ONLINE – 4th Annual Marketing & Communications for Post Secondary Conference

Jennifer Ferguson, BA, Liaison Officer, Western University

Salena Kitteringham, Director, Communications & Marketing, Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Alberta

Join our panel of experts as they share their COVID Comms strategies, tips, tricks and lessons learned. This is a session you don’t want to miss!

Rachel Janzen, MA, Communications & Marketing Manager, Academica Group

Why is institutional branding important? What is happening in the PSE sector when it comes to branding and institutional success? What does a University or College brand have to do with recruiting quality students, facilitating their success, and ensuring graduates are engaged years after they leave?

In this session, the team from Academica Group will speak to the relevancy of branding an institution, the pressures many face finding a unique brand positioning, the challenges around engaging internal departments, as well as strategies to consistently communicating the brand story across multiple touchpoints. Since this process is very different than marketing a consumer product, unique approaches are needed to understand, guide and celebrate an institution’s brand. Drawing on our branding research with Canadian post  secondary institutions big and small, this presentation will highlight the biggest trends in PSE branding happening across the country and will offer key learnings that can be applied at any Canadian institution.

Do you ever feel stuck for a good idea? Is it hard for you to find time to get your colleagues together for an excellent creative brainstorming session? Are your marketing campaigns on repeat year after year and in need of a good shake-up?

Throughout this interactive session, Carley McDougall will discuss the importance of finding time to innovate and engage in out-of-the-box thinking. Attendees will have the opportunity to brainstorm new ideas for their upcoming marketing campaigns and walk away with brainstorming activities that can be used with their teams.

Claire Taylor, Manager, Student Engagement and Communications, University of Waterloo

The University of Waterloo just finished a report based on a Student Communications Survey completed in Winter 2019. The results provided insight into communications preferences of Waterloo students including:

• Where students want to receive information from the University (i.e. which channels)
• What kind of information they want to receive in each channel (e.g. events via social media)
• Who they consider to be an important source of information on campus
• What has changed since the last survey in 2015

Attendees will learn they key highlights from the survey results and how the results influence student communications on campus. Delegates will also hear tips for running a Student Communications Survey on your campus and lessons learned in the process.

It is critical that post-secondary institutions differentiate themselves to create a unique value proposition through their storytelling. To do so requires a strategic approach to content creation and distribution. UBC’s Cindy Connor will walk you through how the Communications team created an integrated content strategy that utilized content and resource deployment to serve the strategic purpose of highlighting the university’s strategic plan and brand proposition.

What attendees will learn:

• The challenges of breaking down content silos and taking a phased approach
• How to create a topic model to guide the university’s strategic storytelling
• How we identified target audiences, channels and KPIs
• The people, process and tools required for this content strategy work
• Wins, losses and lessons – evaluation and lessons we learned along the way

Andrew Leopold, Director of Communications, Humber College

In 2019 Humber formally merged Government Relations, Communications (and PR) and Marketing into one department. With a renewed emphasis on building their government relations portfolio, they apply a communications approach to advocacy outreach and initiatives, while ensuring there’s a GR lens on PR activities. From dignitary visits to strategically integrated announcements, events and campaigns they use their “Educate, Advocate, Advance,” approach to showcase Humber and postsecondary education in ways beyond traditional government relations efforts.

Participants will learn about applying brand journalism techniques to amplify government relations and advocacy efforts; how to consider government relations opportunities and implications in communications activities and about the subtle yet significant role of social media in joint advocacy-PR outreach.

Hear specific case studies from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Premier Kathleen Wynne and Premier Doug Ford’s visits as well as others government officials.

Developing Brandon University’s new strategic plan required extensive consultation on campus. We knew that traditional town halls, surveys, and focus groups would tie up resources and still might not be enough. So, we developed a simple template and a weekly email strategy to put us in touch with more people, more often, and to prompt meaningful conversations about our university’s future. We will outline our flexible approach, share how well it worked, and show how you can use the same approach to hear from your audiences as well.

In 2019 George Brown College launched a podcast about the future of work called Work Shift. A communications vehicle – not a promotional marketing project. The goal was to insert themselves into a greater conversation about the fast-changing work force. Shawne will discuss the range of factors changing the work force, including AI, automation and climate change, that this podcast aims to address.

Delegates will gain insights into how they started their podcast on a modest budget, what they’ve learned along the way and what they know they can do better in the future.

Elizabeth DiEmanuele, Digital Media Specialist, McMaster University

In a digital world, where higher ed has moved from in-person to hybrid or fully online formats, the desire for one-on-one communications and real connections has never been more important to Gen Z students. As student affairs and communications professionals, we have experienced this change in student behaviour first-hand.

To adapt to the increased demand for our services, the Student Success Centre at McMaster University has applied Gen Z research, analytics and student feedback to transform our approach to digital communications and service delivery. We have already observed how using this knowledge of Gen Z preferences can enhance the success and reach with students, even when they are no longer connecting with us in-person.

Come to this session, ready to engage! Taking a queue from our own learning, this will be a highly interactive session that combines research, real-life examples, and rapid-fire Q&A. Attend this session to connect across our institutions and learn from one another, and come away with insight into how you can enhance your communications strategies to connect with your audience in a reliable, authentic way.

Diversity and inclusion is not just a “nice-to-have” but a must-have if an organization is to enjoy the highest standard of recruitment, performance and retention for viable, sustainable growth. BREAKFAST CULTURE’s Diversity and Inclusion Audit is a comprehensive measurement and analysis process to understand where your
organization lies and how to move it along the DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) Continuum*.

This is one of the first steps towards cultivating a diverse, inclusive and equitable workplace culture. In this session you will learn about the DEI Continuum* and how Breakfast Culture uses current tools, including leading edge Employee Engagement Enterprise software and/or Global Diversity & Inclusion Benchmarks (GDIB) to analyze where your organization currently resides on the DEI Continuum*.

*The Human Equity Advantage: Beyond Diversity to Talent Optimization, Wilson 2013

Kristin Linklater, Executive Director, Communications & Marketing, Simon Fraser University

How your university’s strategic plan and brand can work together to identify your differentiator, bring diverse stakeholders together, reduce daily workload and reach those business outcomes.

You will learn:

• Suggested steps in the rebrand process
• How to structure internal stakeholder input and approvals governance
• How to bring decentralized communicators along on the rebrand journey
• Choosing and working with the right vendors
• The magic of an institutional narrative
• Turning logo soup into a refined logo architecture – and helping stakeholders let go of their logo obsession
• How tools and templates can benefit your stakeholders and improve team efficiency

You might think that you don’t have time to do user testing. You’re scared what you’ll see if you watch people use your website, think you already know how your users behave based on analytics, or believe that you don’t have time for UX research. In fact, there are lots of easy ways to use UX techniques to improve your digital experience and the user journey.

In this presentation, Suzanne will guide you through a toolbox of lean UX research techniques: Identifying personas, user testing, mapping user journeys. Real-life case studies will be used from their work with Princeton University and McGill University to show you how they mapped out how students select their top school and pick the program that’s right for them. You’ll also learn how user research can guide how your approach to personalization.