Jane Crofts
Jane Crofts is the programme leader for the new Public Relations offerings at the Lincoln School of Journalism but she has over ten years worth of alumni to engage with as PR ran from the start in the Business School. Here she shares her experiences of setting up the PR alumni blog …
It’s easier than you think! OK the set up has taken a little while but Peter Dewrance and Joss Winn have been really helpful ironing out little problems, nudging me in the right direction and stopping me from repeatedly hitting the keys when things don’t happen as fast I think they should.
I am a huge fan of social and new media as channels of communication and so when I saw the appeal in the internal communications daily bulletin I replied immediately. Blogging is a key tool of the PR practitioner so it was also a bit of case of practicing what I teach! It’s my involvement with social media that has made it fairly easy to get things going. I maintain contact with students past and present via facebook, I run a number of groups for those studying now and those who moved on. These have, for some time now, done a lot of what the Alumni blog aims to do – keep folks in touch and share information about job opportunities and the social stuff of matches and hatches. PR Geeks was my first effort and still chugs along, it is even used by PR practitioners from outside the alumni to recruit new talent.
To me the alumni blog also serves as a superb PR and marketing tool for recruitment to my programmes. It now allows me to point prospective students at a place to see what their studies could lead them to. It’s a fabulous place to share success and inspire pothers to follow. I set up an event on facebook to recruit some contributors and simply invited all my alumni contacts to contribute. Once there were two or three posts in place I went live and that helped others to have the confidence to contribute, and from the point of view of setting up the blog it is important not to be afraid as the curator – the blog doesn’t have to be perfect, by nature they are organic and develop over time so just go for it! So far I have gathered in profiles and a couple of PR Discussions in the news section. Joss Winn found a ‘floating social’ widget so readers can tweet, like and share with Linked in and Google+; the next task is to set up our own Twitter and facebook accounts for the blog so we can tweet the new posts automatically and raise the profile of the University and PR programmes therein.
In terms of time it has probably taken about 8 hours in total to get things going but i anticipate maintenance and chivying up items should eat in to no more than an hour a week. I suspect it’ll be something that I will do in odd moments either with a glass of wine in hand or like now, whilst having half an ear on the TV news as they set up the flotilla for the jubilee – PR at its most extravagant!
Jane has achieved much in a short time, and is to be congratulated. I think she raises a fundamental point about social networking being the key to finding and engaging our graduates. I also have the same message from Dave Prichard in the University Alumni office, where I gather their Facebook group is proving to be the best communication tool. In the LSM, over the last 3 years most of the alumni stories have come from individual graduates who have chosen to get in touch with this or that tutor, usually by email, especially when they have felt they have some good news, but only now are the social networks (notably Twitter) kicking in. My strong feeling is that the personal touch is crucial. Faceless e-mailshots are ineffective unless identified with a name that graduates recognise and are inclined to respond to. There is no lack of graduate loyalty out there, but Jane’s example points to a very good way to make it work for all concerned.