Survey and Implementation of Best Communications Methods (2011 Strategic Plan)

Email can be an ineffectual and time-intensive tool for communicating all-campus, School, program, and building-specific information and announcements. We need to find new ways to facilitate interoffice communication and information sharing among faculty, staff, and students, integrating both centralized and decentralized methods. A survey could help us determine what on-campus communications methods are most effective in ensuring that all are adequately informed. Among possibilities discussed during the strategic planning process were: a central kiosk, flat-screen monitors in the lobby of all academic buildings, providing announcements as well as a building or School specific schedule for rooms and auditoria, creation of an on-campus communications function, creation of an information center on campus that could accommodate both visitors and members of the Hampshire community, and restructuring the Hampshire daily announcements system.

Comments
Please include your thoughts on the importance of the initiative, how to frame the issue, things that may be missing, and any additional comments here (you can do so by logging into Hampedia and clicking edit):

Until we centralize responsibility for internal communication with a professional staff, our organizational efforts to improve communications will continue to be one-off, scatter-shot, disparate, disconnected and ineffective. Efforts to build a cohesive campus community will continue to suffer from confusion, misunderstanding, duplication, contradiction and rumor.

If Hampshire wants to make internal communications even a fraction as effective as our external communications, staff has to be devoted to it. This cannot be accomplished by adding responsibility for internal communications to an existing staff person's job. The key is fully-focused, full-time professional staff (at least one, perhaps with a committee of volunteers) who can:

-do the research into best practices and community needs, -gather all the input (read all those past reports and recommendations!), -propose plans, -assess and incorporate feedback, -implement tools that are part of an integrated, strategic communications plan, -assess effectiveness and retool anything that's not working

-etc.

A strategic communications plan should clearly define elements such as organizational goals, multiple audiences and their information needs, and how information needs and organizational goals are best met.

Hampshire should think about internal communications as strategically as we think about external communications. The downside of treating internal communications as something that happens naturally because we're all well-educated and well-intentioned is chaos and dissatisfaction.

Nancy Osgood, Staff


 * The recommended ideas reflect our habit of thinking about this in terms of our physical environment. We need to go beyond that. Why is there no mention of Hampedia? Hampedia will only be as good as we make it. As a platform for communication it reflects Hampshire's egalitarian values. Here, we are all equally able to share information and opinions; there is no "gatekeeper" deciding whether or not we deserve to be heard. I'm also morbidly amused by how this very strategic plan reflects our communication problems- the goals in this sub-section overlap quite a bit with the goals in the "Participation and Governance" section. Wikis are one of the best tools for community-created documents; had the SPC used a wiki to develop the plan, then these sorts of mistakes would have been corrected far earlier in the process. - Ananda Valenzuela