Higher Education
(Credit: Michigan Photography)
Career Transition
After 15 years with the AP, I was awarded the Knight-Wallace Fellowship, which allowed me to spend an academic year at the University of Michigan studying Korean and taking MBA courses. When I finished the program, the university hired me to help create and execute the institution’s first global strategic communications plan.
(Credit: Michigan Photography)
Challenge
The University of Michigan is the biggest public research university in the U.S. and has a strong national reputation for academic excellence. However, the institution had low brand recognition in key markets overseas, where most people are more familiar with Ivy League schools.
Interviewing students in Michigan’s medical and public health schools in Ethiopia.
Like most large research universities, Michigan is a transnational institution, with hundreds of projects, initiatives, programs and partnerships across the world. But successfully telling this story and targeting key overseas markets demands special expertise and platforms the university needed to develop.
Downtown Ann Arbor (Credit: Michigan Photography)
(Credit: Michigan Photography)
Target Audience
International media
Alumni
Philanthropists
Institutional donors
Current and potential partners
Officials in U.S. & foreign governments
Multinationals and local companies recruiting recent grads
Internal audience
Barriers
A massive decentralized university that struggled to provide a comprehensive view of its global activity and reach.
Communications staff who needed to develop a stronger global sensibility and awareness.
Key Achievements
Website Redesign
Created a website that showcased the university’s global reach with memorable visuals and compelling multimedia storytelling.
Chinese Social Media
Launched the first Twitter-like Weibo site in U.S. higher ed that engaged with a Chinese audience using a strategic, intentional approach.
Multimedia Storytelling
Led an initiative to create a multimedia microsite for immersive storytelling that blended words, photos, video and graphics.
Interactive Global Map
Conceptualized and created a digital map of the world that provided the only comprehensive view of what Michigan was doing internationally.
I led a team that redesigned and rebranded Global Michigan – a website that showcases the university’s activities worldwide. The original site was mostly an events calendar and bulletin board for news releases. The redesigned site was more lively and visual, with photos from students, a global interactive map and multimedia storytelling. Traffic to the site doubled after the redesign.
One of the most pivotal moments of my career at Michigan was when I had a coffee chat with Liz Kumin, my colleague in a new team focused on international fundraising. I learned that Liz and I were both looking for ways to use social media to raise Michigan’s profile in China. We teamed up to get approval for a new full-time position for a staffer using Weibo, a Twitter-like platform wildly popular in China, to engage with a Chinese audience. Michigan became the first U.S. higher education institution to do marketing with Chinese social media in a strategic, dedicated way.
Weibo was an excellent platform for brand listening, engaging with students, sharing information and promoting the university in China. It was also extremely effective in getting Michigan’s large population of Chinese students to participate in campus activities. For many of them, Weibo was their main source of information about what was going on at the university.
Our Weibo strategy attracted much attention in U.S. higher education and inspired similar initiatives at peer institutions, including Princeton, Duke and the University of Chicago.
I pioneered the use of multimedia storytelling at Michigan, using words, graphics, photos and videos to create an evocative and immersive digital experience for readers. I led teams of communicators that traveled to Africa and Latin America with professors and researchers to do these special stories. The content was showcased on the university’s homepage.
Check out the stories:
Challenge: The University of Michigan had more that 500 projects in over 100 countries. But it lacked a way to display this amazing global reach.
Working with the marketing and design team, I created an interactive map that showed where Michigan was working worldwide. It became a valuable resource in presentations with key stakeholders: donors, elected officials, partners, media, etc.
Global Impact Reports
My team developed a series of monthly reports that collected data about our global PR efforts and shared it with the university’s leadership and other stakeholders across the campus. The reports compared our efforts with peer institutions. They identified best practices and shared them with other communicators. The reports also provided dashboards for our social media channels. Check out sample reports below (with internal data redacted):
