Students can be counted on to produce unlimited quantities of high-quality content to fill the holes in your Information Architecture. For some reason, the will be more interested in things like free pizza then monetary remuneration for doing this.

I try to never, ever, under any circumstances resort to hyperbole, so I’ll just say that I’ve heard this plan “a lot” in the short time I’ve worked on Notre Dame’s web projects. It mostly comes from clients, but occasionally the idea that students represent a vast, untapped resource of fresh, engaging content bubbles up from our own team. I’m guilty of falling back on it myself at times.

It’s easy to see where this myth derives. Our students are millenials. They produce copious amounts of content in the form of online picture galleries and facebook profiles and quizzes that inform them which Crayola Color they are. This content appears impressive because of the sheer volume of it. What we sometimes fail to notice is that 99% of it is useless or of interest to an exceedingly small group of close contacts. Any plan that relies on students to produce an endless stream of high-quality content cheaply is almost by definition doomed to failure. Hell…you may as well replace the word “students” with “anyone” in that last sentence. It’s just as accurate.

University web content staff should do their best not to fall into this trap. Too often, “We’ll buy the students free Papa John’s and get them to produce videos that we’ll show like YouTube. Everyone loves YouTube,” represents a flimsy bridge that we use to get over the task of actually sitting down and putting together the content that the site requires. This could because it’s too daunting, because we’re just not capable of producing it, because we don’t have any new or fresh ideas, or because we’re just lazy, but I would suggest that the actual problem is Content Overthink.

Content Overthink is a symptom of the larger problem “Overestimating Your Audience,” which develops when a site’s content is designed with the idea that everyone who visits the site will move through the content linearly, like a book, hitting all of the high points and missing nothing. Once they finish all of the important information, we need to entertain them and give them a reason to come back daily, right? It’s reasonable to assume that a giant bolt-on section of the site containing constantly updated viral student-produced content will attract return visitors and longer page views. There are two problems here: 1) No one uses an informational site for entertainment. 2) Students really aren’t all that reliable. Generally.

Content teams should concentrate on figuring out what is the most important information to their users, organize that information to make it easy to find, and then figure out an engaging, easy to read voice for the content. Whenever you find yourself at the edge of a huge gaping chasm in your content and someone suggests a vague plan to lure students into producing it for you cheaply and on an ongoing basis, consider cutting that section of the site entirely and concentrating your efforts on areas that can return more on the investment in time required to produce them.