Greetings, Communications blog subscribers (all 77 of you), and happy new year!
It’s been a few weeks since my last update, so let me first say that I hope everyone had a lovely and restorative winter break. I had a great vacation and feel rested and ready for whatever spring semester brings.
When last I sent an update in early December, we were still putting the finishing touches on the SimpsonScarborough audiences survey that by now everyone has seen and filled out… At least, I hope you filled it out… Don’t worry; it was totally anonymous, so I’ll never know if you did or not. Thank you to the hundreds who did take the time. Our response rate for each audience meets the criteria we were hoping for, so we can keep moving forward. Different variations of the survey were sent to the following audiences: faculty, staff, current students, alumnae/i, prospective students, and prospective student parents/guardians. Our alumnae/I win for the fastest goal response total reached! We also recently hosted a great focus group of current parents.
SimpsonScarborough is now culling through the responses and analyzing all the data, and that will be ongoing through the week of January 22nd. This means I will not be sending an update next week. However, after they are finished with the analysis, we’ll get a readback of their top observations and suggestions based on the data, so the January 26th update might be an interesting one!
After that, we begin the project’s second phase with the iteration of the positioning and values messaging/language we will adopt to describe the College to our priority audiences. It’s an important part to get right, as other creative work will be based on that foundational language. We’ll begin offering feedback for that work in early February and continue co-creating with SimpsonScarborough until the end of February. And yes, there will be opportunities for some of you to give feedback on the language later next month during the next campus visit of our SimpsonScarborough project leads.
SimpsonScarborough is also hard at work on several other aspects of the project behind the scenes, but I thought it would be easier to follow the project elements in this format as we interact with them rather than when they are created. There’s lots more to come this spring! Please let me know if you have any questions. Thanks for your continued interest in our positioning project.
Samara