Category: higher education

On presentations, accolades and nametags: an update from CASE District VI

I’ve been in Denver since Sunday at the CASE District VI “Great Adventure” Conference, where I presented back-to-back sessions (Monday) titled “Crisis Communications in a Networked World” and “Communicating Change, Inside and Out.”

It seems that both sessions were well received,. No rotten tomatoes, anyway. But I wish I hadn’t tried to cram so much into the crisis communications presentation. I wanted to talk share some info about monitoring and measuring your online reputation, but that ought to be a session in and of itself. (And it will be in a couple of upcoming conferences. Watch this blog for details.) People don’t realize just how many online tools are available for monitoring image, brand and reputation online. Nor do they realize how easy to use many of them are. And that they’re free. Anyway, trying to share all that info in a 45-50 minute presentation was like turning on the fire hose. I’ll post both presentations via Slideshare later in the week, and I’ll link to them from here.

As great as it was to present again in my home district, the high point of the conference was last night’s awards ceremony. Our university won a grand total of 13 awards for communications, marketing, PR, design, alumni relations, development, etc. — the most we’ve ever won. Included in that list is the coveted Sweepstakes Award for overall excellence in institutional advancement, a designation we also won last year. It’s a shame more members of our communications team and our overall university advancement team weren’t on hand to share in the excitement. Only four of us from Missouri S&T made the trek to Denver this year, two of us as presenters. But we will celebrate appropriately back home. I consider myself very fortunate to work with so many talented and hard-working people.

Two other highlights: a good friend of mine, John Amato, won the district’s distinguished service award this year (well-deserved, John!), and I thoroughly enjoyed Sunday evening’s opening keynote by Scott, the nametag guy, who also happens to be quite a blogger. Too bad I couldn’t have met him before we launched our hello campaign to introduce people to our university’s new name.

Blogging about organizational change

missouri_sandt_bw_thumb.jpgToday — New Year’s Day 2008 — the university that has employed me for almost 17 years officially became Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T).

This name change comes after some 15 months of challenging communications work. Part of the challenge was trying to communicate to such a broad array of stakeholders in a relatively short time period. (Chris Brown of Branding & Marketing picked up on this in her Too many stakeholders post last March. “I think that rebranding a university is much harder than rebranding a company,” she wrote. “With a university the stakeholders feel much more ownership of the branding than the stakeholders in a company.” True that, Chris.)

One of the ways we attempted to communicate was through our Name Change Conversations blog, which we launched on Jan. 30, 2007. Over the past 11 months, that blog has been both a sounding board and a lightning rod for alumni, students, faculty, staff and others interested in the name change. As I posted that blog’s first post of the new year a little while ago, I reflected on this experiment in blogging for organizational change.

Over the past 11 months, we’ve tried to use this blog as an avenue to talk about the name change with our alumni, students, faculty and staff. As we said when we launched this site last January, we wanted it to be:

  • a source for useful information about the proposed name change.
  • a forum [for] discussion about the issues being raised by the proposal.
  • an avenue for providing up-to-the-minute information about the proposal.

When this blog experiment began, the idea of a name change was still in proposal form. It is now reality. But even after moving from proposal to recommendation to unanimous endorsement from the University of Missouri Board of Curators and on through the process of picking a logo and other details of the implementation, I’d like to think that this blog has achieved its purpose.

I hope you agree. But if you don’t, well, that’s fine. It’s not like we haven’t had our disagreements in the past. But I hope you can at least agree that this forum has allowed you to freely express your opinions about the name change and to participate in a process that we have tried to make as open as possible.

In my opinion, “transparency” and “conversation” were two of the most overused buzzwords of 2007. But those two terms best express what we have tried to do with this blog. We have used this blog to make the process more transparent than it would have been otherwise, and we have used it to try to engage you in a meaningful conversation about this change in your university’s identity.

It will be interesting where this experiment goes in 2008.

Update: this FC Now post today seems particularly relevant.

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