Communications
Throughout my time in the Division of Diversity and Inclusion, I have had the opportunity to grow our communications tools and strategies. When I began working in this space in 2014, there were no sophisticated communications tools being used which meant the reach of our information was lacking. Over the last few years I was able to advocate for a branded communications template to be created and used for important communications that needed to be sent from our organization. Following the first successful system, we then transitioned this same style to a branded HTML template for our monthly newsletter to be formatted into for distribution.
The success of these tools led to us being the leader of this type of branded look across campus and many others followed in our footsteps. Fast forward to today, a branded email tool has been built for all marketing staff at RIT to use and to allow for consistency in communications across campus. This tool works hand-in-hand with the new RIT email system that was created called RITMail. During the initial training period for this new platform, I identified the lack of a space for messages related to diversity at RIT to be sent. Through conversations and advocating for this, they adding a list for diversity and inclusion at RIT which would consist of a mandatory Important Announcements channel and two opt-out channels - Newsletters and Publications and Educational Opportunities. These are the first diversity specific communications channels RIT has ever had. Now with our branded communications strategy, we are able to send effective messaging to almost 20,000 contacts subscribed to our list serves.
Event Communications
I developed communications within our email template for high level divisional or university events. Use of this email tool in sync with our university events calendar, I was able to effectively communicate to the community information about registration, keynote speakers and other important information.
Program Communications
I worked with directors across our division to develop communication strategies for marketing our programs to students. I had the responsibility of developing communications and design email banners to go to both current RIT students as well as incoming first-year students. These ran from our leadership development programs to the DDI Summer Experience which is a program run for incoming first-year students from qualifying populations. The communications strategy for the DDI Summer Experience was more comprehensive because we not only had to communicate with the students but their families as well. It required well organized messaging which fell in line with what was being communicated from Enrollment Management and also indicated the areas of importance related to mandatory information collection.
Newsletter Communications
Since the winter of 2017, I have been responsible for building all 47 of our monthly newsletters between the months of September and May which have been publish on our diversity and inclusion website at RIT. As part of this process, I am responsible for collecting or designing all visuals to accompany the articles which have been written by our content writer. I then take the written content and visuals and build them within our website on Drupal. Each article is crafted to be eye catching and easy for our readers to navigate. Over the years I have made improvements but including easy link navigation at the bottom of articles so readers can easily navigate from one article to the next.
When the newsletter is completed the below HTML versions are created and sent via our RITMail platform to all 19,000 RIT community members that subscribe to our list serves. In the Academic Year of 2021-2022 we had 62 individual articles which received over 12,000 views.
