{"id":3695,"date":"2012-10-30T06:58:30","date_gmt":"2012-10-30T10:58:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meetcontent.com\/?p=3695"},"modified":"2017-04-20T00:20:37","modified_gmt":"2017-04-20T04:20:37","slug":"case-in-point-building-community-at-uw-madison","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meetcontent.com\/blog\/case-in-point-building-community-at-uw-madison\/","title":{"rendered":"Case in Point: Building Community at UW-Madison"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"John
John Lucas, UW-Madison<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

How can we use content to develop a true sense of community\u2014both online and off\u2014among our audiences? Whether it\u2019s through a revamped newsletter or new ways of using social channels, University of Wisconsin-Madison social media and internal communications manager John Lucas has made it work.<\/p>\n

Through his work on innovative projects like #UWRightNow, a 24-hour crowdsourced snapshot of life on campus, the Bucky Challenge, a social media scavenger hunt, and his role organizing the #UWSocial internal community, Lucas has gained acclaim for his ability to take social media to the next level in building relationships and driving real-world action.<\/p>\n

Lucas did time as a reporter in Chicago for about six years, but after getting burned out on the newspaper grind, he hearkened back to his days as a college newspaper editor at Notre Dame covering life on a college campus. So he came to Madison, Wis., a city he had always heard great things about, and started working in student life communications for the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001. <\/p>\n

We reached out to John to talk about his experiences building online (and offline) community\u2014among not just students, but also faculty, staff and alumni\u2014via social media at UW-Madison. <\/p>\n

Overhauling Internal Communications<\/h2>\n

MC: I\u2019d like to talk about internal communications and the faculty\/staff newsletter you retooled. I find that really intriguing. From my own experience and from talking to other people, internal communications is a huge challenge. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Lucas<\/strong>: Internal communications is something I’m really passionate about. We’re now in our second year with what we call Inside UW-Madison<\/a>. We had this old print newspaper and it was just a disaster at the end. They were putting it on news racks and no one was picking it up, and we didn’t know who was reading it. <\/p>\n

So I led a process where we moved over to an HTML newsletter template. Again, nothing particularly fancy about the look or feel of it, but it was really a chance to re-envision how we were talking with our 16,000 employees. [It was an opportunity to go beyond solely focusing] on what the institution wants to tell its audiences, but think about what people might actually be interested in and what would drive them to open your newsletter and actually click.<\/p>\n

The one thing that always bothered me here was, we have a huge college of agriculture, a huge extension school, a school of veterinary medicine, and we were constantly shoving recycled research stories and news releases into this faculty\/staff newspaper. Well, you can think about what people like to read in the newspaper. We probably skew female, older, 35+. People are interested in things that speak to their life. First, on the news side, it’s parking. It’s about benefits. It’s pay plans. You try to develop content that reflects the news that they are interested in. <\/p>\n

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It was really a chance to re-envision how we were talking with our 16,000 employees and think about what people might actually be interested in reading.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

But then you try to find some, for lack of a better term, lifestyle content that leverages the people we have here who are experts. We’ve got a horticulture department that is one of the best in the world, and they can tell you how to grow any plant that you’d want to grow. Why couldn’t we go and find folks like that, instead of taking solely research expertise, and go develop content that talks to people where they live\u2014about their health, about food and cooking, their gardens, their lawns\u2014and trying to connect to people on a level where the internal product was reaching them with something they found was interesting or useful or humorous or \u201cGee whiz, I didn’t know that about this campus.\u201d <\/p>\n

For the longest time, we were filling this paper with this recycled copy, so the HTML really liberated us because we could go out and link anywhere. We can convince people from the business school to write about the Super Bowl ads or what you might see ahead of the Super Bowl, or convince people from the school of veterinary medicine to write about pet care. We’ve got a huge health system here\u2014what useful tips they can give you? It’s marathon training season, so here’s what to think about if you’re going to run a marathon. That formula has been well received. <\/p>\n

We feel like we’ve got a pretty strong open rate\u2014I want to say now that it is upwards of 25-30%. <\/p>\n