Strategy Case Study — UCLA

Helping the nation’s #1 public university communicate with its many constituencies

How it started

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.

Still, it didn’t have a clear system for creating, curating, and managing its informational and storytelling content.

Additionally, the team wanted to create a new home page, and needed a partner to help it design and prioritize content for the best consumer experience.

What we did

Program 11 realized that to effectively find, curate, and publish daily content for what is essentially a small city, UCLA needed strong team buy-in, clear processes, and well-communicated content standards.

We conducted dozens of interviews across 21 UCLA departments in order to understand their audiences, capture their communication challenges and pain points, and share out the university’s broader vision and needs.

The a-ha moment: We discovered that, on the whole, content creators 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.

How it’s going

The multi-channel communications strategy we developed was delivered right as COVID emptied the campus. Because our strategy included clear audience and channel goals, workflows, and decision-trees to help the team have a “who” and a “why” for content creation and collaboration, we helped them avoid much of the chaos and havoc they could have encountered with the messaging they needed to create and deliver.

Five years after the development of their strategy, the communication workflows and playbook we designed serve as a roadmap for processes, and help teams easily participate in content ideation and submission.

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.