Co-op Student Communications Strategy

The challenge:

The Arts & Science Co-op office at the University of Toronto Scarborough needed a way to tell students about upcoming events, funding opportunities, and share other content to drive interest in new initiatives.

The solution:

Research

To help determine which platforms were preferred for communications with students, I first launched an email survey with students to collect some primary feedback to determine sentiment around what we had been doing thus far, and where we could go.

In order to drill down from this feedback, I conducted focus groups with students to further distinguish their communications preferences and learn more about the context when they were engaging with our content to further inform our approach.

Internal communications

In order to effectively create an editorial calendar and allow sufficient time to develop content, we needed more advance notice than what was currently being given.

After consultation with stakeholders in the leadership team, I drafted an internal communications guide to outline the workflow and optimal timelines for sharing information to students, and then shared it with the broader team for their feedback about its implementation.

Discussion about and deployment of this document did a great deal to raise internal awareness of the steps involved to create successful content; it was also instrumental in raising awareness of the various communications channels and tactics available to communicate with student audiences, which assisted with boosting internally-generated leads for stories.

Student team

In order to meet the ongoing need for new content, I hired a student team of 2 to assist with creating content for social media, digital community management, and media production. I also recruited a student volunteer to assist with written content. Based on the team’s success (particularly the popularity of our video content), this team is set to expand to 5 this fall.

Tactics

Based on our user research findings, I chose to focus our resources on launching a student-facing Instagram account and a newsletter, as well as coordinating messaging that’s shared in co-op classes.

The student newsletter currently reaches 2000+ student subscribers along with about 40 staff from the department and across campus. It enjoys strong open and clickthrough rates that are consistently above the reported industry standard.

When compared to larger institutional accounts, the Instagram account sees strong engagement numbers in the feed and in Stories and a steadily growing follower count.