Civic University - is now the right time?

Civic universities? Well, they sound like a lot of fun. What are they? Where do I sign up?

Hang on; what are they? Do we have un-civic universities??

Woah.... In short, and after some hard-hitting desk research (three cuppa exercise), the civic university can be summarised as an institution working towards the 'community good'; focusing and acting as a regional 'anchor institution'. There's a wider beautifully honed Powerpoint on one of my intranet pages. Or you can look on line for some wonderfully opaque diagrams. Like this:

Err, ok

Don't we do "civic" already? What's driving the agenda?
Right. The idea of a civic university is excellent, though one - I'd suggest - that many institutions have been applying for years.

Higher Education is, however, under the cosh. Headlines about VC salaries suggest self-serving fat cat academics - or fat-catDemics - diverting money from poor students and thus inflating fees, reducing WP missions and generally bringing on financial meltdown. Yes, most VCs are paid salaries the rest of us can only dream of, but carving and distributing a quarter of a million quid and distributing it even to a small student population of, say 10,000 barely raises an extra 60p a week, per student, over a 42 week academic year.

The whole media stance and political point scoring is a bit stinky whichever way you look at it. It's hardly on the same scale as the sort of ludicrous mess our friends the bankers got us into a few years ago.

Good. Myth debunked. Sort of. What about this Heaton-Harris fellow?
Tory MP Chris Heaton-Harris' request for details about the way universities teach Europe and Brexit which commentators outside the sector have compared to the McCarthy purges of the 1950s.

The McCartney witch trials

All of which is leading to a good deal of 'harrumphing' and sneering at the higher education sector and precisely the sort of moaning stunned pro-EU "snowflakes" are accused of. Makes my blood boil.

But hang on, there's the Green League rankings.....
This should receive more attention than either of the areas already under discussion - not least because we did very well (6th place; YEH!) - but it won't. The Green League ranking will also doubtless be buried under other news stories coming out - directly or indirectly - from the sector's push into the 'market'.

So, civic universities is a rearguard action?
Well yes and no. No, obviously. But maybe a bit 'yes' . While many of the principles of the civic university are written into most post-94 institutions' DNA, the recent accentuation may be an attempt to mirror the bluff and bravura surrounding more negative stories.

On the other hand, there may be something in trumpeting universities' civic agendas (agendi?) to justify or explain inroads and universities' increasing interest and gains from Further Education.

But still, there's a load of good stuff in the civic university agenda, much of which is reflected in our very own Strategic Plan. It's difficult to tell if the drive towards civic responsibility is 2017's version of the clamour for the central place of the student consumer which was raging a few years ago - it seems like the two are going to run together, applying even more pressure on universities.


Right, I'm off for a winter break. See you all soon. Comments below always welcome.

Mastering measurement

So the word on my mind this week is measurement. To be honest, this is probably not one of the most riveting topics that I could have chosen for a blog post, but I thought I would go against the grain and not focus on the other word preoccupying the department this week – Clearing. 

Never the less as it has been a priority on my to do list, so I thought I would try and share some of my thoughts on how I am trying to be more robust in measuring our internal communications, and specifically assessing the success of campaigns and knowing how we can improve for the future.

It often feels as though when it comes to measuring the impact of campaigns, things are more straight forward for my marketing and digital colleagues (especially as their outcomes are more tangible; resulting in enquirers, applicants and ultimately students). But actually I think it is just a bit more ingrained in their practice and this is something that internal comms or at least I could learn from.

Historically I think measurement is something that internal communications has grappled with. I recently had the privilege of helping to judge Institute of Internal

Communications awards and I was blown away by the standard of entries but it was clear that the measurement side of things was a little bit weaker. 

More often than not it’s really the outputs (i.e. the number of people that read an email, or a newsletter) that gets focussed on, as I suppose it’s just easier to demonstrate. But measuring and revealing the outcomes (i.e changes in behaviour) of our communications is something that we need to place more importance on rather than just showing reach. 

We recently launched our ‘Let’s make it happen’ campaign to encourage our staff to get on board with our new strategic plan, I mentioned it in my last blog post. When thinking about planning and evaluating a campaign, internal communications professionals are concerned with what we want people to know, what we want them to feel and what we want them to do differently as a result.

I’m now in the process of measuring how successful the communications have been in:

• engaging colleagues in the development of the plan, encouraging them to contribute to each stage of the development process
• raising awareness of the new plan
• encouraging shared ownership and accountability of the plan
• urging and encouraging action to help the University to implement the plan

Some of the tools in my arsenal to evaluate this include:

• Focus groups- to gather opinions and views on what has or hasn’t worked with our communications including assessing message recall and looking at what has changed as a result
• Pulse surveys - to quantify specific measures in relation to communications
• Walk abouts- casual research to find out what people thought of the communications
• Assessing analytics and feedback from our strategic plan intranet site, emails and our newsletters
• Evaluate feedback that we received from staff that attended consultation events and town hall style events

If our market research guru Andy is reading this, he is possibly currently grimacing at the fact that I’m going to be calling on his expertise shortly. 

I think in the end this blog turned out to be a bit of an internal comms lecture, but essentially this is what we are trying to do as part of our everyday practice, to develop SMART communications objectives that are both output and outcome focussed and linked to the overall objectives of the University.

Unveiling our new strategic plan

Last week began with our buzzing annual staff conference. The first keynote of the day was from our own Vice Chancellor who was there to launch the University’s new strategic plan for the next three years.

This was a particularly satisfying moment for the Internal Communications team who have been busy over the last few weeks finalising all of the launch communications, including coordinating the design and production of the final strategic plan document and all of the supporting content for our staff intranet.

However, the pièce de résistance of the campaign was a video involving a variety of staff to help explain the essence of our plan and encourage them to get on board.

Our new video stars, who kindly agreed to be filmed on two of the hottest days of the year so far no less, can be seen here: https://youtu.be/ToQWUIEjlvU. I was overwhelmed by how many people were willing to be involved (especially considering the humidity!). Personally being in front of the camera is my own worst nightmare, so I expected a lot more resistance (and the need to employ serious persuasion tactics), but everyone seemed such naturals in front of the camera and took it in their stride.

Why a video?

No matter how good the plan is though, it’s never going to be a success unless our staff buy into it and support it. That’s why we wanted to create a video that aimed to bring to life the mission and vision of the University over the next three years in an inspiring and engaging way.  The video wasn’t supposed to explain the plan in its entirety (we might have had a feature-length film on our hands if that was the case) but be a vehicle for generating excitement for what we want to achieve in the next three years.  Plus by getting so many staff involved, we hoped to create that sense of staff being part of a team, or being part of a family (cue emotional music).

 

Staff will be the judge of whether we achieved that, but hopefully they recognised a few familiar faces, that it provided a few chuckles and that perhaps it got them intrigued to read more about the plan.

Why a Z card?

We all know that Strategic Plans are probably not everyone’s idea of a good read, and we are all extremely time poor, however we were keen to ensure that staff were clear on our direction of travel, even if they hadn’t read the entire plan. That’s why we also created a nifty pocket-size z card version of the strategic plan providing a bite-size summary of the key goals and measures. Everyone will get their personal copy, plus staff can read the strategic plan in full here.

We’re not complacent though, and always looking for feedback to ensure that we continue to improve communications to staff. If you have any feedback that you would like to share then please email internalcommunications@beds.ac.uk.