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Hull York Medical School
Communications plan 2011- 2013
Summary of this plan
For the years 2011-2013, HYMS communications staff will:
- align communications activities with the developing strategy of the school as a whole
- develop appropriate methods of communication for important audiences, specifically students and alumni
- develop the existing Boomerang Online site into a single unified online resource for HYMS staff (analogous to an intranet)
- focus on developing mature content management systems for the website so that future updates can be efficiently delegated to colleagues without losing quality oversight
- [depending on whatās decided about the prospectus:] move to a lighter printer version of the undergraduate prospectus accompanied by greater detail online
- secure colleaguesā support for a realistical prioritisation of workload which takes into account staff resource limitations
Table of contents
- Summary of this plan......................................................................................................................
- About this plan
- Requirements and objectives
- Staff
- Students
- External audiences
- Alumni..................................................................................................................................
- Core communications activities.........................................................................................
- Brand and visual identity
- Boomerang Online.................................................................................................................
- HYMS sheet
- Email.....................................................................................................................................
- Boomerang meeting
- Website..................................................................................................................................
- Pioneer magazine
- Communication with students
- Communications with alumni
- Undergraduate prospectus
- Postgraduate prospectus
- Events
- Resources
- Staff resources
- Financial resources
- Prioritisation and management of workload..................................................................
- Appendix 1: Current communications activities
- Appendix 2: Results of 2010 staff survey
Students
Historically, communications staff at HYMS have not been directly involved with student communication (except via generic channels which are also aimed at staff and the public). However, the quality of the student experience is becoming increasingly important to the success of the school. This is particularly true given the changes to higher education funding which are expected in the period 2011-2013. The way in which the school communicates with its students is one of the main factors in that student experience. So communications with students will need to be professionalised. Objectives:
- Students should have a single clear channel of communication with the school.
- Student communications should be coherently branded and professional, while also maintaining a friendly tone.
- Communications should be adapted to current trends in the media of communication already in use by the student body.
- Intercalated degrees should be marketed to undergraduate students to increase takeup.
- Emergency methods of communication should be available should the need arise.
- Key message: HYMS is a professional yet friendly medical school focused on providing a top-quality student experience.
External audiences
For historical reasons, external audiences have never been an official part of the HYMS remit (hence the communication teamās official designation as āinternal communicationsā). This is because external relations have traditionally been reserved by the parent universities. However, siting external relations outside of HYMS would mean that we would not have control over our own external relations strategy. For this reason, in practice the majority of the HYMS communication teamās activities have in fact been for external audiences, including applicants, the media, and the general public.
Regardless of where the work takes place, objectives for communication with external audiences are:
- Student recruitment for postgraduate courses should be prioritised. In the increasingly competitive environment that we anticipate for 2011-2013, we also expect an increased need to focus on recruitment for undergraduate courses, and on attracting students from other institutions for our intercalated degrees.
- The HYMS website should be continually developed and maintained to make it a comprehensive, modern and accessible source of information for all our external audiences.
- The distinctive nature of research at HYMS, whether solely or in partnership with parent universities or other organisations, should be communicated to the public, our competitors and our external stakeholders.
- Communicating our widening participation activities should be a high priority.
- Media relations should focus on the local and regional media to raise awareness of the contribution the school makes to healthcare in the region.
- Key messages: HYMS is a progressive, innovative medical school producing top-class doctors. HYMS is improving the health of its local region. HYMS works to widen participation in medical training in the UK.
Alumni
To date, HYMS has not successfully engaged with its alumni. But there are now compelling reasons to do so, including marketing postgraduate courses, cultivating future clinical academics, raising the schoolās profile in the NHS, and long-term fundraising efforts. Approach:
- The school should identify and liaise with members of its existing alumni community to agree strategic priorities for alumni activity.
We now have a need to make static information about the school available to all staff in an organised and accessible way. The current solution (where information is stored in a wide variety of relatively unstructured places, including web pages, shared drives, on paper, in emails and in staff membersā heads) is awkward, insecure, unsustainable and a threat to further development. Activity plan for 2011- 2013 We will develop, test and roll out a single point of access for news, staff information and staff resources. This will be a web-based, intranet-style solution which builds on the existing Boomerang Online system. We will develop a unified visual style across our different communications channels, as far as is possible. We will delegate content management for some areas while retaining overall quality control of content in the communications team. We will provide training and support to staff in using the new solution. We will advertise it internally to encourage take-up. We will discontinue redundant channels of communication as this new solution becomes more widely used. We will consider the best technology to implement this. If resources allow, it will probably prove most effective to manage this project in-house, with individual parts of the work outsourced where necessary.
HYMS sheet
The HYMS sheet is an informal paper-based and electronic newsletter circulated every 1- 2 months. It has a wide readership among staff, and research shows that it is especially valued by colleagues whose work is more distant from the HYMS core. It is also read by students and some visitors. It brings together news items that have been published elsewhere in the preceding few weeks, as well as new, informal content from staff and students. It was well received by respondents to the staff survey (Appendix 2). Activity plan for 2011- 2013 We will continue to produce the HYMS sheet in its current format and circulate it to staff and students.
Email
Internal email can be used to target individuals or groups with key information.
In recent years, we have acted to reduce the number of āblanketā emails used to distribute information, which had proven very unpopular in the past. As an official communication channel with all staff, the email system is now used only to distribute urgent, time-critical information. Activity plan for 2011- 2013 We will continue to use blanket emails sparingly for urgent, time-critical information. We will continue to discourage their use by colleagues and to provide effective alternatives.
Boomerang meeting
The Boomerang meeting is a general weekly meeting open to all staff. Although it is not a communication channel managed by the communications team, it was included in the survey of communication methods carried out in November 2010 (Appendix 2). Results showed that it was poorly attended and in general respondents did not regard it as a good method of communication. Activity plan for 2011- 2013 We do not regard the Boomerang meeting as an effective method of communication. It is not āownedā by the communications team, so we are not able to discontinue it. But we will provide the results of our survey to inform any future discussions about the meeting that may take place among colleagues elsewhere in HYMS.
Website
The current incarnation of the HYMS website was developed and launched over a period of six months in 2009. It targets the widest possible external audience, including (significantly to the school) potential applicants for both undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. The overall structure, appearance and useability of the website, and the technologies which underpin it, are jointly controlled in HYMS by the communications team and the web manager. These overall aspects have proven robust. However, other aspects of quality and usefulness vary by area across the site:
- The āAbout HYMSā area is presentable and regularly updated, but a number of key areas are not yet fit for purpose. For instance, staff information is piecemeal and we
changes would make the process of updating content much easier in future. We need to break this cycle. Activity plan for 2011- 2013 In the short term, we will focus on content for the following priority areas: research, postgraduate courses, committees, student prizes. In the longer term, we will identify parts of the website where control of content can be delegated to colleagues, and develop mature, integrated systems to allow this to happen. We will aim to complete this work by the end of 2012. This will almost certainly involve outsourcing packages of work to external contractors. We will work to make this effective both technically and in terms of work planning.
Pioneer magazine
Pioneer is a biannual magazine aimed at a wide external audience, including other medical schools and universities, prospective students and their families, politicians and policy- makers, other stakeholders and the general public. There are also specific pages aimed at our alumni. Because of its wide audience, it is difficult to assess the usefulness of the magazine or how well it is received by readers. However, it does reach an audience which no other channel reaches, and it mirrors publications produced by other institutions. Activity plan for 2011- 2013 We will continue to produce Pioneer biannually. We will undertake to collect data on its usefulness as far as this is possible. We will update the design and layout of the magazine following the refresh of the HYMS brand.
Communication with students
The communications team currently has no official remit to communicate with students. For ad hoc communications, we use a mixture of Blackboard, email and the HYMS Sheet. We need to develop this further.
Activity plan for 2011- 2013 We will work with the undergraduate school to agree the best channel of communication with students. This will take into account current trends in methods of communication used by students, and methods of communication already used by colleagues. We will provide templates and resources so that official communications between the undergraduate school and students can be as professional and HYMS-branded as possible. We will develop a method of emergency communications in case we need to issue whole-school messages to students at short notice.
Communications with alumni
The communications team currently has no official remit to communicate with alumni, except by sending them Pioneer magazine; nor does any other part of the organisation. We need to develop this further. Activity plan for 2011- 2013 We will work with members of our alumni community to determine what communications would be useful for them, and we will develop them in conjunction with volunteers from the community. This activity will be alumni- led. In particular, we will investigate the potential for using social networking and other digital communications tools.
Undergraduate prospectus
The current design and format of the undergraduate prospectus was created by an external agency in 2009, and intended to last three yearsAfter this date, the prospectus will be due a redesign. Experience of this process in the past suggests that it takes the best part of a year to conduct market research, put the contract out to tender, identify contractors, agree a new design, produce content and review the document, given the number of stakeholders whose input will be needed. DRAFT ā choose one of these two options for the final version of this document The cost of designing and printing a full undergraduate prospectus is by far the biggest single slice of the communications budget, and the workload Although we have considered moving away from producing a full printed undergraduate prospectus towards producing a lighter, less formal document
Postgraduate prospectus
In 2010, work on the postgraduate prospectus was led by the postgraduate centre with minimal input from the communications team. This was not an ideal situation, but it was unavoidable given both teamsā workload pressures. We are fortunate that the result has been positive because colleagues in the postgraduate team have some communications expertise and have worked with a strong external consultant. Ideally, we would like the postgraduate prospectus to follow a similar workload model to the undergraduate prospectus, with the postgraduate centre acting as client and the communications team managing the work. But this is not going to be practical in the foreseeable future, given that we have no resources to allocate to it. Activity plan for 2011- 2013 So long as colleagues in the postgraduate centre have the technical and resource capacity to manage the production of their own postgraduate prospectus, we will continue to support them in this and provide limited input where requested. If capacities change either in communications or in the postgraduate centre, we will revisit this arrangement.
Events
At present, the communications team organises and delivers two main HYMS-wide events: a post-graduation reception and an annual lecture. Both of these events are opportunities to communicate HYMS key messages to our staff, students and graduates as well as to external stakeholders. We also carry some of the expenses of the annual education conference, which is organised by the undergraduate school. Activity plan for 2011- 2013 We will continue to organise and deliver the post-graduation reception, and we will organise and deliver a new annual HYMS-wide prizegiving event which may incorporate a lecture. We will continue to support the education conference.
4. Resources
Staff resources
In-house communications staff at HYMS are:
- Communications Officer , 1.1 fte
- Communications Assistant , 0.7 fte
Financial resources
Budgets for 2011 - 2013 have not yet been set, but for the purposes of planning the communications budget for 2010-2011 was Ā£ 106 67 5. However, we have discretion over only a very small proportion of this expenditure. Two thirds of our budget (about Ā£70 000) is spent directly on behalf of the undergraduate school, including printing study guides, designing and printing the undergraduate prospectus and organising the graduation reception. Most of the remainder is earmarked for projects over which we have no control, such as postgraduate publications, events, staff ID badges, the Deanās Christmas cards, and so on. Only about 4% of our budget (roughly Ā£5000) is available to us to cover projects originated within the communications team. One important consequence of this is that we do not have any significant flexibility within our budget, so we are not able to reallocate expenditure to pay for projects which arise between budgeting periods, even when these projects are regarded as very high priority (such as the website redesign in 2009). Another consequence is that we cannot rely on being able to make significant changes to the communications budget for the period 2011-2013, even if we plan significant changes in our approach to communications. One possible solution to this difficulty would be to delegate parts of the budget to the parts of HYMS which currently control them, notably the undergraduate school. Colleagues would then request work from the communications team when they needed it, and provide funding to pay for it. This would be a more rational arrangement and it may help both us and our colleagues with work planning. However, we judge that it would be a significant risk to the organisation, since we would then be vulnerable to some colleagues
Appendix 1 : Current communications activities
Job Main domain internal external Sourcing and writing news stories P P Writing & designing the HYMS sheet P Writing & designing the external magazine P Maintaining & updating the website P Designing & specifying new website developments P Designing & writing ad-hoc marketing materials for colleagues P Collating & printing curriculum materials P Coordinating events P Responding to media enquiries P Organising media training P Managing internal use of HYMS brand P Advising on external use of HYMS brand P Writing & commissioning intercalate.co.uk P Replying to general public emails P Coordinating alumni activities P Writing & commissioning undergraduate prospectus P Liaising with UoY press office on PR P Attending meetings, advising colleagues on comms issues P Proofreading and editing comms produced by colleagues P P Publicising HYMS events externally P Publicising external events internally P Organising staff events, farewell gifts, etc P Maintaining contacts database P^ P Monitoring media coverage P Ordering & selling HYMS merchandise P P Maintaining photo library P Evaluating communications activities P P Compiling lists of things we do P P Total 12 19
Appendix 2: Results of 2010 staff survey
Please tell us how useful you find each of the following methods of communication in HYMS. Not at all useful Occasionally useful Often useful Invaluable Total of often useful + invaluable I never see / attend this Donāt know HYMS Sheet 3.3% 35.3% 31.4% 5.2% 36.6% 17.6% 7.2% Pioneer 15% 26.1% 12.4% 0.7% 13.3% 35.3% 10.5% Boomerang Online 2.6%^ 27.5%^ 28.8%^ 7.8%^ 36.6%^ 26.8%^ 6.5% Boomerang meeting 11.1% 10.5% 3.3% 5.2% 8.5% 55.6% 14.4% Total number of respondents: 153
