To: The UMBC Community

From: President Freeman Hrabowski 

Date: June 26, 2013

As we shared with the campus community in January, the USM Board of Regents has required all USM institutions, including UMBC, to provide a healthy, smoke-free environment for all faculty, staff, students, contractors, and visitors by July 1, 2013. We appointed the Smoke-Free Campus Task Force – with representatives from UMBC's shared governance organizations, including students, faculty, and staff members – to make recommendations about how best to implement this policy on our campus, and that group has worked throughout the spring semester.

We would like to thank all the task force members for their diligence in soliciting input from national experts, other colleges and universities with smoke-free policies, and most important, our campus community. We also would like to thank all of you who took the time to share your perspective on how best to implement this policy. The task force received valuable input from community members who attended one of six campus forums held in February and March or who shared feedback by emailing smokefree@umbc.edu. Many other members of our community provided input through their shared governance representative or through contacting another task force member. That feedback was critical to the task force's work and is reflected in the thoroughness and considered nature of the group's final recommendation.

We are proud to say that, in accordance with USM policy and the task force's recommendations, UMBC will become a smoke-free campus on July 1, 2013.

The task force has recommended that smoking be allowed in two designated areas removed from major pedestrian traffic, in order to provide a safe space for any students, faculty, or staff who may continue to smoke. The two locations will be the Park Road Smoking Area, adjacent to Lots 1 and 3, and the Fine Arts Service Smoking Area, near the Fine Arts Building service area. For students, faculty, and staff who would like to stop smoking, University Health Services offers free visits with a medical provider who will provide support and discuss various options for quitting. You can find more information on the UHS website or can call 410-455-2542 to make an appointment.

You can read the task force’s recommendations on smokefree.umbc.edu, and more information about the full implementation plan will be provided on the site in the coming weeks.

This new policy reflects a national movement to provide healthy, smoke-free environments on college campuses and brings UMBC in line with more than 800 colleges in the United States that are already smoke free. We appreciate your support and assistance as we implement this new policy designed to make our campus community healthier for all who study, work, or visit here.

Smoke-Free Campus Task Force

• Valerie Thomas, Associate Vice President for Human Resources (Co-Chair)
• Nancy Young, Vice President for Student Affairs (Co-Chair)
• Donna Anderson, Manager of Landscape and Grounds
• Terry Aylsworth, Non-Exempt Staff Senate representative and Executive Administrative Assistant, CAHSS
• Dottie Caplan, Non-Exempt Staff Senate representative and Executive Administrative Assistant, CNMS
• Dayna Carpenter, Professional Staff Senate representative and Annual Giving Coordinator
• Fritzie Charné-Merriwether, Special Assistant to the Vice President of Student Affairs
• Romy Jones, Graduate Student Association Community Liason
• Adele Kirk, Faculty Senate representative and Assistant Professor of Public Policy
• Tsunhon Leung, Student Government Association representative
• Steve Pitts, Faculty Senate representative and Associate Professor of Psychology
• Alison Rohrbach, Assistant Director of University Health Services
• David Stonko, Student Government Association representative
• Jason Sumpter, Student Government Association representative
• Beth Wells, Professional Staff Senate representative and Assistant Vice Provost for Academic Affairs

Are your marketing campaigns profitable? In this post I’m going to show you a simple and reliable way to calculate marketing campaign profitability. This will allow you to crank up your spending on profitable campaigns and kill the poor performers.

Calculate your LifeTime Value

The first thing you need to do is figure out the average amount of revenue that your customers pay you over their entire lifetime. You can do these calculations in a simple Google Spreadsheet, any database or Excel. I’ve created a free example Excel spreadsheet here for you to download.

1. Assign each customer a unique ID. This could be their email address or a unique integer.
2. Each time a customer pays you, attach the payment to their unique ID.
3. The customer’s Life Time Value or LTV is a simple calculation: Add up all their purchases with you. It’s easy to do this because you’ve associated each purchase with a unique Customer ID.
4. Calculate the average LTV for all your customers.

Record your campaign data

You’ve got to keep careful records on your marketing spending in order to determine profitability. Initially this can be done in a spreadsheet but I’d highly recommend that you build an automatic system that records all of this data automatically to a database and crunches and reports all the data.

1. Assign each campaign a unique ID.
2. Record the amount you spent on the campaign.
3. Use a unique URL for the landing page, so the unique clicks from each campaign can be recorded in Google Analytics. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to create advanced segments in Google Analytics. For example, just attach the campaign ID to the URL like this: http://teamtreehouse.com/?cid=188. See the screenshot below for how I’d capture the number of unique clicks for that campaign.
4. Record the number of conversions (new customers) who came from each campaign. You can also do this in Google Analytics with Goals. Here’s a tutorial on how to setup Goals in Google Analytics.
5. You can then view the Goal report in Google Analytics and use the Advanced Segment you created, to see the number of conversions on a specific campaign.

The above process will be time consuming if you are doing this manually. This is why you should invest the money and time, at some point, to build a system that records all of this data automatically for you. Collecting it manually at first will  help you understand the data, but it will become too time consuming long term.

Calculate your Cost per Acquisition (CPA) and Profitability

1. Once you know the number of clicks and conversions for each campaign, you can calculate the Cost per Acquisition or CPA. To calculate a campaign’s CPA, just divide the total cost of the campaign by the number of conversions.
2. Determine the profitability of each campaign by comparing the CPA to the average Lifetime Value or LTV. If it’s profitable, then you should consider increasing your budget. If it’s not, then you should consider discontinuing the campaign.

Be warned: just because a campaign is profitable now doesn’t mean it’ll always be profitable. There will be a point where you’ve saturated a channel and you either need to refresh your ads or find a new market/channel to advertise to.

We’ve created an in-depth workshop at Treehouse called Measuring Company Performance with MRR, Churn and Lifetime Values that should also be very helpful.

Please share your tips on measuring campaign profitability below in the comments. I’d love to hear from you!

The post How to Determine if your Marketing Campaigns are Profitable appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Silver Screen Society is a project curated and maintained by graphic designers Trevor Basset and Brandon Schaefer. The idea is to honor the many stories told through the world of cinema by each month featuring a new film and inviting several creatives to create artwork based on their own unique interpretations.

Not only is it fascinating to see how those interpretations differ but also to see the various different styles of artwork. One piece can be 100% vector art and the next can be painted entirely by hand, so there’s plenty of variety on show. Amongst the long list of contributors you can expect to see work from the likes of Luke Bott, Shed Labs, Timo Meyer and Jack Hughes, to name a few.

Here’s a collection of some of our favourite pieces:

Creep Show

Dead Man

Dick Tracy

Fantasia

Forbidden Planet

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Hero

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

Mad Max

Super Mario Bros.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen

The City of Lost Children

Which of these pieces is your favourite? Do you have a similar side project? Let us know in the comments.

60+ Hours of Expert Tutorials from Growth Hacker TV – only $29!

The following is a guest post by Parker Bennett. Parker has written for CSS-Tricks before, in his article Crop Top dealing with the positioning of fluid images. This is a great follow up to that, presenting another option in the never-ending responsive images saga. It's also an interesting contrast to yesterday's post on responsive images - so you can see how very different the approaches to this problem can be.

We want fast page loads. We want retina images. Can we have it all?

We don't want to serve giant-sized images to people who don't need them. There are several approaches for not doing this — including Scott Jehl's picturefill, server-side solutions, and lazy-loading techniques — but the simplest method may be to use a background-image and the magic of CSS media queries. This way, your lucky retina users get the high-res @2x versions, and the rest of us… well, at least I don't have to wait for mammoth files to download.

(To help illustrate below, I've made my "mobile first" default image black and white, the medium-sized version sepia, and there's a larger color version if you resize wide enough or are on a high-dpi screen.)

/* base background-image class */
    .bg-image {
      width: 100%;
      /* default background-position */
      background-position: center center;
      /* lt ie 8 */
      -ms-background-position-x: center;
      -ms-background-position-y: center;
      /* scale proportionately */
      background-size: cover;
      /* IE8 workaround - http://louisremi.github.io/background-size-polyfill/ */
      -ms-behavior: url(/backgroundsize.min.htc); }
    
    /* mobile-first default (b&w) */
    .bg-image-sedona {
      background-image: url(img/photo-sedona_512x320.jpg);
      background-position: center 21%; }
    
    /* example media queries (IE8 needs this:
       http://code.google.com/p/css3-mediaqueries-js) */
    @media
      /* "mama-bear" - plus any-retina */
      only screen and min-width : 513px,
      only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
      only screen and (        min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5) {
    
        /* mid-size (sepia) */
        .bg-image-sedona {
          background-image: url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640.jpg); }
      }
    
    @media
      /* "papa-bear" - plus larger retina */
      only screen and (min-width : 1025px),
      only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
      only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and (        min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5) {
    
        /* high-res (color) */
        .bg-image-sedona {
          background-image: url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640@2x.jpg); }
      }

The div displaying the background-image needs a height, which can be set manually, or, as I've done here, by wrapping a transparent "proxy" img set to scale responsively (more on this here).

Now, as you may have noticed, the first time a page renders a large image, there can be a noticeable delay as it loads. Even smaller images, before they're cached, may display an annoying flash as they load or get swapped in. But we can fix that…

CSS3 multiple-backgrounds: How They Stack Up

Edit on CodePen

Newer browsers let us stack background images by declaring multiple values separated by a comma. In this way, we can display the original cached image while the replacement image smoothly loads over it (note the stacking order in the code below).

To see this at work, narrow the browser window and empty the cache (choose "Clear Browsing Data" in the Chrome menu or "Empty Caches" in Safari's Develop menu). Now reload the page. Scroll back down here and widen the window until the color images load above. (Or try this pop-up window.)

Unfortunately, older browsers such as IE8* see multiple background declarations and throw up their hands — displaying nothing (yikes!). So we need to use modernizr.js to feature-detect, and create a fallback (if we want those browsers to show something larger than the mobile-first default):

/* .bg-image and .bg-image-sedona same as above.
       .multiplebgs class added by modernizer.js. */
    
    @media
      /* "mama-bear" - plus any-retina */
      only screen and min-width : 513px,
      only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
      only screen and (        min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5) {
    
        /* no-multiplebgs - mid-size fallback (sepia) */
        .no-multiplebgs .bg-image-sedona,
        /* upscale to mid-size if no javascript */
        .no-js .bg-image-sedona {
          background-image: url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640.jpg); }
    
        .multiplebgs .bg-image-sedona {
          background-image:
            /* mid-size on top (sepia) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640.jpg),
            /* mobile-first default on bottom (b&w) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_512x320.jpg);
          }
      }
    
    @media
      /* "papa-bear" - all three images */
      only screen and (min-width : 1025px) {
    
        /* no-multiplebgs fallback is above */
    
        .multiplebgs .bg-image-sedona {
          background-image:
            /* high-res on top (color) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640@2x.jpg),
            /* mid-size in middle (sepia) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640.jpg),
            /* mobile-first default on bottom (b&w) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_512x320.jpg);
          }
      }
    
    @media
      /* larger retina device - triggered immediately,
         so mid-size image not needed */
    
      only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and
        (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
      only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and
        (        min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5) {
    
        /* no-multiplebgs fallback is above */
    
        .multiplebgs .bg-image-sedona {
          background-image:
            /* high-res on top (color) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640@2x.jpg),
            /* mobile-first default on bottom (b&w) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_512x640.jpg);
        }
      }

Standard vs. Progressive JPEGs

For JPEGs, the way an image renders over another image in a multiple background depends on how it's been saved. A standard JPEG "paints" the image sequentially as it's downloading. Progressive JPEGs "pop on" once completely downloaded. (The standard way seems smoother to me.) Note that image compressors like ImageOptim have their defaults set to save progressively (Jpegrescan is checked) because it saves a little space.

Of course, we don't want users to download images unnecessarily, or overcomplicate our upkeep, so it's important we keep our breakpoints restrained and think them through logically. But now that we can make image swapping less conspicuous, it opens up some possibilities…

Faking "lowsrc"

Edit on CodePen

Back in the days when steam powered the Internet, dial-up access was so slow they created a special attribute so that users would see something during the minute and a half it took to download their animated gifs: it was called "lowsrc" and it looked like this: IMG SRC="big.gif" LOWSRC="small.gif".

Browsers stopped supporting this back in the late '50s.

But something like this might be handy now, so that users can see something during the two-and-a-half seconds it takes to download their retina-ready high-res images. (And don't forget, 4K is coming.)

Modern browsers are pretty smart about filling in images as soon as they're fetched, so by specifying smaller, more compressed "lowsrc" images as the default, then including them stacked beneath the @2x retina images in our CSS media queries, things are likely to feel snappier. We can go one step further using jQuery…

The idea is to hold off image swapping until the page is rendered completely with our default "lowsrc" images. Then we use jQuery to add an "hd" class to our main "bg-image" class, which triggers our media queries to swap the images. We could also hold off and "lazy load" the higher-res images as we scroll to them, using something like the jQuery Waypoints plug-in.

/* .bg-image and .bg-image-sedona same as above
       .hd class added by jQuery after page loads
       (or perhaps "lazy loaded" as user scrolls) */
    
    @media
      /* "mama-bear" - plus any-retina */
      only screen and (min-width : 513px),
      only screen and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
      only screen and (        min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5) {
    
        /* no-multiplebgs - mid-size fallback */
        .no-multiplebgs .bg-image-sedona.hd,
        .no-js .bg-image-sedona {
          /* mid-size (sepia) */
          background-image: url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640.jpg); }
    
        .multiplebgs .bg-image-sedona.hd {
          background-image:
            /* mid-size on top (sepia) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640.jpg),
            /* mobile-first "lowsrc" on bottom (b&w) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_512x320.jpg); }
      }
    
    @media
      /* "papa-bear" - size only */
      only screen and (min-width : 1025px) {
    
        /* no-multiplebgs fallback is above */
    
        .multiplebgs .bg-image-sedona.hd {
          background-image:
            /* high-res on top (color) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640@2x.jpg),
            /* mid-size in middle (sepia) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640.jpg),
            /* mobile-first "lowsrc" on bottom (b&w) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_512x320.jpg); }
      }
    
    @media
      /* larger retina device, triggered immediately,
         so mid-size image is not needed */
      only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and
        (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5),
      only screen and (min-device-width : 768px) and
        (        min-device-pixel-ratio: 1.5) {
    
        /* no-multiplebgs fallback is above */
    
        .multiplebgs .bg-image-sedona.hd {
          background-image:
            /* high-res on top (color) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_1024x640@2x.jpg),
            /* mobile-first "lowsrc" on bottom (b&w) */
            url(img/photo-sedona_512x320.jpg); }
      }

/* waits until everything is loaded, not just DOM is ready */
    $(window).load(function() {
    
      $('.bg-image').addClass('hd');
    
    });

See this "Faking lowsrc" demo in action

See an example with "lazy loading" at work.

/* "lazy loads" when .bg-image appears in viewport -
       http://imakewebthings.com/jquery-waypoints/ */
    
    $('.bg-image').waypoint(function(direction) {
      if (direction === 'down') {
        $(this).addClass('hd');
      }
    }, { offset: 'bottom-in-view', triggerOnce: true });
    
    /* other offsets: '100%' (image top at viewport bottom),
       '125%' (just beyond the viewport, about to scroll in) */

Wrapping Up

Ideally, I'd like to see this work in a more automated way, like picturefill.js, but extrapolating from a mobile-first img rather than a data-src attribute. What do you think? You can take a look at the source code for more, see all the demos on CodePen, or download the example files here. If you have any questions, comments, or corrections, drop me a line: parker@parkerbennett.com.

* IE8 doesn't support multiple backgrounds, but if you can declare a width and height for your image, you could work something similar using this pseudo-element approach by Nicolas Gallagher.

The Layered Look: Better Responsive Images Using Multiple Backgrounds is a post from CSS-Tricks