Strategic Priority 3: Communication

Goal 2: Enhance strategy and story-telling efforts around divisional needs and impact.

Student Affairs will use strategic communications and relevant data points to secure external funding through donations/grants, solicit support from campus partners, aid in recruitment efforts, and broadcast the division’s brand. Student Affairs will provide infrastructure and set new standards for approaching, developing, executing, and evaluating quality marketing and communication plans that help the division achieve key objectives that support student success.

  1. Create individual student and staff testimonials where they talk about how their engagement with DoSA impacted them. Utilize a variety of different formats (social media, video, print, etc.) to reach a variety of audiences and aid in recruitment. See also Assessment, Planning, and Programming Goal 4, Action Item 2.
  2. Develop an impact story for each division fundraising account to utilize in marketing and communication efforts. Create several assets for each story (news story, half-page graphic/testimonial, video). See also Assessment, Planning, and Programming Goal 4, Action Item 2.
  3. Integrate with the Assessment, Planning, and Programming group to develop stories that align with goals for fundraising and signature programs.
  4. Identify a strategic goal for each unit and map how marketing and communications can assist in achieving the goal.

Goal 3: Bolster internal divisional communication efforts.

Student Affairs will coordinate communication strategies with schools and student-facing divisions to help ensure information is accurate and campus partners are appropriately informed.

  1. Establish guidelines and an audit schedule for shared file storage locations (G Drive, Teams, SharePoint, Google) and file sharing to provide clarity and fidelity for important information.

Goal 4: Lead current students communications for our campus.

Student Affairs will lead the implementation of a new, centralized current students communications team meant to improve coordination across the divisions of Student Affairs, Undergraduate Education, and Enrollment Management.

  1. Network with school-based marketing/communications directors/leaders to understand their communication efforts and patterns to students.
  2. Host focus groups and survey students asking them to evaluate various communications for preferences and effectiveness including, but not limited to, emails, text messages, social media posts, websites, and print marketing materials.
  3. Integrate a segmented, personalized communications strategy across the divisions of Undergraduate Education, Enrollment Management, and Student Affairs. Use marketing/communications as an intervention strategy to support student success.
  4. Identify major annual divisional milestones our campus partners need to know about, craft story-telling communication strategies surrounding those milestones, and use identified divisional milestones in communication strategies with campus partners.
  5. Perform a communications audit for regular divisional and unit-level communications sent to students evaluating for quality, strategy, and best practices.
  6. Explore additional ways to leverage Canvas to communicate to students, including researching student needs and wants.
  7. Expand asynchronous trainings and host in-person seasonal training opportunities for staff on a variety of marketing and communications topics, standards, and best practices with the goal of supporting staff in building marketing and communication skills.
  8. Clarify how different units can collaborate with Mar/Comm and set standards/expectations for collaboration/integration.