Build an Engaged Online Community
While the predictions of print becoming obsolete were dead-wrong, having a digital presence is essential. It is much more than creating content for one channel and replicating it across others. An audience-centric, integrated strategy is needed.
Email Newsletters
Everybody’s email box is overflowing. Email newsletters are great ways to cut down on the number of messages you send, give people a view of the breadth of work you do, and share great content in an engaging way.
Whether conceptualizing the newsletter, writing the copy, or overseeing the team’s content development and design, I ensure that newsletters deliver impact to your stakeholders.
Tracking metrics for continuous improvement is also key to a successful email newsletter. Further, deploying A/B testing empowers organizations to use data to improve engagement.
Alumni Website
In 2018-19, I led the development of this website for RISD alumni. At the time, the Office of Alumni Relations had just a single page on the college website. A 2018 survey found that although 97% of alumni survey respondents said they were proud to have attended RISD, 61% rated their engagement as low. Building a presence for alumni online was essential to boost engagement. I managed the site build, including developing a request for proposals, working with the selected vendor’s team, facilitating the discovery process, connecting with stakeholders and creating content.
With the goal of increasing alumni’s sense of connection with RISD, we also knew that we needed to offer fresh and enjoyable content to entice repeat visits. Our solution was to offer a way for the alumni to create this content themselves and share it with each other on the site. Ever since the site was launched, alumni continue to eagerly submit images and details about their creative work, exhibitions, personal news, professional updates and memories of RISD. Through an alumni submission process carefully integrated to work with RISD’s Raiser’s Edge donor management platform, we also deepened institutional knowledge about alumni.
Leveraging Social Media
Social media is a critical part of multi-channel communications and choosing the best platform to connect with your audience is essential. At the John Carter Brown Library, the scholars it served connected most readily on Twitter (now X) throughte #twitterstorians hashtag. We employed popular hashtags used by our audience and invited people to join the conversation. In addition, our social media strategy made use of the incredible visuals of the rare books and maps in the Library’s collections that made the channel interesting to bibliophiles and history buffs not in the scholarly community.
Focusing on the Right Platforms
For the alumni artists and designers who form the Rhode Island School of Design’s creative community, Instagram is the preferred way to engage. Driving traffic from Instagram to the alumni website and featuring stories from Momentum magazine are some of the ways that I integrated social media into a multi-channel communications strategy.
