Communications Support

The Communications Support team coordinates the development of our marketing, programming and curriculm materials. The team connects with students by coordinating with the College through a variety of print advertisements, multimedia and social media platforms.

200 Creative Marketing Campaign Materials Designed for Print And Social Media

55 Creative Marketing Campaign Materials Designed for Signature Events 12 Graphic Design Interns Trained

OVERVIEW The growth of the Diversity & Social Change team has led to an expansion of Student Engagement programs, initiatives, and curriculums. With this expansion, the need to reach students, faculty, and staff have been crucial for the success of the department’s mission. The Communications team has been essential in consolidating Student Engagement’s marketing efforts to communicate its programming to the College through a variety of platforms. Since its development in 2017 Communications has become a pivotal role not just as part of the Diversity & Social Change team but to the overall Student Engagement department. The team has even been utilized outside of its Student Engagement role, taking part in developing marketing materials for Student Success, collaborating with the Library & Learning Commons, and as well as creating marketing materials for outside institutions. Last winter, the Communications team implemented marketing focus groups which included over46 partcipants across 3 campuses. Its purpose allowed us to determine student’s social media behavior and how they receive college marketing. The focus group, along with survey’s helped determine Student Engagement’s communications strategy. This included revisions to how we distribute printed materials, email and where to focus on our social media platforms. This year we began implementing our Social Media Marketing Strategy.

SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY Since August, Communications has developed a social media strategy that has focused on growing reach, engagement and followers. Communications has charted audience traffic and has built a content schedule during those periods to boost not only engagement and followers, but to also effectively market programs by matching audience behavior. Communications uses or designs content that helps boost engagement by posting relevant video, links, resources, infographic memes and pictures reaching an average audience from 1,200-1,400 weekly. Since August, Diversity & Social change’s Facebook followers has organically grown from 96 followers to 144 followers. That’s a steady growth of 12 followers per month. For Instagram the strategy has been to design content and post pictures relevant to Diversity & Social Change’s core programs. To increase profile views, follower’s engagement and reach the team has also utilized Instagram stories, posting or sharing content from FSCJ’s other social media accounts. In August DSC’s

Instagram followers were around 352, we have now grown to around 416 followers averaging roughly 16 a month. Our profile views have continue to average between 34-46 people a week. BUILDING COLLABORATIVE RELATIONSHIPS Building relationships and collaborating with other organizations has been a key strategy to improve FSCJ Diversity & Social Change community profile. There have been several to collaboration that the Communications

Support Team has engaged in to promote or build on

DSC’s mission. The Communications Support Team facilitated a Social Media Strategy Workshop at the Urban Resource Center for the Mayoral Commission on the Status of Women. The workshop solidified DSC’s Volunteer Services relationship with the commission, opening the door to future volunteer event with the commission. As part of Human Rights Week the team collaborated with the Oxfam Hunger Banquet’s marketing team to promote an event held at FSCJ. Additionally the team also helped design marketing materials for outside institutions such as NASPA Region III & SASCA’s National Conferences and for the Florida Association for Blacks in Higher Education. Within FSCJ the team collaborated with Professor DeArriba-Montgomery’s Advanced Advertising class developing a curriculum that intersects the initiatives of Diversity & Social Change with multimedia production. Students had to develop a research driven group advertising campaign that touched on DSC’s mission. Each group had to design an information campaign surrounding these social issues using graphic design, 118% Increase in Social Media Engagement in a 9-month Period

motion graphics, video production and web design. At the end of the semester each group had to do a presentation before the DSC team, industry experts and the Dean of Business and Workforce. Results were impressive and students appeared to have learned more about social justice issues and how their role as digital media designers can be used to educate others. INTERNSHIP TRAINING PROGRAM In just one academic year the Communications team has grown from just 1 Graphic Design intern to a team of 6 Graphic Design Interns per term. Many of the Graphic Design Interns that have worked on the Communications Support team have come from the College’s Digital Media program or were part of the Emerging Leaders Internship. In collaboration with Digital Media Internship Professor Liz Thomas, Communications has also developed a training program for incoming interns. The program provides student interns with professional development and experience within their profession of graphic design. The learning outcomes focuses on developing key skills in organization, collaboration, portfolio development, creative strategies, and branding, as well becoming knowledgeable with ADA compliance related to design. Communications has had the privilege of recruiting and training a total of 12 interns throughout the academic year. The internship program has been successful with 3 interns using their portfolio to transfer to the University of Central Florda, University of North Florida and University of Florida after finishing their Associates Degrees. 4 interns recieved Outstanding Student Leadership and Outstanding Student Assistant Awards. 5interns stayed with the team after finishing their internship.