Transforming Communications: How we are developing communications as a professional services department in Higher Education

Background

The Centre for Academic Development and Quality (CADQ) is a large professional services department that supports the enhancement of learning and teaching at Nottingham Trent University (NTU). Working closely with academics, professional services, and industry leaders we support everything from policy development and digital learning innovation to professional development and high-quality apprenticeship provision.

As a service-based department, effective communication is essential to ensure our work meets the needs of our users. Yet, like many professional services teams, we face challenges, limited time, resources, and occasionally a lack of communications expertise which can sometimes make the task of effective communication feel overwhelming. But it doesn’t have to be. By adopting simple, practical communication techniques, we’re finding new ways to connect with our audiences and share our work more effectively.

In this blog, I’ll explore how CADQ is developing its communications to achieve our goal of becoming sector leaders in learning and teaching, and how small changes can make a big impact.

Our Communications story

For a long time CADQ’s communications relied heavily on articles published in NTU’s internal newsroom. While this gave us visibility, the engagement numbers told a different story, our articles typically saw between 500 and 950 views, whereas others on the platform often exceeded 1,200.

But why?

Part of the problem was likely due to the volume of articles and broad audience on this communications channel, but could it also have been our style of pushing out information rather than framing the messaging around the reader?  In addition to this during the pandemic, we relied heavily on Microsoft Teams. It worked well then, but post-pandemic, engagement dropped, fewer likes and interactions suggested our messages weren’t sparking interest. This prompted us to rethink how we communicate in a way that wasn’t just informative, but engaging and meaningful too.

With my background in private-sector marketing and communications, I developed a new strategy one that better connected us with our audience and reflected the needs of our service user.

Rethinking our approach

The Institute of Internal Communication defines internal communication as “the art and science of enabling people at work to feel informed, connected and purposeful in order to drive organisational performance”. For us, as a professional services department, this means helping our audience see the value of engaging with us and how that engagement benefits both them and our students.

To do this, I had to rethink our approach, starting with the basics.

There are seven fundamental principles of communication which apply across all sectors and to both verbal and non-verbal communication.

7 C’s of Communication first formulated by Cutlip and Center (1952) in their book “Effective Public Relations” and are still relevant and used today.

1. Clarity: Ensure the message is clear, with a specific objective, leaving no questions.
2. Completeness: Include all relevant information the audience needs.
3. Correctness: Ensure spelling, grammar, timing, and content are accurate. Maintain authenticity and credibility.
4. Concreteness: Make the message clear to avoid misinterpretation. Use facts and statistics to support it.
5. Conciseness: Be brief, use short sentences and words.
6. Consideration: Frame the message around the audience.
7. Courtesy: Use polite and respectful language, showing empathy and understanding.

Applying these principles through a simple communications planning document became a key part of the changes we implemented.

The first step in the development of our strategy was to work with the CADQ Senior Leadership team revisiting the mission, vision, values and purpose of the department. These formed the foundation for our messaging and helped us better understand our audience and how our services meet their needs.

From there, I worked with each team to understand their communications needs. Whilst priorities varied, similar communication objectives emerged; to raise awareness of their service offer, boost stakeholder engagement, leading to an increase in demand for their services. These shared objectives gave us a strong foundation to build on.

Having already built good relationships with the NTU Communication, Alumni and Marketing team (CAMS  ) I didn’t need to start from scratch, I could utilise established processes adapting them to suit CADQ’s needs.

Individual Communications Plans

I introduced individual communication plans for each team, guided by the 7 Cs of Communication and built around a template already used by NTU’s communications team. This helped teams to focus their messaging, clarifying the purpose, audience, and call to action.

Each plan asked seven key questions

1. Project title: What are you trying to communicate? (Clarity)
2. Audience/Stakeholder: Who is your message for? (Consideration)
3. Objective: What do you want to achieve from your communication? What action do you want your reader to take? (Completeness)
4. Strategy: How will you achieve your objectives.
5. Key Messages: What are the benefits to the reader? Why should they do what you want them to do? (Concreteness)
6. Implementation Plan: When and through which communication channels will you deliver your plan?
7. Evaluation: How will you measure the effectiveness/success of your communication?

This approach gave every team a voice and structure to work with, and raised the quality of our messaging ensuring teams got what they needed from CADQ communications.

Creating new communications opportunities

As part of our new strategy I wanted to open up more opportunities for colleagues to engage and contribute with our communications, developing knowledge and understanding of the different channels available; educating and influencing them to recognise which channel might work best for their message.

One of the first changes was getting teams to take turns in writing the monthly departmental newsletter, this not only gave everyone a voice but also helped us better understand each other’s work and spot new opportunities for collaboration.

Perhaps the biggest opportunity came from creating three new platforms for CADQ colleagues to showcase work.

1. A Blog space on the CADQ webpages - A place for colleagues to reflect on their work, share insights, with NTU and the wider sector.
2. A CADQ LinkedIn page - Provided a professional space to celebrate and promote work, build networks and share ideas and practice with peers across the sector.
3. CADQ Connect – A physical presence at internal NTU events. Giving CADQ the opportunity to speak directly to NTU colleagues, and give our NTU colleagues the opportunity to meet the people behind the teams posts and emails, strengthening those relationships.

Communications training opportunities

Early on it became clear that many colleagues had never received any sort of formal training in communication. Most weren’t aware of the resources that were readily available at NTU, such as style guides, marketing toolkits and writing workshops. Inspired by a brilliant persuasive writing webinar I had attended from A Thousand Monkey’s, I created Persuasive writing training for our department focusing on writing for teams posts and emails - our most used communications channels - but with learnings that could be used in all communications. The impact was immediate: clearer messages, more confident writers, and a noticeable lift in engagement.

Have we transformed our communications?

We have made a good start!

Communication within the department is changing, teams are embracing the new ways of working and we are beginning to see the real impact of our strategy. In the first 12 months alone,  we reached over 60,000 people across all internal platforms, social media and website. We gained 700+ followers on LinkedIn, and have published 19 blogs. We have used our channels to spotlight colleagues presenting at conferences helping us to engage more with the sector, and in some cases, prompting others to reach out to learn more about our work at NTU.

Internally we saw record numbers of colleagues attending our 2024 Annual Learning & Teaching conference. While we can’t say for certain that our communications plan was the sole driver, we know that reaching more people with a clear, consistent message likely played a part.

We’ve also seen a noticeable improvement in the quality of posts and emails, and more thoughtful use of the internal newsroom, leading to greater engagement through, likes, comments and interactions. Some articles and blogs now regularly rank among the top 10 most viewed pages on our department website.

What’s next

We’re developing new training focused on creating better PowerPoint presentations. And as we continue to grow our communications, we’re asking: how do we measure impact? It’s never easy when it comes to communication, but it is something we want to get better at and explore further. So if you have any ideas or approaches that have worked for you,  I would love to hear them.