10 cringe-worthy things #highered marketing professionals hear

One of my favorite PR news sites recently offered a list of 14 cringe-worthy things PR clients say. As a light-hearted first post for 2013 (following my extended maternity-leave blogging hiatus), I bring to you a version for those of us in higher ed marketing:

• "Can you make our logo, phone number and web address fit on this pen?"
• "I don't do social media. Can I have my student assistant run my Facebook page instead?"
• "I need a link on the home page."
• "This important official is visiting campus today at noon, and we need publicity. Just don't release his/her name for security reasons."
• "Only five people have RSVPed for tonight's event downtown. Can you help us get a crowd?"
• "I heard an ad for your college on the radio. Can we meet for 30 minutes to discuss how stadium bathroom stall advertising can help you reach your target market?"
• "Can we use these photos from my flip phone in the brochure?"
• "For some reason, that reporter at [national news outlet] seemed irritated when I called him the next day."
• "Your design is OK, but we're tired of the school colors so we had our research assistant design something new in Publisher."
• "Real writers use the serial comma."

Disclaimer: This blogger has worked in higher ed communications for more than 15 years and has heard many stories from many professional peers at many institutions. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Groundhog Day tips for breaking out of a work rut

No matter how awesome your job may be, anyone can find themselves in a rut at work. Though I've been at the same institution for more than 10 years now, I've been blessed to have a job that has evolved over time. Here are a few tips on keeping things fresh in your professional life over the long haul:

• Aspire to greatness. In the Bill Murray's classic movie Groundhog Day, his character finds his way out of an endless rut by making his world a better place. While most higher ed jobs don't lead to saving lives, setting a high goal that inspires us can make every day more interesting. Consider pursuing a new credential, learning a new skill, or even earning a graduate degree.
• Serve others. Apply your professional expertise in a volunteer capacity for a nonprofit organization or community group. You'll get a fresh environment with people who appreciate your service, and you may even pick up a few ideas to bring back to your day job.
• Find new ways to expedite routine tasks. Do you spend too much time sifting through email, looking for files, or dealing with interruptions? Check out the myriad productivity blogs out there for new ways of getting through the monotonous tasks so you can focus on big-picture projects that can take your work to the next level.
• Connect with peers outside your institution. Expand your network and meet others who do similar work to you. Social networks, local professional organizations and national conferences can all expose you to people and ideas outside your normal sphere.

What do you do to keep things interesting in your work?

Higher Editing: Educate your content contributors

Getting tired of making the same editing corrections to the same colleague's work, over and over and over again? There is hope.

Yes, in the short run, it's easier to just fix things yourself or write a quick proofreading mark. But those microchanges add up over time, and constantly bleeding red ink over others' work won't exactly help your relationship for the long term. Address the core problems — not just the symptoms — to improve the work product and efficiency of your team:

• Explain why you make your changes. Either through a written mark-up, email message or in person, it helps to coach content contributors on the reasons why you correct their work can help prevent them from making the same mistake in the future.
• Build your institutional style guide. Setting ground rules for common style issues, such as campus abbreviations, titles and locations, is an important place to start building consistency and consensus among your institution's writers and editors. If you don't already have a style guide, start one. Members of the University and College Designers Association can access an index of style guides from around the country on their website, or a quick web search will yield dozens of examples.
• Share resources. Read any great newsletter articles or blog posts lately on the issue at hand? Know of a helpful grammar or design resource? Forward these resources on to those peers who might benefit from them. Ragan Communications offers one of my favorite daily e-newsletters on all things PR, and many of their featured infographics are pinned to my office bulletin board. Feel free to add your recommendations to the comments section below.
  

Graduation collaboration: Sharing the workload on commencement programs

There are few higher education publication projects that are more collaboratively time-intensive than the commencement program. It's a document that will be treasured for decades by graduates and parents alike, and whether your institution is graduating 50 students or 5,000—it had better be accurate.

Of course, reaching perfection can be an elusive goal for any publication, let alone a commencement program. It's a herculean task requiring extensive collaboration from the registrar's office, student affairs, academic deans, faculty award committees, etc. Academic recognitions may not be finalized until weeks before the event, and it's tempting to delay production for the inevitable last-minute changes.

Since our communications office began producing our graduation-related programs two years ago, we've found Adobe InCopy to be an invaluable tool for managing the process. It's a basic word processor that can link directly into an Adobe InDesign document, where the graphic designer can alter the appearance and organization of the layout. Think of it as a content management system for a printed document, instead of a website.

By saving the files to a shared campus file space and separating sections of the program into different linked files, several users in different departments can update the document at once. Once the information has been finalized by the various offices, the communications office finishes the publication and sends it to the printer.

To train other departments on how to use InCopy to update the program, I used TechSmith's free version of its Jing screen-capture video software to narrate the steps for finding the files and editing them in the program. Watch the training video.

Another technical trick for checking accuracy is to save every official name to your InDesign user dictionary. It won't catch every mistake, but running a spell-check to the entire document after this step can catch some elusive name errors.

Photo courtesy of Flickr.com/omgdek under Creative Commons license.

Survivor's guide for the short-staffed

It's a good thing that my institution's mascot is the Hatter, as I'm wearing many, many hats this week. The boss is out on a family emergency, our Web editor is on a much-deserved vacation, and our office manager is out with a sick child. All this, and we have one of our biggest annual events this weekend, plus a board meeting, plus graduation in two weeks, plus the thousand other tasks that make up our regular job descriptions.

Here's how I'm keeping sane*:

• Prioritizing early and often. On days like this, a to-do list with true deadlines is essential.
  
• Cut off the distractions. No Twitter. No e-mail notification sounds. Check e-mail a few times daily so that the limited hours you have are more productive.
• Delegate what you can. Spread the urgent priorities among the remaining staff, and request help from other departments if necessary.
• Postpone the less important tasks. When you're short-staffed for reasons beyond your control, the relationships you've built with other department heads and campus colleagues will pay off by way of understanding.
• Make sure the missing staff turned on the out-of-office messages. There's no bending on this rule in my office. Regardless of the reason for being out, this is the one thing that will guarantee a call on personal time.
• Call in your clone, if you have one. Unfortunately, my Web developer is way behind deadline on building our cloning machine. If those of you at research institutions have access to one, let me know!
  

* For the moment.

Have you hugged your university PR office today?

I *heart* my university marketing and advancement colleagues.

This weekend, we celebrated the inauguration of our ninth president at the main university campus. A month ago, we met up at the CASE III regional conference. Both events provided a great opportunity to reunite in person, to catch up on office happenings and each others' lives.

My law school campus resides across the state from our main university campus. It's a 2-3 hour drive to see colleagues who do our same jobs, for our same institution. We may e-mail each other periodically, we may virtually collaborate on projects, and we may even follow each other on Twitter. But it's no replacement for seeing your counterparts in person, especially if you've never met in the physical world.

When working in a decentralized environment, it's easy for some to adopt an "us" and "them" mentality, even if the feeling is not adversarial. An over-dependence on online communications doesn't help, removing the context and personality required to build interpersonal relationships. While I have a long history with my parent university, other colleagues haven't had the benefit of studying and working on our main campus or on university-wide committees.

These relationships are important not only for project collaboration, but also for less tangible reasons: cameraderie, shared perspectives and institutional knowledge, to name a few. We have great things to learn from each other. Find opportunities to meet in person, whether you work across a campus, city or state. It's one of your most important networks, and it's always worth developing.