Strategy Case Study — UCLA

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

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. Still, 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:

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.

1

Design and configure communication workflows to help teams easily participate in content ideation and submission.

2

Conduct research and discovery, to understand and deliver insights around communication challenges.

3 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 out 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.

Communication Strategy

We developed a strategy for all internal stakeholders to crystallize the purpose and audience for each of UCLA’s channels and publications. The strategy serves as a foundational “filter” through which communication goals and processes can be run.

Our accompanying communications playbook served as a roadmap for processes.

Communications Workflows

Our workflows and accompanying processes documentation streamline and operationalize information needs, story-pitching, story-selection, and submission processes via narrative and designed diagrams.