You need information about Zoom: Turn to page 39.
You want to know more about IT content throughout the pandemic: Turn to page 42.
We have all been impacted by the pandemic. As University communicators, we found it uniquely challenging to make sure our voices were heard over the cacophony of emails, chats, and messages that were being sent constantly by others both within and outside of our organization. As communicators for the Information Technology division, and because of the new focus on remote instruction and work, we knew our content was uniquely critical to the academic and workplace success of our disparate audiences.
Students, faculty, and staff all consume information differently, and information fatigue is a real danger as we all check email and messages that are being sent rapid-fire from all angles. Therefore, we needed to adapt our communication efforts to encompass all the ways our disparate audiences were looking for content. Social media, email, up-to-date status dashboards, Slack messages, and website updates were only part of the puzzle.
So we had to come up with a way to meet people where they were. It became quite a choose-your-own-adventure story, after a while.
We used:
Slack messages
Webex Teams
Social media (Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook)
IT Status dashboard
Daily, and then eventually twice-weekly update column (news from the front lines of IT Services)
Remote Tools blog (information on updates about Zoom, Webex, and general teleconferencing information)
Monthly newsletters for faculty and staff
Once-per-semester newsletters for students
Regular Friday column in campus-wide newsletter
Fun, team-building activities
This resulted in some amount of extra work for us, but a greater awareness of the tools and technologies that students, faculty, and staff needed during the pandemic. Where do you get your updates about Zoom? The Remote Tools blog. Where do you get your information about IT outages? The status dashboard. Depending on your questions, we have a place you can go to learn what you need to know.
So: Join us as we discuss this adventure, how our audiences were invited to choose their own content destinies, and the reception of our efforts across campus, as well as the methods we used for determining which page our audience ended up on during their adventure.
You want to learn more about IT Communications content streams. Turn to page... HEW 2021.