The key constituency we most often take for granted as campus public-relations officers is the one nearest at hand. Faculty members, students, and staff administrators can be the college’s best — or worst — ambassadors, depending on their attitudes. It behooves us to take seriously our role in shaping those attitudes.
The stakes are obvious. Who are you going to believe more? The slick advertising brochure of a car manufacturer or the experience of someone who has driven the car? The movie trailer or the reviews of people who have seen the film?
Whether it be a student home on break talking to former high-school classmates, a staff member meeting at the local diner with colleagues from a nearby institution, or a professor chatting with a neighbor in the checkout line, they all present an image of your institution that can prove more durable and persuasive than your fanciest direct-mail brochure.
You need both, of course. You are trying to reach so many people, for so many reasons, it would be impossible to accomplish it all through human contact. Print and electronic media are essential to keep prospective students, parents, alumni, donors, policy makers, and friends of the college up to date about its people and programs. But if a goal of publicity is to connect those people in some way to your campus, much of your good work will be undone unless you have carefully considered what they are very likely to encounter away from the controlled messages that come out of your office.
One way to determine if your marketing messages are in harmony with what’s happening on your campus is to apply the same logic to yourself as you do to the car buyer or moviegoer: You are more persuasive and believable in person than via an e-mail message, a memo, or a publication. The more you circulate on the campus, the more effective you can be as an ambassador of your institution. At the same time, you will become a more authentic spokesman (or woman) by keeping in close contact with the people who are actually teaching courses, taking them, providing services to students, and maintaining the campus.
It’s easy to neglect that basic fact. There’s always something pulling us back to our offices: a report due, a press release that needs to go out, a meeting to attend, e-mail to answer. It’s possible to spend an entire work week without leaving your office, except for administrative meetings, and feel perfectly productive. But sooner or later, if you are doing your job, you should be out on your own campus getting to know as many people as possible.
In my experience, you will be well received. People appreciate recognition, and they like being consulted. It’s easy for students and faculty and staff members to feel ignored and undervalued, especially as the semester lurches toward its hectic end. There is often a perception that the administration — of which you are a member — exists in a bubble, apart from the fray of classroom attendance, lost dorm keys, and late registrations. People are reassured when they see you as a person genuinely interested in their concerns rather than as some shameless huckster from the mysterious and detached world of marketing.
Developing a common language. Try this experiment: Ask 10 people on your campus — you can include anyone from your president to department colleagues to students — to write a single paragraph describing your institution. Then compare the responses. Chances are there will be common themes, but a wide range of phrases and interpretations. The people completing the exercise will find it surprisingly difficult. Few, if any, of the carefully considered descriptions that your office has developed will appear in those paragraphs.
Marketing messages developed from outside, or above, typically fail to resonate with the people you want most to repeat them. To develop a common language about your college, you must first listen to the people who populate its services and programs, and faithfully translate what you learn into language that is clear, concise, and accurate. Then you have to present that language back to the professors, students, and staff members whom it purports to describe. If you have done your job well, the lingo will eventually begin to find its way into people’s conversations.
Obviously, the language needs to be written as well as oral, and disseminated widely on your Web site and in your publications and press releases. But that’s not enough. You have to speak it yourself. And it has to fly with your toughest, most demanding audience: the people you work with in public relations.
Like the institution they represent, these verbal snapshots or elevator messages need constant updating and tweaking. People come and go, programs are added, awards are won, books are published. The trends beyond the campus are always changing and evolving, and your institutional language should not lose touch with its audience.
So don’t allow yourself to be chained to your office. If you want to speak with authority about your institution, immerse yourself in it. Attend that lecture. Accept an invitation to sit in on student presentations. Make time for a yoga class. Walk across the campus to the mailroom. Spend time in the library. Meet faculty members, admissions counselors, residential-life staffers for coffee. The possibilities — and benefits — are endless.
Valuing publicity on the campus. Likewise, there are simple but important steps you can take to spread good information about your campus, on the campus. Print-media coverage is terrific, and its primary initial audience is the community beyond the college’s borders. But it can have great value on your campus as well.
Take the time to make an attractive paste-up of an article (include the publication’s date and masthead), and then enlarge it. Display it in prominent locations around the campus and, voilà, you will have increased people’s awareness of the college in a positive manner, through an outside source, at little cost.
Consider: A professor’s friends and neighbors are as likely to read the local daily as The New York Times. We’ve all heard versions of the complaint from people who are recognized for their accomplishments elsewhere but ignored in their own backyard. We all would like to be valued in the community in which we work and live. But if you — colleague, student, staff member, friend, neighbor, community leader — missed the paper the day a faculty member was profiled, or you don’t routinely consult the section in which the article appeared, an opportunity for recognition will have passed unfulfilled.
By making enlarged reprints — with the type big enough for casual passers-by to easily stop and read it — you multiply the life of that story. The professor will be pleased, and the college benefits by association.
Recognition is only one reason to repurpose good publicity. On our campus, for example, a student art show opened in early December in a second-floor gallery of the student center. The floor has just a couple of classrooms and some administrative offices in addition to the gallery, and the art exhibit was all but forgotten after the opening reception, except among those who had reason to visit that part of the building. By enlarging an article profiling the show in the local weekly, which included four-color photographs, we were able to remind people of the students’ accomplishments — not just in the art department but across the campus.
The Elms College men’s basketball team was ranked 12th in the nation in Division III at semester’s end, which was well known, of course, to anyone connected to the college’s athletics programs. But shouldn’t that accomplishment (we are, after all, a school of just 800 undergraduates) be widely celebrated? Even on a small campus like ours, there is no guarantee that the biology major, the nursing professor, or the head of dining services knows about the basketball team’s recognition, though it could be a source of pride if they did.
The prominent public display of reprints is an easy and effective way to spread the good word. So get as much good publicity as you can for your institution, but don’t stop there. Make sure your own campus knows about it. Keep the publicity, like your institutional language, moving — the bulletin boards should change at least once a month, or they will simply blend in with their surroundings.
That’s just one example of how to value the contributions of the people at your institution. Making sure that your alumni magazine is widely circulated on the campus, sharing periodic updates from the president, and organizing recognition events are some other ways to keep your connection with your core constituency strong.
The common theme in all this is visibility. The work of a college marketing or public-relations office is often obscure, and compromised by a perception that it takes place in its own, sometimes unaccountable world.
Even when people are pleased with the results of a marketing effort, they don’t always appreciate how those results are achieved or their own role in advancing the institution. By making it your job to meet regularly with the people on your campus, you are being accountable and giving them the tools they need to promote the college in an authentic, consistent manner. By displaying your publicity, you make the results of your work accessible and take full advantage of a handy tool available to you to promote your institution.