An internal comms strategy for the nation’s #1 public university
The Problem
The UCLA Strategic Communications team was frustrated. This small, resourceful group managed the bulk of UCLA’s content—its website, newsroom, magazine, internal communications, and social media channels—but it didn’t have a clear system for creating, curating, and managing its informational and storytelling content.
The Program
Finding, curating, and publishing daily content from what is, in essence, a small city requires team buy-in, airtight processes, and content standards to be defined and communicated widely. We were asked to:
Conduct research and discovery, to understand and deliver insights around content creation and distribution challenges.
Develop a multi-channel communications strategy, expressing audience and channel goals to help the team have a “who” and a “why” for content creation and collaboration.
Design and configure content workflows to help creators across departments to easily participate in content ideation and submission.
Stakeholder Research
We conducted dozens of interviews across 21 UCLA departments in order to understand their audiences, capture their communication challenges and pain points, and share the university’s broader vision and needs.
We discovered that, on the whole, they didn’t understand the criteria and process for content planning, scheduling, and promotion. Additionally, they weren’t clear on what metrics were being measured to determine content success.
“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”
