University Communications Overview: 2021
Transcript
[First slide: Title slide]
Robert Hornsby:
Welcome to Communications 101, WeConnect workshop. Today is a fast-moving session; it's a communications overview, and we're going to cover some broad material and not get into too many specifics. If you have questions, please put them in the chat, and we'll try to refer to those along the way if we can. We'll also have a three-part session today: a 15-20 minute presentation that I'll conduct, and then we'll be joined by a special guest for a 15 to 20 minute interview, and then a general question and answer period for 15 to 20 minutes. So, here we go.
[Second slide: Communications Overview – Course Basics]
Course, the basics. We're going to cover general topics relating to theory and practice of communications. Each week is a weekly presentation, a dialogue, and a question and answer. You can join as many classes as you wish, and each week we'll give you an easy research project before class, such as collecting a couple of websites that you can refer to.
[Third slide: Communications Overview – Three pillars of Communications]
So, we're going to start with three pillars of communications. They are audience. And the big question there is, to whom are you communicating? Purpose. Why are you communicating? Serving what goal? And outcomes. After communicating, what outcomes do you seek?
[Fourth slide: Communications Overview – Course Topics]
So, we know all too well that Columbia can be like a jumble, a big puzzle that you're trying to solve, especially if you're new to the university, but we created this course to help you put the pieces together. So, these are these series of course topics. Today is the communications overview. And by the way, these PowerPoint presentations will be saved in a Google folder for your reference, and this is in fact a playable puzzle.
[Fifth slide: What We Do]
So let's talk about what we do in the communications area of Columbia. We create content about the university. And see that at the end there: “purposeful.” We deliver and promote that content to stakeholders and audiences within the community and externally. We also facilitate current and future fulfillment of university initiatives. What we mean by that is our job, in some respect, is to help make things happen. We just don't broadcast about the university to make people feel good; we want them to engage with us, we want them to apply to the university, we want them to come to our programs, participate, write checks, get hired. Those are the initiatives that we're talking about fulfillment.
We also assist other external entities such as news outlets, for example, The New York Times, CBS TV, WNYC radio, Huffington Post with a production of content about Columbia, often featuring our experts or our research.
[Sixth slide: What We Do: What is “content”?]
So, now we have a chance for you to unmute yourself. What are some types of content: written content, visual content, audio content, and multimedia? Let's start with written content. Unmute yourself if you have something to offer. Tell us a piece of written content.
Unidentified attendee #1:
Op-ed.
Unidentified attendee #2:
Website content.
Robert:
Website content. Go ahead.
Unidentified attendee #1:
Op-eds for an executive.
Robert:
Op-eds for an executive. Anyone else?
Unidentified attendee #2:
Press releases.
Robert:
Press releases.
Unidentified attendee #3:
Blog posts.
Robert:
Blog posts.
Unidentified attendee #1:
Newsletters.
Robert:
Newsletters. Keep it rolling.
Nadine El Tanamly:
Event marketing materials.
Robert:
Yes.
Unidentified attendee #3:
Annual letters and appeals.
Robert:
Indeed. So that's great. So, here are some examples, and you mentioned most of these. These are examples of written content.
[Seventh slide: What We Do: What is “content”? – Visual Content]
So, visual content can include photography, video, graphics. What about other things? What other things are visual?
Unidentified attendee #1:
Hand out tapes for–
Unidentified attendee #4:
There you go.
Robert:
Sure.
Yulia Trask:
It can be chart with some analytics, for example.
Robert:
Sure. Sure. Charts, analytics. There's also audio content such as podcasts, and there's a new emerging platform of voice chat. On the multimedia side, there are Zoom events and webinars.
[Eighth slide: What We Do: Deliver and promote content]
So, what we do: delivering and promoting content. So, what are some of the platforms or places that you find our content, Columbia's and external? And for this course, when we say platforms, we're referring to the mediums of transmission; how a piece of content is transmitted or delivered to an audience, and that could be online or offline. So what are some of the platforms you'll see Columbia content?
Unidentified attendee #3:
Email.
Robert:
Email.
Unidentified attendee #5:
Social media.
Robert:
Social media.
Unidentified attendee #6:
Website.
Robert:
Yes. anything else?
Unidentified attendee #7:
Print.
Robert:
Okay.
Unidentified attendee #3:
Maybe advertising outdoors.
Robert:
Sure.
[Ninth slide: What We Do: Deliver and promote content – Examples]
Okay, you mentioned most of these. Notice the first four items: web pages; social media; YouTube, Vimeo for video; and streaming audio; and social media apps. And then there are four, they're in gray: in print, newspapers, magazines; TV broadcast; radio news; signage; and street banners. And of course, there are many, many others. These are just some of the– When we talk about platforms, this is what we're talking about.
[Tenth slide: What We Do: Deliver and promote content—”Digital First”]
So, those first four items. This is digital first, the practice of leading communications with online platforms or channels, and we're going to talk more about that as we go along. But–
[Eleventh slide: What We Do?: Why Digital First? – some statistics]
Why is digital first important? So, look at these numbers as we go down the list. New York Times subscribers.
Unidentified attendee #8:
[Indiscernible]
Robert:
7.5 million viewers. 6.7 million are digital only. And you go down the list and it gets larger and larger. But look at the break between TV broadcast news viewers and Twitter users, and then look at the break between Twitter users and Facebook users in North America. So between TV and Twitter, it's a factor of 10. Between Twitter and Facebook, it's almost four times, certainly three times greater. And then you look at the Facebook users worldwide, 2.8 billion. And what's the world population? 7.8 billion people, so nearly a third of the people in the world are on Facebook. And on the right, you'll see a chart of Facebook's inception to today.
[Twelfth slide: Who does What?: Office Integration]
So, who does what? This is an organizational chart of the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. So, within each of these units, there are multiple offices and multiple groups, but they are broadly Government Affairs, Community Affairs, Operations, and then Communications and Public Affairs. We'll talk more about this in a few minutes. But then under Operations is Budget and Administration unit, Columbia creative, Columbia Community Service. Under the Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the Public Affairs Office, Internal Communications—that's me and Cassandra—Columbia News, and our Digital Strategy group. You can find all of our names and titles at the link at the bottom here: who we are, Office of Communications and Public Affairs.
[Thirteenth slide: Who does What?: Next several weeks]
So, in the course of the next several weeks, we'll have guests from various units to discuss their roles, responsibilities, and day-to-day duties, and we'll be sharing a dialogue or an interview with an expert. But before we go along, I wanted to pause screen sharing for a second and check in with you.
[A computer makes an alert noise.]
So, do people have questions about–?
Peter:
I’ll ask a question.
Robert:
When you’re ready. Peter, go ahead.
Peter:
Are there slides from this presentation going to be shared with us afterwards along with the–
Robert:
Yes.
Peter:
–recording?
Robert:
Yes. There will be a powerpoint presentation– We have a Google folder, and we'll load all those up. And people from the Medical Center, we have a folder in an app—an application—called Lab Archive, and we'll be able to put all the presentations there. Not all the presenters and the guests will have presentations.
Are there other questions about what we've covered so far?
Come on. Okay, let me do it a different way. So, how many people are in a public affairs role? Media relations or public affairs of some kind? Raise your hand.
Okay, and how many people are in an internal communications role like mine or have that as an aspect of your job?
Okay, those are my peeps.
And what other offices are represented here? Do we have people from Alumni or that have alumni responsibilities? Krista, Christina.
What about other people? What about multimedia? Do we have people who are in the web teams, like Peter?
What about social media of responsibilities?
So you'll see, one of the reasons we're having this class is that multiple people have multiple roles, and some people only have one role. So, this is an opportunity for you to round out your skill set. If you don't know a lot about social media, we're going to have a social media expert come talk to you. We're going to have someone talk about media relations. We're going to have someone talk about executive communications and crisis.
So, this is an opportunity for us to share some resources, get to know each other, understand each other's issues, and then share the wealth and the knowledge that we have. What we're trying to do is break down the silos. In part, what we're trying to do is break down the silos between the various offices, so that we have a sense from you of what's going on, and you know who we are and what we do and how we can help you.
So, are there other general questions from the first part of the presentation?
See a couple of people from the Strategic Communications class; they've heard the audience, purpose, and outcomes. Has anyone else encountered this kind of thinking before? Okay–
[A computer makes an alert noise.]
–so this is more of a marketing perspective.
And let's see what's happening in the chat.
“Is there another overall communications group we can–?” There are a few subset groups; there's a marketing group, and there are a couple of other small groups. Cassandra and I run a couple of informal groups for people with responsibility for digital screens, for example, across campus. But no, there aren't multiple groups.
But if you have a group in mind, say it was an affinity group that you felt needed to be represented, then we can help you connect with other people and set something up.
“Would there be a master list you could look people up by unit?” Well, we do have a master WeConnect list. I guess we can take a look at how we would present that so that you'd be able to see it. I think right now it's in a spreadsheet, but I'll have to take a look at it.
Any other questions?
Unidentified attendee # 9:
I had a question.
Robert:
Sure, go ahead.
Unidentified attendee # 9:
Do we have people listed where, in effect, they would be willing to talk about their primary skill set? No, that someone could say, “I'd be willing to answer questions about x.”
Robert:
We haven't compiled that, but I think that could be one of the emerging resources coming out of group like this, where similar to your LinkedIn page where you tick off, you know, here are my five areas of expertise. People that are here today, would you be interested in doing that or willing to participate in something like that? So, see a show of hands or thumbs up or reaction. Okay. so, we're making notes of this as we go along; Cassandra will put together, and we can contact you as a group and get a starter list going, maybe.
Unidentified attendee # 9:
I mean, I say that if I could offer one, I happen to be a former television producer for CBS. And there's probably a number of people here who used to work in the news, and we could be a resource for anybody who has questions about, you know, anything to do with video, TV production–
Robert:
Sure.
Unidentified attendee # 9:
–journalists.
Robert:
That’s a great idea.
I see in the chat someone asked about the directory. I can't look at that while we're doing this event, but we'll capture the chat, and we'll take a look at it and see if it's all up to date.
Cassandra Nathan:
It's not; I just checked.
Robert:
Okay, we'll work on that. We have just a minute or two before our guest speaker arrives, and I wanted to ask, is there any other question about the previous content? If I was to ask you, can you define your primary audience, your primary purpose, and the primary outcome, would you be able to do that? Anyone?
Unidentified attendee # 9:
Wouldn't that be dependent upon your director, your executive?
Robert:
Oh absolutely, absolutely. It's unit specific. Could be your school, the department. But understanding who your primary audience, who you are trying to communicate with, why you're communicating with them, and then what you expect to happen at that back end is the core of our work. And we're pushing this purposeful communications idea to try and not only to engage you in that, but also to challenge people.
So, in the old school of communications, you set the dial on broadcast, and you just hope that someone at the other end was listening. So that might be that you're only knowing that The New York Times has circulation, but you don't know who's reading it, or how they feel about what they're reading. And you know that people are watching television, and they're watching television when a TV show mentioned Columbia University, but you don't know how they feel about that. You don't know if they liked it or didn't like it.
It was really difficult before the expansion of the internet and social media, particularly, to come up with really good metrics other than sort of nielsen ratings. But now we're far beyond that, and there's really no going back.
Okay, we should be joined very shortly by our guest.
Shailagh Murray:
I'm here.
Robert:
You're here. There she is. Hey, welcome. So, this is a group of about 35 people-ish, and we're going to turn it over to our guest. And let me go back to screen share for just a second
Cassandra:
We’re at 57-ish.
Robert:
57, that's amazing.
Shailagh:
Wow.
Cassandra:
Good to see you, Shailagh.
Shailagh:
Hello, hello.
Robert:
And as I said before, we're gonna have a dialogue, and our first guest is Shailagh Murray, the Executive Vice President for Public Affairs, and she'll be joined in dialogue by April Brazil who's Administrative Coordinator in the Office of Communication and Public Affairs. I'm going to stop share and go back to general view.
[Screen share stops]
April, can you hear? Are you on mute? You just seem to be on mute. Unmute yourself.
Shailagh:
Uh-oh.
Robert:
I can hear her; she's sitting in the next office; I can hear her voice, but I can't–.
Shailagh:
[Laughs.] Now, she–
Cassandra:
April, try to log out and come back in, and maybe– Because I had some trouble with my Zoom earlier. Maybe log out and come back and see if it works.
Robert:
Okay, in the meantime, Shailagh, would you talk to us about digital first? Where did this idea come from, and why is it important?
Shailagh:
[Laughs.] Well, digital. I was a newspaper reporter for about 20 years, and when I say newspaper reporter, I mean literally newspapers. I think it was the 2004 presidential campaign which I was covering John Kerry for The Wall Street Journal. And The Wall Street Journal was not just a newspaper; it was a five day a week newspaper in those days. So, you would go out on the campaign trail, and like a week would go by before you would write, like, a little short story that would run somewhere inside the paper. And you just kind of have to wait for space to become available and then—you know, unless something huge happened, like he picked his Vice President or something—that was, you know, kind of what you were left with.
By 2008, when I covered the Obama campaign, like, all coverage had a digital component, and, you know, by the end of the campaign, basically by election day, we were not just writing one story a day, we were writing multiple updates of those stories. And you weren't primarily writing for the internet yet, but you were, you know, you were still writing the story that was going to run in the paper that then had a digital version.
But, within a very short amount of time that, even that, reversed itself. And now we're in what in the news business we call a virtuous news cycle, which is a news cycle that never ends. And so there's a lot of downsides to that. We're not going to focus on those.
But the upside to it for an organization like Columbia is that—well, all institutions—is that we can basically become our own newspapers and content providers. And the platforms are so small d democratic because everyone has access to them, that you have this opportunity that never really existed before to tell your own story on your own platforms and access all of the other platforms that everybody uses to share content, which, otherwise known as social media.
So, we—you know, at Columbia—we've gone in just a few short years from publishing a monthly newspaper, which was our primary way of communicating internally with faculty profiles, and, you know, features about, you know, art gallery exhibits, and all that kind of stuff. All that is migrated online. We no longer publish any print products, and we have this whole universe of digital Columbia News branded products that we now rely on, not just to communicate internally but externally as well.
And I'm sure you're going to hear more about this as this, you know, series of seminars unfold. But the COVID site, which is our largest website now, has, you know, on a good day will have 30 or 40,000 unique visitors. What that tells you is that there is an audience for the kind of content that we are producing and the stories that we're telling. We didn't have any ability to reach people that way before. And you take something like, you know, a crisis like this pandemic. You know, digital platforms and crises are, you know, made for each other.
The other thing that I think is important about digital communications is that it has basically turned everyone into a communicator. And if you just run your own Instagram account or Twitter feed that you primarily communicate with your friends on, that's communications, and it's not that different from what we're doing at a university-wide level. Maybe, we're just a little bit more paranoid about what we share—I wouldn't say paranoid, I'd say responsible—but I think the idea here is to equip as many people as possible with as many communication skills so that we kind of create this universe of communicators university-wide to just enhance everything that we're doing. And I'm super excited to be here.
April do you have audio now?
April:
Yes, I have audio now. I'm back, and I'm ready.
Shailagh:
Robert, ask your first question.
Robert:
Go ahead, April. We’ll give you a second question.
April:
No problem. So everyone, my name is April Brazil. I work in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, and I had the privilege of working in Government and Community Affairs as well.
So for our second question, Shailagh, we would like to know, how has this pandemic, how has COVID affected the way we communicate across the university? Because this pandemic has really just changed the way we do life in general, so we want to know how that has impacted us.
Shailagh:
As I was just saying, it has forced us to pivot much more quickly than we would have under normal circumstances, and for that I could not be more grateful to the coronavirus. Because we had started—and thankfully we did start—a year or year and a half ago to make this big digital conversion. So, we were already thinking this way; we already had a restructured team built for the long haul of, you know, digital communications, but what COVID allowed us to do was create this critical mass audience that I was just describing, where we suddenly for the first time ever as a university are actively engaged with student, faculty, and staff on the same platform.
And that is, you know, not exactly the most exciting development in the world. In the whole scheme of things, it's not like electric cars. But it's a pretty powerful tool, and the ability for us, for instance, to share test data. Right?
So, every day you go on the COVID site, you can see how many people tested positive for COVID within our community. And that is, you know, super important information, not just for people within the community—live and may attend classes in person or work in person—but also for the people who live around the community. They keep a close eye on those numbers, and we hear from them regularly; they see something they don't like. And state and city health officials pay very close attention to those numbers. Those numbers are also reported to the state on a daily basis.
It's allowed us to create this ongoing conversation with our entire community, and supply them all kinds of practical information, and also create a level of transparency in the information that we're sharing so that, you know, students have access to the same information that we're giving to state health officials, or, you know, you can just sort of mixed and matched those audiences.
That's a very important, I think, message to convey to people because at the end of the day it is, you know, what reinforces this notion that we're a good citizen, a responsible neighbor, and–
April:
Right.
Shailagh:
–hopefully a constructive force in fighting this pandemic.
April:
So you actually covered a lot of the questions I was going to ask you, so I just want to jump in to this one. Can you please tell us what is digital first, and why is it critical for us?
Shailagh:
Yeah. You know, I think we should just think, “Forget the ‘first’ part and just think digital,” right? And that's just how we communicate now. And I think some of these things are easier and more obvious than others; some aspects of digital communications are easier than others.
I'll give you another example from the last few months. We have a very, sort of, fragmented student communications structure at Columbia, you know? We have a lot of autonomous or semi-autonomous schools and institutes and even departments. They control their communications channels to their students, as they should. They've picked these students, enrolled these students, they're educating these students. However, the students don't necessarily see, experience Columbia the same way we view them.
So, they are—in addition to being students at GS or Engineering or, you know, school psychiatry up at CUIMC—they also live in a particular dorm, or they live in a particular off-campus environment, or they come from a particular part of the country, or world for that matter. We have a very large population of international students at Columbia, and up until a few months ago, we have never really communicated with them as a cohort of people, and we've never really identified their shared interests or concerns.
COVID has forced us to service international students much more proactively. I mean, these are students who can't get thesis to get into the country, or they're dealing with travel bans where they can't get into the country. There are all sort of serious impairments that they're facing that none of our other students are facing. So, what digital allows us to do is very quickly build up a communications infrastructure to deal with this very important, also very high risk, student population.
So, we launched a couple months ago when the Global Centers set up these WeWork sites all over the world so that these Columbia students and wherever could—many different cities—could gather, you know, responsibly of course, and study together. We kind of created these little Columbia ecosystems in, I don't know, 20 or 30 cities. And at the same time, we launched this e-news product. You know, just an e-newsletter that specifically targeted international students who were not in the country, who, you know, were stuck in this kind of ridiculous pipeline.
And I think that universe of students is, I don't know, eight or nine thousand or something like that. And so we started this weekly newsletter where we included all these legislative updates and fun stories of life at these WeWork centers, and webinars specially programmed for them, and we started sending these newsletters out weekly. And I mean, I think the open rate on these newsletters is upward, you know, in the high 60s, like close to 70% every single week–
April:
That’s remarkable.
Shailagh:
–and the students are consuming all of the content on these newsletters because we can gauge that. And so from nothing from this void from, like, “Oh yeah, the international students, right?” to this product.
I mean we've now come to—in a very short amount of time—have identified and filled this void. It's very, very important that these students remain enrolled at Columbia and return to campus to finish their degrees and that we are perceived as being, you know, a responsive and caring institution in their eyes.
So that's a example of how digital can do what print couldn't do, but also can do this very targeted, meaningful type of communication that, you know, the whole, like, chasing links and clicks and likes, I mean, that's sort of a paper tiger in many respects. Because really, you know, communications matters most to the people you're trying to reach, and if you're only trying to reach 200 people, you want to get as close to that 200 as possible. And it doesn't really matter if you're reaching 200,000 people if you're not reaching the right 200 people.
So that's, you know, probably more than you bargained for there, April, but– [Laughs.]
April:
No, it's okay. No, we appreciate all the information. That's actually really good. We'd just like to know, so you oversee both GCA and Communications and Public Affairs. What we'd like to know is, why was this merger so important, and what does that mean for communicators across the university?
Shailagh:
You know, I come from a journalism, political background, and to me, the kind of community government portfolios—it's just a different form of communications. It's still communications; it's just different tools and objectives. But it's all about, you know, taking Columbia out into the world. And so I think it's important that that messaging, and what we're communicating, and how we're characterizing our priorities and our culture, you know, the more consistent you can be across those different audiences, the better feel people are gonna have for who we are and what we do well.
This isn't just like a feel-good exercise. This is like, you know, for instance the Climate School. We have this new Climate School; hopefully you've heard about it. Like this morning, I did a call with the Government Affairs team with this lobbying firm that we work with in Washington to figure out how we can introduce this Climate School into the ecosystem in Washington with, you know, committees on hill and all the science, you know, different factions within the administration, including, like, huge grant-making entities. And then on the communication side we, you know, helped the Earth Institute build the Climate School website.
All of that, all of that language and why we created a Climate School, why does this stuff matter, why is this interdisciplinary approach the way to go, what does Columbia have that's unique in this space? That's all the same information, right? It's just kind of packaged differently for different audiences. But having the whole department together makes it easier to manage that, and it just is a more efficient way of doing it.
April:
I love it. So, we're gonna ask you a wild card question. It has nothing to do with our presentation on today. You've pretty much answered all of our questions, even the ones that weren't asked.
Shailagh:
[Laughs.]
April:
Yeah, you did a great job expounding. So, what we want to know is, what advice would you give your younger self as a communicator today?
Shailagh:
You know, honestly, the most useful tool as a communicator is listening. Believe it or not, I'm an introvert by nature. And when I was a reporter, I really saw myself as sort of a voyeur; I felt like history's voyeur, right? I get to stand in the corner of the room, or listen to people tell their stories, or listen to a politician connect with voters, watch that happen in real time.
There's nothing, there's no substitute for just absorbing information and learning how to process it, and trying to be objective in the way that you receive it. I'm all for loyalty to the cause and to the institution and all that sort of thing, but the most important thing is listening, and observing, and trying to take your own personal biases and points of view kind of out of the equation to the extent you can.
[A phone rings.]
I laugh at this. When I was in college, I was a bartender at a nightclub, and I often say you learn more about human nature when you're the only sober person in a bar at two in the morning. But that was really, like, the power of observation in a totally different form.
But just being open to receiving information and not being self-conscious about what you don't know, what you think you don't understand, and also seeing these barriers that don't actually exist is, I think, the key to being– It's the open mind that really is the most important tool and the key to really effectively telling stories.
April:
You are awesome! [Claps hands together.] You already know how I feel. [Giggles.] But, we just want to know—we know you might be pressed for time—but do you have time to take maybe one to two questions?
Shailagh:
Oh yeah, sure.
April:
Awesome.
Shailagh:
Bring them.
April:
Right, I'm gonna turn it over to Robert Hornsby.
Shailagh:
[Laughs.]
Robert:
So, I'm gonna ask people, if you put a question in the chat, we can ask on your behalf, or I can call upon you and you can unmute yourself. There are too many people for me to see you waving your hands, so you're gonna have to put your question in the chat.
April:
Robert, if they like, if you guys select more at the bottom of your Zoom tab, you guys may know this already, you can actually raise your hand, and–
Robert:
Yeah, I saw that.
April:
–we’ll call on you.
Robert:
Cassandra, do you have a question for–? Here we go here. Marika has a question. Marika, unmute yourself and ask your question.
Marika:
Oh, I was just curious to know, we've talked about digital. You know, the trend. I'm wondering, if you could take out your crystal ball and look five years from now or so, like, can you see any kind of communication trend that's peaking its way that we should probably lean into or start focusing on?
Shailagh:
Yeah. Well, Marika, it's great to see your smiley face down there in the corner. Marika is a wonderful relative newcomer to Columbia, and is the—well, I don't know—the every-woman behind so many of these international student developments, so I'm glad to see you.
We need to do some serious reflection on what we've learned through COVID, but I think one of the things that is mind-blowing to a lot of us is the ability to reach way more people than we thought we could with events. And, you know, we've defined kind of event capacity, and whether this is conferences like huge global conferences like Davos or these Aspen Institute, you know, boondoggles or, you know, like, just the more workmanlike events that we do as part of our academic programming. You know, what we've discovered through COVID is that if, you know, if the issue's relevant and timely, like, thousands of people will show up to these webinars. And I don't think we really had a format like that before.
It creates, like, a communications connection opportunity that we need to figure out how to preserve it and kind of re-position it within, you know, a larger events framework when we do start meeting in person again.
Just as an example—and you know April and Cassandra will know this—but you know, we started doing these town halls with the community. We've done a series of them, 10 or 12 so far with local politicians, and you know, addressing kind of COVID-related issues, now vaccine related issues with the community of Harlem, West Harlem, Morningside Heights, you know, upper Manhattan. And you know, some of these are getting like five or six thousand, seven thousand people tuning in to them on, you know, like six o'clock on a Wednesday night or something like that.
We've never penetrated the community like that before, certainly not with, like, positive information. It's usually like, “No we're sorry, we didn't mean to screw up.” There's a lot of opportunity there, and that's a, you know, kind of an old school thing, right? That's not a new platform. That's just taking an old concept—events—and figuring out how to bring it into a digital space in a more permanent way.
Robert:
Alexis, you had a question.
Alexis:
Yeah, just the converse of that. What trends are you seeing that should be on their way out? You know, what should we stop focusing our attention on that you see kind of not going to be used in the next five years?
Shailagh:
[Sighs.] Yeah, I think this scale idea is– I think the idea– Well, let me just put this a slightly different way. You know, we tend to measure the success of digital products, or we have typically measured the success in volume; it's like a per pound, you know, value. As these marketing tools—like, Salesforce-type tools—become more sophisticated, I think the, you know, deep penetration of messages is easier to measure, and I think will become, you know, more targeted, more impactful, will be easier to actually deliver.
But also will lead us to scale back some of this, you know, this notion that we need to have, like– A website isn't successful unless it's getting, you know, a couple hundred thousand page views a day, and that's, of course, an unattainable goal for us, but it doesn't matter. I think when you're thinking about, like, if you're building a website from scratch right now, I'm not sure you would build the kind of traditional, big, mega website with a whole bunch of tabs and kind of drop– You know, where you're trying to do everything with one website.
I think it's sort of devolving away from this mass audience idea into more targeted, meaningful engagement. It's hard to read these things, though. I mean, honestly. I think COVID’s been a humbling exercise for many of us who thought we had this all figured out. [Laughs.]
Robert:
Got a question from SIPA. Go ahead, SIPA. Tell us your name.
Nadine:
Hi, I'm Nadine El Tanamly, and I'm the Director of Events and Communications at SIPA. This has been a very exciting week for me because I never participated in anything like this before, so I'm really appreciated the fact that you've all come together and provided Columbia University employees with this learning opportunity.
I am wondering if we, as a university, are using the best tools. I know that each individual school has their own budget and priorities. However, sometimes I wonder, just based on feedback we received from alumni, if we should be using the same products and tools that our students are using at their companies that they're working for after they graduate Columbia.
I often find that I get feedback from alumni that we should be using different platforms, and that they're very critical of the fact that we're not providing the highest, most amazing experiences for them. I think they're tired of Zoom, and that's the only platform that we're using, and we use Mailchimp, and Bedework, and CampusGroups.
So, I was just wondering if there's any discussions internally to perhaps have pilot programs for some products like Marketo or Adobe that are more sophisticated for us to trial as a group and see what works best, or if that's something that has been done before.
Shailagh:
Robert's laughing because this is, like, there's nothing that gets me more worked up than this issue.
Yes. So yes, we need to figure this out. It really holds us back, the fact that we're so fragmented technologically. And I mean, I don't want to get all worked up about this. But let me just reassure you that we are on the case, and we have a team of people who represent entities across the university that have been relatively recently convened to address exactly this issue. And if you have specific needs or interests that you want to bring to our attention, bring those things to our attention, and send them in to Robert. And we are very anxious to—and I think there is a willingness to—be more responsive to this, but we need to collaborate more effectively across the university to identify, you know, things.
I mean, don't get me started about Salesforce. I mean, I sometimes feel like Salesforce should pay me as an official sponsor. You know, we have 15 or 20 entities around Columbia that have different Salesforce platforms, licenses. They don't interact; it's insane. We don't have one even in our own office. We generate by far the, you know, largest lists, and it's crazy that we don't have this marketing cloud– [laughs] –component baked into, you know, all of our newsletters and all that.
But we're working towards that, and, you know, CUIT Gaspare is very receptive to approaching things this way. But we, you know, we just need—you know, that's why these types of gatherings, and Robert and Cassandra– I think there's just so much potential for a much more vibrant internal, you know, collaborative dynamic, and that's what we're trying to achieve through you know these sessions. Right? Is, we get to know each other, we work together more closely, we bring things like this to each other's attention. And yeah, I just think we can cover so much ground just in this very specific area, which is really the key to doing digital communications effectively.
Right now, it's sort of a duct tape and twine operation. And we leave a lot of opportunity on the table because we miss the boat on these, you know, products that would just not only make it easier to do, make it easier for a lot more people to do, but also, you know, that's how you target effectively. We just don't have the data we need in many respects. So, that's a very short homily for me on the subject, but–. [Laughs.]
Robert:
Sue Rosenthal, you had a quick question, and we're down to our last five minutes.
Sue Rosenthal:
Yeah, it's very quick. Number one, I don't think I have to say this, but please be sure to include the Medical Center in whatever you're doing. Thank you.
Shailagh:
[Laughs.]
Sue:
I know CUIT and CUIMC Communications sort of have their own separate pods.
And then I was curious, and this is maybe too specific a question, but following up on what the last person asked about. Looking into webinars, has anybody used GoToMeeting? But, you know, that specific question. Thank you.
Robert:
You can vote in the chat. Kristina Hernandez had a general question; I think it may be our last one. Kristina?
Kristina Hernandez:
Yeah, I mean it was just something Shailagh like, what you said about fragmented media and technologies. And I was just wondering, like, are there other ways in your opinion, besides technologies, that we as communications professionals can help address, you know, the fact that Columbia is such a large institution? There's so many different schools and departments, and that there's a lot of information to share. And so aside from technologies, are there ways that we can be working together differently, better, to bridge some of those gaps?
Shailagh:
Yeah. You know, we had– It's just one of these, like, “Whoops, then came COVID.” So, we had actually created this– We have some real estate over on Broadway that is, like, kind of a big open space that we were going to turn into sort of a, you know, kind of comms lab for people to come and work together, especially, you know, the digital social media types to do just this kind of brainstorming, and, you know, maybe one day a week working together there as a team.
You know, obviously we have our individual portfolios, but it's really like the communication staff at this school work together more than any other—I mean, other than maybe HR—which is much more, you know, kind of specific and inward looking. But we have just an enormous canvas to operate on, and we're only limited by our own kind of traditional, cultural instincts. Right?
I think we're trying to facilitate as much of that collaboration as we can out of, you know, our office. But if, you know, if you see missed opportunities, or opportunities, or you feel like you would benefit from, you know, or specific types of kind of cross-collaborations. You want to recommend any of those things, we're just like, couldn't be more receptive to those ideas. I'm a fairly, you know, impatient kind of informal person, so it will happen– [Chuckles] –if you propose it, probably. I don't want this to be our thing; I want this to be kind of like a public square type internal dynamic.
And so I leave that to Robert and Cassandra to figure out how to, you know, make these things come to life. But I think we just, especially now kind of as we transition ultimately back to a sort of semi-normal work environment, like, let's just not go back to that old environment in all of its forms that weren't working. [Laughs.] It's a long list when it comes to communications. I'm exceedingly optimistic about all the upside potential here.
Robert:
Well, we would be happy to launch a virtual comms lab if that's possible. We'll figure it out.
I want to thank everyone. We're just about out of time. Thank you so much, all of you, for coming out today for our first session of Comms 101. Next session is next Tuesday at 2 p.m. Tune in again, and thanks very much. And thank you, Shailagh. Thank you, April.
Shailagh:
Thank you, everybody.
Robert:
Have a great afternoon.
Cassandra:
Yes, thank you, everyone.
Shailagh:
Take care.
Unidentified attendee #10:
Thank you.
Robert Hornsby:
Welcome to Communications 101, WeConnect workshop. Today is a fast-moving session; it's a communications overview, and we're going to cover some broad material and not get into too many specifics. If you have questions, please put them in the chat, and we'll try to refer to those along the way if we can. We'll also have a three-part session today: a 15-20 minute presentation that I'll conduct, and then we'll be joined by a special guest for a 15 to 20 minute interview, and then a general question and answer period for 15 to 20 minutes. So, here we go.
[Second slide: Communications Overview – Course Basics]
Course, the basics. We're going to cover general topics relating to theory and practice of communications. Each week is a weekly presentation, a dialogue, and a question and answer. You can join as many classes as you wish, and each week we'll give you an easy research project before class, such as collecting a couple of websites that you can refer to.
[Third slide: Communications Overview – Three pillars of Communications]
So, we're going to start with three pillars of communications. They are audience. And the big question there is, to whom are you communicating? Purpose. Why are you communicating? Serving what goal? And outcomes. After communicating, what outcomes do you seek?
[Fourth slide: Communications Overview – Course Topics]
So, we know all too well that Columbia can be like a jumble, a big puzzle that you're trying to solve, especially if you're new to the university, but we created this course to help you put the pieces together. So, these are these series of course topics. Today is the communications overview. And by the way, these PowerPoint presentations will be saved in a Google folder for your reference, and this is in fact a playable puzzle.
[Fifth slide: What We Do]
So let's talk about what we do in the communications area of Columbia. We create content about the university. And see that at the end there: “purposeful.” We deliver and promote that content to stakeholders and audiences within the community and externally. We also facilitate current and future fulfillment of university initiatives. What we mean by that is our job, in some respect, is to help make things happen. We just don't broadcast about the university to make people feel good; we want them to engage with us, we want them to apply to the university, we want them to come to our programs, participate, write checks, get hired. Those are the initiatives that we're talking about fulfillment.
We also assist other external entities such as news outlets, for example, The New York Times, CBS TV, WNYC radio, Huffington Post with a production of content about Columbia, often featuring our experts or our research.
[Sixth slide: What We Do: What is “content”?]
So, now we have a chance for you to unmute yourself. What are some types of content: written content, visual content, audio content, and multimedia? Let's start with written content. Unmute yourself if you have something to offer. Tell us a piece of written content.
Unidentified attendee #1:
Op-ed.
Unidentified attendee #2:
Website content.
Robert:
Website content. Go ahead.
Unidentified attendee #1:
Op-eds for an executive.
Robert:
Op-eds for an executive. Anyone else?
Unidentified attendee #2:
Press releases.
Robert:
Press releases.
Unidentified attendee #3:
Blog posts.
Robert:
Blog posts.
Unidentified attendee #1:
Newsletters.
Robert:
Newsletters. Keep it rolling.
Nadine El Tanamly:
Event marketing materials.
Robert:
Yes.
Unidentified attendee #3:
Annual letters and appeals.
Robert:
Indeed. So that's great. So, here are some examples, and you mentioned most of these. These are examples of written content.
[Seventh slide: What We Do: What is “content”? – Visual Content]
So, visual content can include photography, video, graphics. What about other things? What other things are visual?
Unidentified attendee #1:
Hand out tapes for–
Unidentified attendee #4:
There you go.
Robert:
Sure.
Yulia Trask:
It can be chart with some analytics, for example.
Robert:
Sure. Sure. Charts, analytics. There's also audio content such as podcasts, and there's a new emerging platform of voice chat. On the multimedia side, there are Zoom events and webinars.
[Eighth slide: What We Do: Deliver and promote content]
So, what we do: delivering and promoting content. So, what are some of the platforms or places that you find our content, Columbia's and external? And for this course, when we say platforms, we're referring to the mediums of transmission; how a piece of content is transmitted or delivered to an audience, and that could be online or offline. So what are some of the platforms you'll see Columbia content?
Unidentified attendee #3:
Email.
Robert:
Email.
Unidentified attendee #5:
Social media.
Robert:
Social media.
Unidentified attendee #6:
Website.
Robert:
Yes. anything else?
Unidentified attendee #7:
Print.
Robert:
Okay.
Unidentified attendee #3:
Maybe advertising outdoors.
Robert:
Sure.
[Ninth slide: What We Do: Deliver and promote content – Examples]
Okay, you mentioned most of these. Notice the first four items: web pages; social media; YouTube, Vimeo for video; and streaming audio; and social media apps. And then there are four, they're in gray: in print, newspapers, magazines; TV broadcast; radio news; signage; and street banners. And of course, there are many, many others. These are just some of the– When we talk about platforms, this is what we're talking about.
[Tenth slide: What We Do: Deliver and promote content—”Digital First”]
So, those first four items. This is digital first, the practice of leading communications with online platforms or channels, and we're going to talk more about that as we go along. But–
[Eleventh slide: What We Do?: Why Digital First? – some statistics]
Why is digital first important? So, look at these numbers as we go down the list. New York Times subscribers.
Unidentified attendee #8:
[Indiscernible]
Robert:
7.5 million viewers. 6.7 million are digital only. And you go down the list and it gets larger and larger. But look at the break between TV broadcast news viewers and Twitter users, and then look at the break between Twitter users and Facebook users in North America. So between TV and Twitter, it's a factor of 10. Between Twitter and Facebook, it's almost four times, certainly three times greater. And then you look at the Facebook users worldwide, 2.8 billion. And what's the world population? 7.8 billion people, so nearly a third of the people in the world are on Facebook. And on the right, you'll see a chart of Facebook's inception to today.
[Twelfth slide: Who does What?: Office Integration]
So, who does what? This is an organizational chart of the Office of Communications and Public Affairs. So, within each of these units, there are multiple offices and multiple groups, but they are broadly Government Affairs, Community Affairs, Operations, and then Communications and Public Affairs. We'll talk more about this in a few minutes. But then under Operations is Budget and Administration unit, Columbia creative, Columbia Community Service. Under the Office of Communications and Public Affairs is the Public Affairs Office, Internal Communications—that's me and Cassandra—Columbia News, and our Digital Strategy group. You can find all of our names and titles at the link at the bottom here: who we are, Office of Communications and Public Affairs.
[Thirteenth slide: Who does What?: Next several weeks]
So, in the course of the next several weeks, we'll have guests from various units to discuss their roles, responsibilities, and day-to-day duties, and we'll be sharing a dialogue or an interview with an expert. But before we go along, I wanted to pause screen sharing for a second and check in with you.
[A computer makes an alert noise.]
So, do people have questions about–?
Peter:
I’ll ask a question.
Robert:
When you’re ready. Peter, go ahead.
Peter:
Are there slides from this presentation going to be shared with us afterwards along with the–
Robert:
Yes.
Peter:
–recording?
Robert:
Yes. There will be a powerpoint presentation– We have a Google folder, and we'll load all those up. And people from the Medical Center, we have a folder in an app—an application—called Lab Archive, and we'll be able to put all the presentations there. Not all the presenters and the guests will have presentations.
Are there other questions about what we've covered so far?
Come on. Okay, let me do it a different way. So, how many people are in a public affairs role? Media relations or public affairs of some kind? Raise your hand.
Okay, and how many people are in an internal communications role like mine or have that as an aspect of your job?
Okay, those are my peeps.
And what other offices are represented here? Do we have people from Alumni or that have alumni responsibilities? Krista, Christina.
What about other people? What about multimedia? Do we have people who are in the web teams, like Peter?
What about social media of responsibilities?
So you'll see, one of the reasons we're having this class is that multiple people have multiple roles, and some people only have one role. So, this is an opportunity for you to round out your skill set. If you don't know a lot about social media, we're going to have a social media expert come talk to you. We're going to have someone talk about media relations. We're going to have someone talk about executive communications and crisis.
So, this is an opportunity for us to share some resources, get to know each other, understand each other's issues, and then share the wealth and the knowledge that we have. What we're trying to do is break down the silos. In part, what we're trying to do is break down the silos between the various offices, so that we have a sense from you of what's going on, and you know who we are and what we do and how we can help you.
So, are there other general questions from the first part of the presentation?
See a couple of people from the Strategic Communications class; they've heard the audience, purpose, and outcomes. Has anyone else encountered this kind of thinking before? Okay–
[A computer makes an alert noise.]
–so this is more of a marketing perspective.
And let's see what's happening in the chat.
“Is there another overall communications group we can–?” There are a few subset groups; there's a marketing group, and there are a couple of other small groups. Cassandra and I run a couple of informal groups for people with responsibility for digital screens, for example, across campus. But no, there aren't multiple groups.
But if you have a group in mind, say it was an affinity group that you felt needed to be represented, then we can help you connect with other people and set something up.
“Would there be a master list you could look people up by unit?” Well, we do have a master WeConnect list. I guess we can take a look at how we would present that so that you'd be able to see it. I think right now it's in a spreadsheet, but I'll have to take a look at it.
Any other questions?
Unidentified attendee # 9:
I had a question.
Robert:
Sure, go ahead.
Unidentified attendee # 9:
Do we have people listed where, in effect, they would be willing to talk about their primary skill set? No, that someone could say, “I'd be willing to answer questions about x.”
Robert:
We haven't compiled that, but I think that could be one of the emerging resources coming out of group like this, where similar to your LinkedIn page where you tick off, you know, here are my five areas of expertise. People that are here today, would you be interested in doing that or willing to participate in something like that? So, see a show of hands or thumbs up or reaction. Okay. so, we're making notes of this as we go along; Cassandra will put together, and we can contact you as a group and get a starter list going, maybe.
Unidentified attendee # 9:
I mean, I say that if I could offer one, I happen to be a former television producer for CBS. And there's probably a number of people here who used to work in the news, and we could be a resource for anybody who has questions about, you know, anything to do with video, TV production–
Robert:
Sure.
Unidentified attendee # 9:
–journalists.
Robert:
That’s a great idea.
I see in the chat someone asked about the directory. I can't look at that while we're doing this event, but we'll capture the chat, and we'll take a look at it and see if it's all up to date.
Cassandra Nathan:
It's not; I just checked.
Robert:
Okay, we'll work on that. We have just a minute or two before our guest speaker arrives, and I wanted to ask, is there any other question about the previous content? If I was to ask you, can you define your primary audience, your primary purpose, and the primary outcome, would you be able to do that? Anyone?
Unidentified attendee # 9:
Wouldn't that be dependent upon your director, your executive?
Robert:
Oh absolutely, absolutely. It's unit specific. Could be your school, the department. But understanding who your primary audience, who you are trying to communicate with, why you're communicating with them, and then what you expect to happen at that back end is the core of our work. And we're pushing this purposeful communications idea to try and not only to engage you in that, but also to challenge people.
So, in the old school of communications, you set the dial on broadcast, and you just hope that someone at the other end was listening. So that might be that you're only knowing that The New York Times has circulation, but you don't know who's reading it, or how they feel about what they're reading. And you know that people are watching television, and they're watching television when a TV show mentioned Columbia University, but you don't know how they feel about that. You don't know if they liked it or didn't like it.
It was really difficult before the expansion of the internet and social media, particularly, to come up with really good metrics other than sort of nielsen ratings. But now we're far beyond that, and there's really no going back.
Okay, we should be joined very shortly by our guest.
Shailagh Murray:
I'm here.
Robert:
You're here. There she is. Hey, welcome. So, this is a group of about 35 people-ish, and we're going to turn it over to our guest. And let me go back to screen share for just a second
Cassandra:
We’re at 57-ish.
Robert:
57, that's amazing.
Shailagh:
Wow.
Cassandra:
Good to see you, Shailagh.
Shailagh:
Hello, hello.
Robert:
And as I said before, we're gonna have a dialogue, and our first guest is Shailagh Murray, the Executive Vice President for Public Affairs, and she'll be joined in dialogue by April Brazil who's Administrative Coordinator in the Office of Communication and Public Affairs. I'm going to stop share and go back to general view.
[Screen share stops]
April, can you hear? Are you on mute? You just seem to be on mute. Unmute yourself.
Shailagh:
Uh-oh.
Robert:
I can hear her; she's sitting in the next office; I can hear her voice, but I can't–.
Shailagh:
[Laughs.] Now, she–
Cassandra:
April, try to log out and come back in, and maybe– Because I had some trouble with my Zoom earlier. Maybe log out and come back and see if it works.
Robert:
Okay, in the meantime, Shailagh, would you talk to us about digital first? Where did this idea come from, and why is it important?
Shailagh:
[Laughs.] Well, digital. I was a newspaper reporter for about 20 years, and when I say newspaper reporter, I mean literally newspapers. I think it was the 2004 presidential campaign which I was covering John Kerry for The Wall Street Journal. And The Wall Street Journal was not just a newspaper; it was a five day a week newspaper in those days. So, you would go out on the campaign trail, and like a week would go by before you would write, like, a little short story that would run somewhere inside the paper. And you just kind of have to wait for space to become available and then—you know, unless something huge happened, like he picked his Vice President or something—that was, you know, kind of what you were left with.
By 2008, when I covered the Obama campaign, like, all coverage had a digital component, and, you know, by the end of the campaign, basically by election day, we were not just writing one story a day, we were writing multiple updates of those stories. And you weren't primarily writing for the internet yet, but you were, you know, you were still writing the story that was going to run in the paper that then had a digital version.
But, within a very short amount of time that, even that, reversed itself. And now we're in what in the news business we call a virtuous news cycle, which is a news cycle that never ends. And so there's a lot of downsides to that. We're not going to focus on those.
But the upside to it for an organization like Columbia is that—well, all institutions—is that we can basically become our own newspapers and content providers. And the platforms are so small d democratic because everyone has access to them, that you have this opportunity that never really existed before to tell your own story on your own platforms and access all of the other platforms that everybody uses to share content, which, otherwise known as social media.
So, we—you know, at Columbia—we've gone in just a few short years from publishing a monthly newspaper, which was our primary way of communicating internally with faculty profiles, and, you know, features about, you know, art gallery exhibits, and all that kind of stuff. All that is migrated online. We no longer publish any print products, and we have this whole universe of digital Columbia News branded products that we now rely on, not just to communicate internally but externally as well.
And I'm sure you're going to hear more about this as this, you know, series of seminars unfold. But the COVID site, which is our largest website now, has, you know, on a good day will have 30 or 40,000 unique visitors. What that tells you is that there is an audience for the kind of content that we are producing and the stories that we're telling. We didn't have any ability to reach people that way before. And you take something like, you know, a crisis like this pandemic. You know, digital platforms and crises are, you know, made for each other.
The other thing that I think is important about digital communications is that it has basically turned everyone into a communicator. And if you just run your own Instagram account or Twitter feed that you primarily communicate with your friends on, that's communications, and it's not that different from what we're doing at a university-wide level. Maybe, we're just a little bit more paranoid about what we share—I wouldn't say paranoid, I'd say responsible—but I think the idea here is to equip as many people as possible with as many communication skills so that we kind of create this universe of communicators university-wide to just enhance everything that we're doing. And I'm super excited to be here.
April do you have audio now?
April:
Yes, I have audio now. I'm back, and I'm ready.
Shailagh:
Robert, ask your first question.
Robert:
Go ahead, April. We’ll give you a second question.
April:
No problem. So everyone, my name is April Brazil. I work in the Office of Communications and Public Affairs, and I had the privilege of working in Government and Community Affairs as well.
So for our second question, Shailagh, we would like to know, how has this pandemic, how has COVID affected the way we communicate across the university? Because this pandemic has really just changed the way we do life in general, so we want to know how that has impacted us.
Shailagh:
As I was just saying, it has forced us to pivot much more quickly than we would have under normal circumstances, and for that I could not be more grateful to the coronavirus. Because we had started—and thankfully we did start—a year or year and a half ago to make this big digital conversion. So, we were already thinking this way; we already had a restructured team built for the long haul of, you know, digital communications, but what COVID allowed us to do was create this critical mass audience that I was just describing, where we suddenly for the first time ever as a university are actively engaged with student, faculty, and staff on the same platform.
And that is, you know, not exactly the most exciting development in the world. In the whole scheme of things, it's not like electric cars. But it's a pretty powerful tool, and the ability for us, for instance, to share test data. Right?
So, every day you go on the COVID site, you can see how many people tested positive for COVID within our community. And that is, you know, super important information, not just for people within the community—live and may attend classes in person or work in person—but also for the people who live around the community. They keep a close eye on those numbers, and we hear from them regularly; they see something they don't like. And state and city health officials pay very close attention to those numbers. Those numbers are also reported to the state on a daily basis.
It's allowed us to create this ongoing conversation with our entire community, and supply them all kinds of practical information, and also create a level of transparency in the information that we're sharing so that, you know, students have access to the same information that we're giving to state health officials, or, you know, you can just sort of mixed and matched those audiences.
That's a very important, I think, message to convey to people because at the end of the day it is, you know, what reinforces this notion that we're a good citizen, a responsible neighbor, and–
April:
Right.
Shailagh:
–hopefully a constructive force in fighting this pandemic.
April:
So you actually covered a lot of the questions I was going to ask you, so I just want to jump in to this one. Can you please tell us what is digital first, and why is it critical for us?
Shailagh:
Yeah. You know, I think we should just think, “Forget the ‘first’ part and just think digital,” right? And that's just how we communicate now. And I think some of these things are easier and more obvious than others; some aspects of digital communications are easier than others.
I'll give you another example from the last few months. We have a very, sort of, fragmented student communications structure at Columbia, you know? We have a lot of autonomous or semi-autonomous schools and institutes and even departments. They control their communications channels to their students, as they should. They've picked these students, enrolled these students, they're educating these students. However, the students don't necessarily see, experience Columbia the same way we view them.
So, they are—in addition to being students at GS or Engineering or, you know, school psychiatry up at CUIMC—they also live in a particular dorm, or they live in a particular off-campus environment, or they come from a particular part of the country, or world for that matter. We have a very large population of international students at Columbia, and up until a few months ago, we have never really communicated with them as a cohort of people, and we've never really identified their shared interests or concerns.
COVID has forced us to service international students much more proactively. I mean, these are students who can't get thesis to get into the country, or they're dealing with travel bans where they can't get into the country. There are all sort of serious impairments that they're facing that none of our other students are facing. So, what digital allows us to do is very quickly build up a communications infrastructure to deal with this very important, also very high risk, student population.
So, we launched a couple months ago when the Global Centers set up these WeWork sites all over the world so that these Columbia students and wherever could—many different cities—could gather, you know, responsibly of course, and study together. We kind of created these little Columbia ecosystems in, I don't know, 20 or 30 cities. And at the same time, we launched this e-news product. You know, just an e-newsletter that specifically targeted international students who were not in the country, who, you know, were stuck in this kind of ridiculous pipeline.
And I think that universe of students is, I don't know, eight or nine thousand or something like that. And so we started this weekly newsletter where we included all these legislative updates and fun stories of life at these WeWork centers, and webinars specially programmed for them, and we started sending these newsletters out weekly. And I mean, I think the open rate on these newsletters is upward, you know, in the high 60s, like close to 70% every single week–
April:
That’s remarkable.
Shailagh:
–and the students are consuming all of the content on these newsletters because we can gauge that. And so from nothing from this void from, like, “Oh yeah, the international students, right?” to this product.
I mean we've now come to—in a very short amount of time—have identified and filled this void. It's very, very important that these students remain enrolled at Columbia and return to campus to finish their degrees and that we are perceived as being, you know, a responsive and caring institution in their eyes.
So that's a example of how digital can do what print couldn't do, but also can do this very targeted, meaningful type of communication that, you know, the whole, like, chasing links and clicks and likes, I mean, that's sort of a paper tiger in many respects. Because really, you know, communications matters most to the people you're trying to reach, and if you're only trying to reach 200 people, you want to get as close to that 200 as possible. And it doesn't really matter if you're reaching 200,000 people if you're not reaching the right 200 people.
So that's, you know, probably more than you bargained for there, April, but– [Laughs.]
April:
No, it's okay. No, we appreciate all the information. That's actually really good. We'd just like to know, so you oversee both GCA and Communications and Public Affairs. What we'd like to know is, why was this merger so important, and what does that mean for communicators across the university?
Shailagh:
You know, I come from a journalism, political background, and to me, the kind of community government portfolios—it's just a different form of communications. It's still communications; it's just different tools and objectives. But it's all about, you know, taking Columbia out into the world. And so I think it's important that that messaging, and what we're communicating, and how we're characterizing our priorities and our culture, you know, the more consistent you can be across those different audiences, the better feel people are gonna have for who we are and what we do well.
This isn't just like a feel-good exercise. This is like, you know, for instance the Climate School. We have this new Climate School; hopefully you've heard about it. Like this morning, I did a call with the Government Affairs team with this lobbying firm that we work with in Washington to figure out how we can introduce this Climate School into the ecosystem in Washington with, you know, committees on hill and all the science, you know, different factions within the administration, including, like, huge grant-making entities. And then on the communication side we, you know, helped the Earth Institute build the Climate School website.
All of that, all of that language and why we created a Climate School, why does this stuff matter, why is this interdisciplinary approach the way to go, what does Columbia have that's unique in this space? That's all the same information, right? It's just kind of packaged differently for different audiences. But having the whole department together makes it easier to manage that, and it just is a more efficient way of doing it.
April:
I love it. So, we're gonna ask you a wild card question. It has nothing to do with our presentation on today. You've pretty much answered all of our questions, even the ones that weren't asked.
Shailagh:
[Laughs.]
April:
Yeah, you did a great job expounding. So, what we want to know is, what advice would you give your younger self as a communicator today?
Shailagh:
You know, honestly, the most useful tool as a communicator is listening. Believe it or not, I'm an introvert by nature. And when I was a reporter, I really saw myself as sort of a voyeur; I felt like history's voyeur, right? I get to stand in the corner of the room, or listen to people tell their stories, or listen to a politician connect with voters, watch that happen in real time.
There's nothing, there's no substitute for just absorbing information and learning how to process it, and trying to be objective in the way that you receive it. I'm all for loyalty to the cause and to the institution and all that sort of thing, but the most important thing is listening, and observing, and trying to take your own personal biases and points of view kind of out of the equation to the extent you can.
[A phone rings.]
I laugh at this. When I was in college, I was a bartender at a nightclub, and I often say you learn more about human nature when you're the only sober person in a bar at two in the morning. But that was really, like, the power of observation in a totally different form.
But just being open to receiving information and not being self-conscious about what you don't know, what you think you don't understand, and also seeing these barriers that don't actually exist is, I think, the key to being– It's the open mind that really is the most important tool and the key to really effectively telling stories.
April:
You are awesome! [Claps hands together.] You already know how I feel. [Giggles.] But, we just want to know—we know you might be pressed for time—but do you have time to take maybe one to two questions?
Shailagh:
Oh yeah, sure.
April:
Awesome.
Shailagh:
Bring them.
April:
Right, I'm gonna turn it over to Robert Hornsby.
Shailagh:
[Laughs.]
Robert:
So, I'm gonna ask people, if you put a question in the chat, we can ask on your behalf, or I can call upon you and you can unmute yourself. There are too many people for me to see you waving your hands, so you're gonna have to put your question in the chat.
April:
Robert, if they like, if you guys select more at the bottom of your Zoom tab, you guys may know this already, you can actually raise your hand, and–
Robert:
Yeah, I saw that.
April:
–we’ll call on you.
Robert:
Cassandra, do you have a question for–? Here we go here. Marika has a question. Marika, unmute yourself and ask your question.
Marika:
Oh, I was just curious to know, we've talked about digital. You know, the trend. I'm wondering, if you could take out your crystal ball and look five years from now or so, like, can you see any kind of communication trend that's peaking its way that we should probably lean into or start focusing on?
Shailagh:
Yeah. Well, Marika, it's great to see your smiley face down there in the corner. Marika is a wonderful relative newcomer to Columbia, and is the—well, I don't know—the every-woman behind so many of these international student developments, so I'm glad to see you.
We need to do some serious reflection on what we've learned through COVID, but I think one of the things that is mind-blowing to a lot of us is the ability to reach way more people than we thought we could with events. And, you know, we've defined kind of event capacity, and whether this is conferences like huge global conferences like Davos or these Aspen Institute, you know, boondoggles or, you know, like, just the more workmanlike events that we do as part of our academic programming. You know, what we've discovered through COVID is that if, you know, if the issue's relevant and timely, like, thousands of people will show up to these webinars. And I don't think we really had a format like that before.
It creates, like, a communications connection opportunity that we need to figure out how to preserve it and kind of re-position it within, you know, a larger events framework when we do start meeting in person again.
Just as an example—and you know April and Cassandra will know this—but you know, we started doing these town halls with the community. We've done a series of them, 10 or 12 so far with local politicians, and you know, addressing kind of COVID-related issues, now vaccine related issues with the community of Harlem, West Harlem, Morningside Heights, you know, upper Manhattan. And you know, some of these are getting like five or six thousand, seven thousand people tuning in to them on, you know, like six o'clock on a Wednesday night or something like that.
We've never penetrated the community like that before, certainly not with, like, positive information. It's usually like, “No we're sorry, we didn't mean to screw up.” There's a lot of opportunity there, and that's a, you know, kind of an old school thing, right? That's not a new platform. That's just taking an old concept—events—and figuring out how to bring it into a digital space in a more permanent way.
Robert:
Alexis, you had a question.
Alexis:
Yeah, just the converse of that. What trends are you seeing that should be on their way out? You know, what should we stop focusing our attention on that you see kind of not going to be used in the next five years?
Shailagh:
[Sighs.] Yeah, I think this scale idea is– I think the idea– Well, let me just put this a slightly different way. You know, we tend to measure the success of digital products, or we have typically measured the success in volume; it's like a per pound, you know, value. As these marketing tools—like, Salesforce-type tools—become more sophisticated, I think the, you know, deep penetration of messages is easier to measure, and I think will become, you know, more targeted, more impactful, will be easier to actually deliver.
But also will lead us to scale back some of this, you know, this notion that we need to have, like– A website isn't successful unless it's getting, you know, a couple hundred thousand page views a day, and that's, of course, an unattainable goal for us, but it doesn't matter. I think when you're thinking about, like, if you're building a website from scratch right now, I'm not sure you would build the kind of traditional, big, mega website with a whole bunch of tabs and kind of drop– You know, where you're trying to do everything with one website.
I think it's sort of devolving away from this mass audience idea into more targeted, meaningful engagement. It's hard to read these things, though. I mean, honestly. I think COVID’s been a humbling exercise for many of us who thought we had this all figured out. [Laughs.]
Robert:
Got a question from SIPA. Go ahead, SIPA. Tell us your name.
Nadine:
Hi, I'm Nadine El Tanamly, and I'm the Director of Events and Communications at SIPA. This has been a very exciting week for me because I never participated in anything like this before, so I'm really appreciated the fact that you've all come together and provided Columbia University employees with this learning opportunity.
I am wondering if we, as a university, are using the best tools. I know that each individual school has their own budget and priorities. However, sometimes I wonder, just based on feedback we received from alumni, if we should be using the same products and tools that our students are using at their companies that they're working for after they graduate Columbia.
I often find that I get feedback from alumni that we should be using different platforms, and that they're very critical of the fact that we're not providing the highest, most amazing experiences for them. I think they're tired of Zoom, and that's the only platform that we're using, and we use Mailchimp, and Bedework, and CampusGroups.
So, I was just wondering if there's any discussions internally to perhaps have pilot programs for some products like Marketo or Adobe that are more sophisticated for us to trial as a group and see what works best, or if that's something that has been done before.
Shailagh:
Robert's laughing because this is, like, there's nothing that gets me more worked up than this issue.
Yes. So yes, we need to figure this out. It really holds us back, the fact that we're so fragmented technologically. And I mean, I don't want to get all worked up about this. But let me just reassure you that we are on the case, and we have a team of people who represent entities across the university that have been relatively recently convened to address exactly this issue. And if you have specific needs or interests that you want to bring to our attention, bring those things to our attention, and send them in to Robert. And we are very anxious to—and I think there is a willingness to—be more responsive to this, but we need to collaborate more effectively across the university to identify, you know, things.
I mean, don't get me started about Salesforce. I mean, I sometimes feel like Salesforce should pay me as an official sponsor. You know, we have 15 or 20 entities around Columbia that have different Salesforce platforms, licenses. They don't interact; it's insane. We don't have one even in our own office. We generate by far the, you know, largest lists, and it's crazy that we don't have this marketing cloud– [laughs] –component baked into, you know, all of our newsletters and all that.
But we're working towards that, and, you know, CUIT Gaspare is very receptive to approaching things this way. But we, you know, we just need—you know, that's why these types of gatherings, and Robert and Cassandra– I think there's just so much potential for a much more vibrant internal, you know, collaborative dynamic, and that's what we're trying to achieve through you know these sessions. Right? Is, we get to know each other, we work together more closely, we bring things like this to each other's attention. And yeah, I just think we can cover so much ground just in this very specific area, which is really the key to doing digital communications effectively.
Right now, it's sort of a duct tape and twine operation. And we leave a lot of opportunity on the table because we miss the boat on these, you know, products that would just not only make it easier to do, make it easier for a lot more people to do, but also, you know, that's how you target effectively. We just don't have the data we need in many respects. So, that's a very short homily for me on the subject, but–. [Laughs.]
Robert:
Sue Rosenthal, you had a quick question, and we're down to our last five minutes.
Sue Rosenthal:
Yeah, it's very quick. Number one, I don't think I have to say this, but please be sure to include the Medical Center in whatever you're doing. Thank you.
Shailagh:
[Laughs.]
Sue:
I know CUIT and CUIMC Communications sort of have their own separate pods.
And then I was curious, and this is maybe too specific a question, but following up on what the last person asked about. Looking into webinars, has anybody used GoToMeeting? But, you know, that specific question. Thank you.
Robert:
You can vote in the chat. Kristina Hernandez had a general question; I think it may be our last one. Kristina?
Kristina Hernandez:
Yeah, I mean it was just something Shailagh like, what you said about fragmented media and technologies. And I was just wondering, like, are there other ways in your opinion, besides technologies, that we as communications professionals can help address, you know, the fact that Columbia is such a large institution? There's so many different schools and departments, and that there's a lot of information to share. And so aside from technologies, are there ways that we can be working together differently, better, to bridge some of those gaps?
Shailagh:
Yeah. You know, we had– It's just one of these, like, “Whoops, then came COVID.” So, we had actually created this– We have some real estate over on Broadway that is, like, kind of a big open space that we were going to turn into sort of a, you know, kind of comms lab for people to come and work together, especially, you know, the digital social media types to do just this kind of brainstorming, and, you know, maybe one day a week working together there as a team.
You know, obviously we have our individual portfolios, but it's really like the communication staff at this school work together more than any other—I mean, other than maybe HR—which is much more, you know, kind of specific and inward looking. But we have just an enormous canvas to operate on, and we're only limited by our own kind of traditional, cultural instincts. Right?
I think we're trying to facilitate as much of that collaboration as we can out of, you know, our office. But if, you know, if you see missed opportunities, or opportunities, or you feel like you would benefit from, you know, or specific types of kind of cross-collaborations. You want to recommend any of those things, we're just like, couldn't be more receptive to those ideas. I'm a fairly, you know, impatient kind of informal person, so it will happen– [Chuckles] –if you propose it, probably. I don't want this to be our thing; I want this to be kind of like a public square type internal dynamic.
And so I leave that to Robert and Cassandra to figure out how to, you know, make these things come to life. But I think we just, especially now kind of as we transition ultimately back to a sort of semi-normal work environment, like, let's just not go back to that old environment in all of its forms that weren't working. [Laughs.] It's a long list when it comes to communications. I'm exceedingly optimistic about all the upside potential here.
Robert:
Well, we would be happy to launch a virtual comms lab if that's possible. We'll figure it out.
I want to thank everyone. We're just about out of time. Thank you so much, all of you, for coming out today for our first session of Comms 101. Next session is next Tuesday at 2 p.m. Tune in again, and thanks very much. And thank you, Shailagh. Thank you, April.
Shailagh:
Thank you, everybody.
Robert:
Have a great afternoon.
Cassandra:
Yes, thank you, everyone.
Shailagh:
Take care.
Unidentified attendee #10:
Thank you.