news releases. We’ve reported on the spot from the BCS National Championship and covered other events like a news outlet. In fact, when it comes to immediacy for live events, the UO is beating other news outlets to the web and building a following because of it.

Celebrating Champions: With a football team that routinely ranks among the nation’s best and generous donors who build glorious athletic facilities, it can be a challenge to highlight the UO’s world-class programs in academics. In the second year of our Celebrating Champions campaign, we saw a 339 percent increase in traffic to the site between the 2009 bowl season and the 2010 bowl season. In 2009, we built the first Champions site over four days with the help of Free Flow Digital. This time, we planned the site months in advance and coordinated its launch with a strategic communications plan to leverage the national attention from the football team for the entire university.

Work samples