The Georgia Education Advancement Council (GEAC) recognized Amy Hancock, South Georgia State College’s assistant director of marketing and communications, for individual achievement and excellence in marketing and communications.
GEAC is a statewide organization for those at public and private colleges and universities who work in educational advancement, including the areas of alumni, development, publications, and communications. Hancock was nominated for the award by Jimmy Harper, SGSC’s vice president of enrollment management and information technology. She received the award at GEAC’s fall 2022 conference in Savannah. The GEAC Awards are intended to honor higher education professionals in Georgia who have distinguished themselves in their respective fields. In making its selections, the GEAC Awards Committee looks for consistent service and specific examples of outstanding performance and commitment.
As noted in her nomination, Hancock has worked in continuing education, advancement and is currently in marketing and communications at SGSC. Her day-to-day work expanded into enrollment management, and she gained first-hand knowledge in the area of admissions and recruitment. Among her duties, she creates printed materials for recruitment and enrollment campaigns and designs for social media in addition to daily posting on the official social media channels of the college. This role placed her in the lead of the website redesign focused on an improved visitor experience with tools to meet the needs of current and prospective students, as well as employees and community members.
“When starting the process for our website redesign, Amy willingly took the lead and began putting plans in motion to move the project forward,” Harper said. “She viewed it through the lens of making the site visually appealing with a design that would be easy to navigate. As she worked with the website vendor, Third Wave Digital, on the redesign, a site map was developed to incorporate items that were already a part of the design but with a new look, as well as innovative items such as a student gateway and faculty/staff gateway for ease in navigation. The gateway pages are easily accessible from the website home page, and the layout creates a format to use one click to get to commonly used pages and sites for each group. In addition, particular detail was given to align the website with the mission, vision and values of South Georgia State College, along with its “Moving Forward” strategic plan.”
Especially noteworthy is initial statistics of the website redesign that launched in July of 2022 show an increase of 34% in page views and a 36% decrease in bounce rate, which means fewer visitors are navigating away from the site after viewing only one page allowing them to find out more about our institution. The site has been well received and will continue to be developed to meet the needs of the students, employees, and visitors. The newly redesigned site can be found at www.sgsc.edu.