By Russell S. Powell

With the rush of commencement now behind us, June is a good time to review the past academic year and begin to make plans for the next one.

But first, a few reflections about graduation. We did pretty well mediawise this year at Elms College, a small, Roman Catholic liberal-arts college in western Massachusetts: a huge photograph on the front page of the local daily (with more photos on its Web site), coverage by two television stations, an attractive spread in a weekly newspaper, and a front-page story in another (text and photos courtesy of me, provided first thing Monday morning).

A third weekly also printed a story, using, verbatim, some of the profiles I had written of students. More than ever this spring, it became clear that when it comes to local news, editorial space will be made available to the college, as long as we supply the copy and the artwork. The better the quality, the better the coverage, especially if we are responsive to their deadlines.

It can be tough to draw more than cursory attention to commencement in print outlets that are shrinking and increasingly short-staffed. Elms is located smack in the middle of more than a dozen colleges that celebrate graduation annually within a three-week stretch. It's easy for reporters to get commencement fatigue, and my challenge is to keep things interesting.

This year our commencement speaker was Richard A. Yanikoski, president and chief executive of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. He has outstanding credentials, was congenial, and gave a good talk, but he is not a household name. He lacked the media appeal of say, Rachel Maddow, the MSNBC talk-show host who gave a commencement address on the same day as ours, just up the road at Smith College.

But commencement, ultimately, is a celebration not of celebrities, but of the graduates. In the weeks leading up to the event I gathered stories of more than a dozen graduates who were noteworthy for their academic achievements, unusual personal circumstances, community service, or career plans. The number of students profiled enabled me to cover many categories of media interest—male and female, traditional and nontraditional age, local, minority, undergraduate and graduate—across a number of academic disciplines.

At the ceremony, I handed out a press packet that included the one-paragraph bios of students, along with bios of the main speakers, graduation statistics, and a college fact sheet. (A few enterprising reporters asked for, and received, the packet beforehand.) Included, too, was a CD with the print materials in Word for ease of use plus JPEG's of the speakers and featured graduates, ready for publication. That was more than most reporters needed, but they appreciated the effort.

The main work of publicizing commencement, however, had only just begun. In the media age in which we live, some of our best publicity results from something that used to be considered low on our list of media priorities: hometown press releases. With community newspapers increasingly dependent on outside sources for their local stories, well-written and timely news of a recent graduate will frequently get your college's name in the paper in a positive way in faraway places. Such feel-good announcements, though brief, get noticed by friends and family, former classmates, teachers, and guidance counselors, and serve as good reminders that a college selected by a local student four years earlier turned out to be a good choice. It's less lofty than a front-page story, but effectively spreads the word on the ground level.

We subscribe to a hometown news-release service, which spares me hours of research about the media outlets serving towns beyond our immediate region. Next year I hope to include photographs with those releases, but at least I know that this spring we were able to get good information out the door.

Then there are reprints. When you get outstanding coverage of commencement, get it enlarged and posted around the campus as soon as possible. For anyone who couldn't attend, it conveys a sense of the festivities, and for visitors to the campus it shows the college at its finest: warm, celebratory, the culmination of a student's academic career.

The weeks leading up to commencement are invariably busy ones for campus public-relations officers. Dozens of events are held as the spring semester winds to a close: student art shows, theatrical performances, alumni gatherings, picnics, awards dinners, among others, leading up to the main commencement. From about April 1on, press releases are going out daily; photos have to be tracked down, captioned, and formatted; speeches and talking points need to be drafted; people need to be greeted or introduced at events. The mood is upbeat, though, and it never gets old; the enthusiasm of the graduates is infectious and acts like a fountain of youth for those of us who work here.

But now with summer, there is time to refocus. The students and faculty members are gone until late August, and the campus is quiet. Now is the ideal time to catch our collective breath, and make plans. In that spirit, here are a few of my resolutions for the coming year:

Make more and better use of video. It's gotten easier and cheaper to produce high-quality video; flip cams have remarkably good picture and sound quality, and sell for under $200. At the same time, through the rise of YouTube, viewers' expectations about quality are relaxed compared with just a few years ago. That means that someone without a great deal of experience behind the camera, but with a steady hand, can produce passable footage.

More video and less text should be a growing trend on our Web sites. By uploading a good, short video on YouTube and then posting it on our own Web sites, we can simultaneously take advantage of passive marketing through the search engine and provide focused content for visitors to our sites.

For the most part, I don't think colleges have been doing such a great job with videos. Many of the ones I've seen are simply migrations of text—the human subjects merely saying aloud what the text previously said, adding sound and movement—rather than taking the potential of the medium to a new level. We need to add new and imaginative content to videos, so that they are of intrinsic interest to viewers rather than merely to public-relations shills. The best way to promote our programs is by showing rather than telling, and video is ideally suited for that purpose—but not if we take a pedestrian approach.

We must apply the same high journalistic standards to our use of video as we do to our print materials. We should always begin by answering the question, "Who cares?" Just because we have the capability of videotaping a guest lecture and putting it up on our Web site, for example, does not make it good television or of interest to our target audience.

To be effective, don't surround the video content with lengthy, glitzy intros promoting the institution, either. If you have chosen and presented your topic well, it will speak for itself. Anything additional should be spare and simple: a title, college name, and Web-site link. Otherwise you will lose viewers before they reach the main feature.

Dive in to social networking. None of us have fully figured out how to tap and tame this emerging area of enormous (we think) marketing potential, but there's no better way to get a handle on social networking than by becoming engaged on multiple levels: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and whatever else comes down the line. We can't afford to be dismissive, even if the utility of some of those networks remains unclear. The more familiar we become with the tools, their users, and the forces driving them, the more likely we can find ways to extract marketing value from social networks without alienating our intended audiences.

I've attended several Webinars on social networking over the past few months, and will continue to do so. They are basic and designed to attract business and establish legitimacy for the people offering them, but they can stimulate thinking and conversations on your campus and within your marketing department, and most of them are free.

Keep learning how to employ new technology. A corollary to the rapidly evolving world of social networking are changes in our information gathering and delivery systems. Our text, artwork, audio, and video must be able to work across diverse platforms, from telephones to laptops to large desktop monitors. On the information-gathering side, video scripts require a different mind-set than prose, for example, and the flip cam does not operate like a keyboard or pencil. Summer is a good time to gain experience with new ways of communicating with our audiences.

Have lunch with faculty members more often. That is a perennial goal. It can never happen enough. Faculty members are a major source of news about their programs and about noteworthy students. Casual meetings over coffee or lunch keep the flow of information going in both directions, as it gives us a chance to educate faculty members about the kinds of things we need to do our jobs more effectively and promote the institution. There's nothing like face-to-face contact. It makes your office visible.

Take a course. This year I took a course on printmaking; last year it was Christian scriptures. What better way to get to know students and to learn about the academic product we are promoting than firsthand? Being able to take classes is one of the true joys of working on a college campus and makes us better at our jobs, with a deeper appreciation of the academic experience—the heart of what we are here to define and promote.

Become a stronger writer. For all the technology available to us, good writing remains the essence of our craft. As communicators, we need to continually find language that describes our institution and its programs favorably and accurately, in a wide range of styles and formats, including memos, speeches, video scripts, and news releases.

To meet that challenge, we must constantly be improving our writing skills, evolving like the institutions we serve.

Russell S. Powell is a public-relations officer at Elms College, in Chicopee, Mass. He previously worked as director of public relations at Hampshire College and at Greenfield Community College, and as a consultant.