April 11, 2020 by Dean Hoke– When I came back to the United States in 2017-18 I wanted to re-engage with the US university community. I joined NAFSA primarily due to my work in International Higher Education but I also wanted to be a part of a smaller organization where I could get to know the people better and attend conferences that would continue my professional development. I decided to join in 2018 The American Association of University Administrators (AAUA).
Who is AAUA
AAUA is a non-profit professional organization founded in 1970 for higher education leaders and administrative personnel. It is the only professional association for individuals who are interested in the entire range of higher education management (from department chair/unit director through president) in the entire diverse set of American colleges and universities (two- and four-year; public, private non-profit, private for-profit; comprehensive, research-focused, special mission).
Membership in AAUA helps support the association’s mission. In addition, membership provides—for those members who have an interest—opportunities for professional networking and leadership. In addition to enrolling and serving a significant complement of administrators at the most senior levels, the association is also interested in assisting early-career practitioner administrators build/enhance their leadership portfolios by providing leadership opportunities through service on association committees, boards, and taskforces. Opportunities to collaborate on offering professional development services are available as well.
Professional Development Opportunities
Annual Leadership Seminar: In particular this is my favorite because of the networking and the presentations. The 50th Leadership Seminar of the American Association of University Administrators is scheduled for June 9-10, 2022. It will be held as a hybrid event, with in-person sessions meeting at the Marriott Stanton South Beach Hotel (Miami, Florida). In-person sessions are planned for June 9 (morning and evening) and June 10 (morning). On-line sessions will be held on the afternoon of June 9th. I will be attending in person.
AAUA Professional Development Fellows Program : The Fellows Program is an individually designed, year-long, mentored professional development experience during which the candidate uses his/her day to-day responsibilities as the spring board for improving a set of self-identified professional skills to enhance his/her administrative competence.
Cross-Institution Visits : Recognizing the value of learning from administrative peers at other institutions (both similar in nature and of radically different structure or purpose), AAUA facilitates short-term (one to three week) cross institution visits between like-role administrators. The association also occasionally organizes and conducts small group (6-10 people) two- and three-day visits to clusters of institutions for the purpose of learning about notable or unique programs.
So What is the Cost of Membership?
There are two types of memberships. One is Individual and the other is Institutional
Individual: An active Membership (Open to any person interested in the administration of higher education) is $100. The Student (Open to any graduate student enrolled in an institution of higher education who is interested in the field of higher education administration. is $35.
Institutional: Any college/university or any other organization/firm may sponsor the membership of individuals on the following basis:
1-6 Supported Members – Total membership dues rate: $500
7-15 Supported Memberships – Total membership dues rate: $1,000
16-24 Supported Memberships – Total membership dues rate: $1,500
25 or more Supported Memberships: $2,000
I would encourage you to consider becoming a member of the AAUA. I have found the people you get to know are outstanding, the conferences educational and enjoyable and the cost of membership is well worth the value.
If you have questions or wish to join feel free to contact me or better yet contact:
Dan L. King, Ed.D., President, and Chief Executive Officer American Association of University Administrators 1 Ralph Marsh Drive, Glen Mills, Pennsylvania 19342 (USA)Phone: 814-460-6498 Email: [email protected]
Dean Hoke is a Managing Partner of Edu Alliance Group in the United States and Co-Founder of Edu Alliance Ltd. in the United Arab Emirates. Dean has decades of progressively responsible and visionary leadership roles in higher education, communications & online learning. He has led numerous initiatives that have created innovation & positive change in the higher education & non-profit sector.
Dean began his career in 1975 with Bellarmine University working in various roles, including admissions and external relations. In 1983 he entered the broadcasting field, serving as a senior executive for Public Broadcasting System stations and a cable network. In 1998 he co-founded The Connected Learning Network, a full-service online learning company. In 2009 accepted an invitation to move to the United Arab Emirates serving in senior positions at Higher Colleges of Technology & Khalifa University.
He participates in numerous advisory & consulting projects in the fields of international education, branding, business intelligence, and online learning. He is an active speaker and writer in the field of global higher education and distance learning. Dean has presented and written worldwide on leadership, higher education, and distance learning. Dean is a member of the Board of the American Association of University Administrators, the Franklin University School of Education Advisory Board, and a member of NAFSA. Mr. Hoke has a B. A from Urbana University, an M.S from the University of Louisville, and a Certificate in Executive Management from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School.
Tullio Rossi, PhD helps scientists share their research with visuals
Dr. Tullio Rossi is a marine biologist turned entrepreneur helping scientists around the world share their research. Tullio found that video animations and graphical abstracts increase the impact of your science.
And, they’re great for sharing your research with the media. Now as Director of Animate Your Science, Tullio and his team are changing the way scientists communicate with visuals.
I’m Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to my blog, The Social Academic. It’s all about your online presence in Higher Education. Whether you’re a graduate student, professor, scientist, researcher, or independent scholar, The Social Academic is here to help you communicate online.
In this featured interview, Tullio and I talk about
Jennifer: Hi everyone, it’s Jennifer van Alstyne here on The Social Academic blog, YouTube channel, and podcast. We’re here talking with Dr. Tullio Rossi, Director of Animate Your Science.
I’m so excited to have this conversation today because having some kind of
can make a really big difference for sharing your research.
Tullio, welcome to The Social Academic. Would you mind starting us off by introducing yourself?
Tullio: Hi, Jennifer.Thank you for having me. It’s great to be here. So I’ll give you a bit of a background about myself.
Everything’s started when I was still a teenager and I started playing around with graphic design. For years I made flyers and posters for events because my best friend organized events. So one day we thought, why don’t we make a flyer for the next event? It was a lot of fun.
I always considered [graphic design] as a bit of a plan B career, if you like. Because then I went on and pursued a career in marine biology. That was back in Italy, in my home country I did undergrad, master’s degree and then a PhD, which brought me here in Australia, where I currently live.
I was doing that PhD when I realized that actually science really needs some help from the world of graphic design and communication in general.
Because there’s so much great research published in these peer-reviewed articles, which nobody gets to hear about. Often not even the researchers themselves. So that pushed me to try things that not many others were even considering to figure out a way on how we can make sure that this research we publish is noticed. That it’s not just lost in this giant online repository of papers.
The question is how do we make sure that our research stands out?
Jennifer: That’s amazing. And I actually watched one of your early videos about your own research. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Tullio: Sure. My research was about the effect of climate change on fish and the ocean in general. It’s a kind of research that has absolutely no commercial application whatsoever.
The only point of that research is to let the public know what we risk if we don’t address our climate change problem.
I concluded that I really needed to get these results out in some way. So I read a lot about storytelling.
I found that whiteboard animations are actually within reach to everyone. I’m not trained as an animator. I used to be a graphic designer. Yes, but I’m not an animator. But anybody can actually make a whiteboard animation. Because there are a number of fairly user-friendly software out there that have very extensive libraries of drawings and assets that you can just use.
I figured out, okay, I actually can put together an animation myself with…my budget was what? $30 [laughs], which was like a one month license to this software I used. And so I decided to try it.
What really made the difference is that I told about the research in a way that didn’t feel like lecture, but in a way that felt like the story. And that makes all the difference, really.
So I started the video, “Imagine to be a baby fish,” you know, and that really drew people in.
I had the opportunity to observe people watch my video. I could see emotions on their faces. And I was like, yes, that’s the holy grail of communication is when you make people feel something.
That video worked really well. It was seen by thousands of people around the world. It won prizes in science communication. And even got me an email from a stranger saying, “Oh, I finally understand what the problem is with this thing called ocean acidification. Thank you for making the video.”
I was like, all right, I think nobody has ever told me thank you before for doing the work I was doing. That feels good.
The world is not just made of angry planet climate change deniers. Now, also nice people out there will show signs of gratitude if us researchers do the little extra effort to break it down in a simple and accessible way for everyone. That was really a great experience.
Then, I presented this work at a scientific conference and the feedback from other researchers was really good. A lot of them came after my talk and said, “Oh, I love what you did. I wish I could do the same. I just don’t know how to do it.” Or, “I don’t have the time.” And so that turned on a light bulb in my head thinking, I should take these more seriously and perhaps I can even make a career out of this.
And so that’s started a new part of my life of my career into science communication and led to where I am today, leading Animate Your Science, a science communication agency that is privileged to help researchers and institutions from all around the world, literally all continents to communicate science using tools like
Animation videos
Graphical abstracts
Posters
Infographics
Training
So either we do it for you if you’re busy, but if you have the time we can also teach you some skills.
Jennifer: I think that’s amazing. And that really helps anyone who needs this kind of skill in their life, whether it’s having it done for you or getting help to learn how to do it yourself.
What you were talking about in terms of being able to see the emotions of people who watched your video, the very first video you created about this. I wish you would see me watching it. I was like crying by the end. And I remember going to my fiancé and being like, you know, how much we care about sustainable fishing? Let me tell you about this video that I just watched and how important it is for us to understand our oceans, understand what climate change is affecting, and what we can start to share about it.
This video affected me so much that I was already telling people about it within just a few minutes of having watched it myself. And I just think that that kind of excitement, that kind of emotional impact that that video had on me, just goes to show how important a company like yours is, how important the work that you’re doing to help other researchers and scientists communicate their work to the general public, but also to other researchers who can benefit from it. It’s amazing.
Tullio: Thank you, Jennifer, I’m very happy to hear that it touched you. That’s always the deck part of communication is reaching people not just at the brain level, but way deeper down here in the heart.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Tullio: And when that happens, which is not easy, you really hit the jackpot in communication.
Jennifer: For sure.
Free online presence workshop
Get started for in this virtual choose your own adventure workshop for professors, researchers, and graduate students.
What is a graphical abstract to share your research?
Jennifer: We’ve been talking about a little bit about video, but they’re also amazing at graphical abstracts and that’s something that you’ve helped scientists with. What is a graphical abstract?
Tullio: Sure.
When I started this new part of my career in business, I looked around or what was out there in terms of graphical abstracts. And I realized that pretty much none of what was out there was actually suitable if you wanted to communicate your research to a non-expert audience. So if you want to reach the general public with your graphical abstract, none of what was out there would work.
All the graphical abstracts we used to see are very technical. They are straight to the key process, let’s say molecule A meets molecule B, they have a reaction to create this new molecule. That’s pretty much what they look like. Some in the medical field even go as far as having p-values, which definitely will mean nothing to a non-expert.
My interests and vision was really to bring science to society, not just to other experts. I wanted to create something that will go beyond the expert sphere.
I created the new format, the graphical abstract, which is a little bit more wordy, I limit it to 80 words. But it has the advantage that it gives some context. It tells the story of that research.
In 80 words, I figured it was enough to just touch on
A little bit of background highlighting what the knowledge gap or the question that the research is asking.
Providing the key results and why that matters. Can it be done in 80 words? I’m not saying it’s easy, but it can be done.
And the rest are visuals relevant to the research.
The reality is that people process images way, way faster than the process text. That’s why we have street signs that are not worthy. Yeah, they don’t explain things with words. They explain with iconography.
Same applies to your graphical abstract. The more visual it is, the more rapidly the viewer will be able to understand it.
Jennifer: So by limiting the words you’re really able to communicate through both words and visuals, what the story is in that graphical abstract it sounds like.
Tullio: Yeah. With this balance between words and visuals, you can really reach anybody. Then you’ve got a much wider audience. Then at the end of reading [the graphical abstract], they’ll be able to decide whether they want to go and read the actual paper. Great. That might be your goal.
Or, just to understand what the key message is, and then move on.
But they can still then share it on social media with friends, which is still a very important thing. It really extends the potential impact of the research passively.
Jennifer: That’s great. So it sounds like once you have this graphical abstract, it’s something that you can share on social media. That must really help scientists to reach more people.
Tullio: Absolutely. So we’re seeing a great use case for graphical abstracts is social media. I will say Twitter above all.
The wrong approach, which I still see very often is to say, “Hey, I published a new paper.” And you pop the link to the paper and that’s it. Well, that’s a tweet that goes unnoticed because it’s not visual. It’s just a string of text.
Some researchers then screenshot one of the figures, maybe the previous figure and they pop it in there. That’s a little bit better, but still people don’t want to see charts on Twitter.
Jennifer: That’s kind of a figure out of context too. You don’t necessarily have access to that paper right away.
Tullio: Yes, it’s often out of context, so people will struggle to make sense of it.
Here is where the graphical abstract really helps. In one panel where you can flesh out that key story and attract people with visuals.
Jennifer: That’s amazing. A thing I really like about it is that it can be shared on its own and in conjunction with the paper.
It’s okay if people are only connecting with the graphical part of it, they don’t necessarily need to read the paper to be able to share it.
They compare how effective it is to tweet about your research with, or without a graphical abstracts. Still consider that these are fairly technical graphical abstracts. So not those I was describing. Even with the technical [graphical abstract], here’s what they found:
The reach (how many people will see it on Twitter) is almost 8x as high.
The number of retweets (how many times people will share it) is more than 8x as high.
Article visits (how many people click and actually read your paper) is almost 3x as high.
Jennifer: Wow.
Tullio: This is pretty amazing. Isn’t it like day and night?
Jennifer: Yeah.
Tullio: I think it should become the standard that when you publish your paper and you want to share it on Twitter or any other social media it needs to have a graphical abstract.
It will be a massive lost opportunity if you don’t. It might be.
Jennifer: Yeah, it sounds like if we’re seeing those kinds of numbers with the kind of really technical graphical abstract, having something from you or something that really just communicates more effectively to the general public can even increase that potential reach even more.
That potential for retreating, if you don’t understand what is going on in the abstract, it’s going to go down. Once you have that connection, that connection that helps you not only understand, but know why it might be helpful for other people to see it too. That’s what increases that potential for sharing. So I just love that.
Jennifer: Now what’s the difference between a graphical abstract and a scientific poster? In the humanities. I think I’ve done one poster about my research and it wasn’t very good.
What is a scientific poster versus a graphical abstract?
Tullio: Sure. In my view, they are actually very similar. The key difference is the size.
Jennifer: Okay.
Tullio: Graphical abstract is typically something that needs to fit in a tweet on social media.
As I said, I would not write more than 80 words and have one or two key visuals.
On a poster, you have much more real estate. Typically it’s printed on an eight zero format, which is very large. Yeah, plenty more real estate.
But having all that real estate often leads these researchers to make the most common mistake, which is to dump everything they’ve got on it. So they dump a couple thousand words. They dump not one chart, maybe eight. And then a couple of tables too.
Then the whole thing becomes this wall of text and chart that is just overwhelming for the audience. That’s the key problem of posters.
One of my battles is to change that. Because if we designed posters this way, we’re creating a disservice to ourselves and our audience.
These posters are ineffective because they put people off. Literally. If something looks overwhelming, you don’t want to look at it.
Think about the typical poster session, pre-corona. You know, it’s the end of the day, you get your first glass of wine. You’re starting to relax. And you go around and look at posters.
Do you really want to read for half an hour 2,000 words and processes, and eight complicated charts? I don’t think so.
What you want is to have a conversation with the person presenting that poster. Right?
The poster should, first thing, attract attention. Because, you know, it’s a room full of posters. There’s probably maybe some conferences, hundreds of posters.
Jennifer: Right.
Tullio: The first thing is that you need to stand out. The way you achieve that is by having one key large visual that is related to your research. Let’s say if your research is on let’s say the bone structure chemistry, have a large bone. Something that is recognizable from that other side of the room.
Jennifer: Ahh, so a big visual.
Tullio: One key, big visual that will make your poster stand out from the other side of the room. People will notice it, get curious, walk towards you and then start the conversation.
The goal is not to watch people read your poster. The goal is to quickly walk them through the story in a one minute spiel. And then ask a question and start conversation which is supposed to go two ways. Right? And that’s how good networking is supposed to be.
Bottom line is that a poster is an eye-catcher first, and a conversation-starter second. That’s what it’s supposed to be.
To achieve that we need to slash the amount of content we put on our posters. That’s the key thing that will dramatically improve. Even without getting into graphic design principles. If you just cut the content in half, you improve your poster massively.
Because everyone is making the same mistake, having way too much on it.
Jennifer: I definitely made that mistake. Yeah.
Tullio: Yeah, look, we are all guilty, but in a way, we’re not because we don’t know any better. Researchers don’t get any training on this. And that’s why I want to change this.
Jennifer: That’s great!
Tullio: That’s why I am providing training on scientific posters in the form of workshops and online courses. Because literally I couldn’t find any training on this. I was lucky to have this background in graphic design. But 99.9% of researchers, don’t.
Jennifer: Right.
Tullio: We need to at least spend a couple of hours learning how we should design an effective poster before we go to the first conference and then get disappointed because,
Oh, nobody came to talk to me.
People were not really interested in my poster.
Nobody really noticed it.
I don’t have any contacts from this conference.
I think it was a waste of time and money.
That’s not the kind of experience you want. It should be the opposite!
You should be full of people that want to talk to you, having lots of new contacts. To thrive in your career. That’s the whole goal of a poster session.
Jennifer: I guess that’s why your course is called How To Design An Award Winning Poster. So this isn’t just a poster that’s going to do well for your research. It’s a poster. That’s going to capture that attention so you can really meet people who are interested in it, interested in what you’re doing. I just love that.
Tullio: Yes. And ideally your poster should work for a broad audience, not just technical audience, you know? It depends on where you set the bar, but let’s say for most scientific conferences, it’s a technical audience and that’s fine.
When designing a research poster for a general audience
Jennifer: We were talking about different uses for posters. What is a good poster that you could make for a general audience?
Tullio: For a general audience, the key thing is keeping jargon in check. Because if you’re not an expert and you’re not familiar with the jargon on something.
One jargony word. Okay. Two? On the third one, you’re like, this is not for me. I feel stupid. And you switch off. And you stopped reading.
And you lost the person. It’s just how it goes.
If you want to reach a broader audience with your poster, definitely keep the drive in and check. It’s better to have a few extra words, but to explain a concept, rather than just relying on jargon.
Other than that, you cannot assume people will be able to understand complex charts. Like 3D plots? Forget about it. Like, bar charts? Fine. Most people can understand a bar chart, but forget about all the more complex things like 3D plots, which is very common in some disciplines. Or, some crazy charts like in evolutionary biology or genetics which look so complicated.
If those are your visuals, you should really rethink how you present your data visually for a broader audience.
But if you go to a genetics conference and there’s just hundreds of geneticists around you, then go for it and that’s fine.
Jennifer: [Laughs.] Then the jargon will make sense to them.
Tullio: Then the jargon will make sense. Then the complex genetics chart will make sense too. And then it’s fine.
The first thing is always to ask yourself
Who am I talking to?
Who am I presenting to?
Once we’ve got clarity on that, then that sets the bar for your communication.
Jennifer: I think that’s wonderful. I really enjoy talking to you about this because I think that visuals are so important for researchers in all fields, not just scientists, but everyone who’s working on something that maybe a limited audience is going to be able to read that kind of final product.
It can really help to talk about it online, whether you’re embedding a video on your website or sharing it on social media. There’s potential to reach way more people than most researchers expect with that kind of visual. So I just have enjoyed this conversation so much.
Is there anything else you’d like to add before we wrap up?
Tullio: Oh, look I could talk about this stuff for hours.
Resources on the Animate Your Science website
Tullio: Something I wanted to add is that yes, we have this online course on our website called How To Design An Award Winning Scientific Poster. But we also have plenty of free resources on our blog including some poster templates, which many researchers find really handy. So feel free to visit our website. If you can dig into the resources section on the blog. There’s plenty of very well-written valuable materials for free.
But then if you’re interested in really going deep, I recommend our online course. That would be the right way to go.
Jennifer: [Laughs]. Well I am so excited to share your course with people. I hope that if you’re working on a scientific poster you check it out. Having that ability to reach more people can really affect how you feel about your research.
Dr. Tullio Rossi is an award-winning science communicator, marine biologist and graphic designer.
As founder of the science communication agency Animate Your Science, he helps researchers tell their story to the world.
His engaging video animations and eye-catching graphics make science understandable for everyone, reaching millions of people around the world, thereby creating a real-life impact.
I spoke with Dr. Timothy Oleksiak, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts—Boston, about two of his essays, “A Queer Praxis for Peer Review” and “Slow Peer Review in the Writing Classroom,” recently out in College Composition and Communication and Pedagogy. In these essays, they present theory and practice for a pedagogical practice they call slow peer review, a different way to approach that classical strategy of writing classes, student-to-student peer review, where students swap drafts and give each other feedback on how to improve them. Slow peer review does have students swap drafts but asks them to spend a lot more time with the drafts than usual, reading them very carefully and thinking about them deeply. Slow peer review then asks students to respond in different and more in depth ways than just giving the writer suggestions. I found the essays really compelling, opening up so many questions with relevance far beyond this specific practice and far beyond even just the teaching of writing.
In our conversation, which you can watch below, we discuss opera, “the improvement imperative” (i.e., there are more things to do in a writing classroom than help students write better, even as that remains a key goal), and the concept of “cruel optimism” (which refers, in this case, to an unhealthy attachment to certain teaching strategies that aren’t working and won’t suddenly start working through being tweaked). We also discuss the ways in which writers and readers of drafts both participate in “worldmaking.” The idea here is that each draft someone writes envisions a world in which some are included while others are not, and peer reviewers can help writers imagine more clearly what sort of world they’ve built. We also discuss what all of this has to do with queer theory. Lastly, I asked Timothy whether this peer review pedagogy isn’t actually a reading pedagogy. While he’s not so sure, he does have students “read the drafts five different times” and directs students to consider such questions as “What does it mean to be fully human in this world?” (i.e., in the world of the draft being read). Those seem like scaffolds for deep reading to me. At any rate, whatever else this pedagogy does, it does ask students to really read each other’s writing. And that feels extraordinarily valuable to me.
Jane CoomberSewell started her website in graduate school, now it’s time for a re-design
Meet Jane CoomberSewell, PhD in this featured interview. She’s been a business owner throughout graduate school. Jane recently completed her PhD in Media and Culture Studies, researching English entertainer Joyce Grenfell.
Jane’s website has always been helpful. Now as an independent researcher, her website has needed to change over time. That’s what this interview focuses on: how personal website can change over time to meet your needs.
I’m Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to The Social Academic blog, where I share articles and interviews on managing your online presence in Higher Education.
Whether you’re just creating your website, or need to re-design your outdated website, I hope this interview helps you. Jane and I talk about
Jennifer: Hello everyone. I am Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to the 1st featured interview of 2022. Today. I’m here with Dr. Jane CoomberSewell. We’re going to be talking about how a website can change over time.
Dr. Jane CoomberSewell created her website when she was in graduate school. And it’s been a journey to figure out exactly what belongs on the website, if the website is going to work long term. Now some changes are being planned, they’re ready to be made. So I thought this is a great subject to share with you.
Jane, it’s great to talk with you today. Would you mind introducing yourself?
Jane: I’m Jane. In the networking world in the United Kingdom, I’m now being referred to as Doctor Word Nerd. I run a business with my wife which has two parallel streams. Which is one of the reasons why the website is now websites. Joyce is an autism advocate and specialist.
Jane’s website was originally shared with Joyce. Now they will each have their own website.
Joyce’s one of the few people in the United Kingdom who is qualified to mentor autistic people who is herself autistic. While we’ve worked both work words, I am very much moving from
Proofreading
Editing
Student support
more and more into being a family and company historian and biographer. Because companies have life cycles and stories to tell just as much as individual’s do.
Jennifer: That’s right. And websites because they help us tell those stories to a wider number of people, it needs to be changed and updated with time as our needs change. And as the things that we want to share with those people change as well. So I’m really glad that we’re getting to talk today.
Can I ask, what was your graduate background and what did you do your PhD in?
Jane:So my, my PhD, it comes under media and cultural studies. But very broadly. It was a 4.5 year–cause I started off part-time and then went full time–adventure into the life of a lady called Joyce Grenfell who is a British entertainer. And really considering her as a sociopolitical commentator, hence the history side of it. And a feminist.
Was she a feminist? The answer being probably only with the small ‘f.’
But really looking at the power-knowledge dynamics that she explores in all her sketches which she wrote herself. Now I’m trying to turn that into a book for normal people.
Jennifer: You want to write a book about that for a general audience it sounds like?
Jane: Yeah. There’s 2 books at the moment. One is something that be useful to undergraduates, sort of a different spin on feminism. Feminism moves away a bit more from theory into lived feminism.
And then hopefully something very much more for the general readership.
I am the only person currently that has ever looked at Grenfell academically. There’s been journalistic approaches and there’s a very good biography by her goddaughter who is also a journalist. But that more general approach I think hasn’t been done yet.
Jennifer: Fascinating. Well, thanks for sharing that with me about your research.
Can I ask, is that something that shows up on your website?
Jane is working toward launching a new version of her personal website
Joyce: It is. I suppose there’s been 3, no 2.5 versions of the website so far. There was the one that we launched at the very beginning of my grad school days.
It was fine. Actually, when you look at my website or our websites, they don’t look very much different at all. The colors are the same. The logos haven’t changed.
We’ve updated the photos cause because you get fat, you get thin, you get fat, you get thin.
[The websites] They’ve become a lot more focused I think.
The 2nd version, which was launched about 18 months ago was about giving us a lot more on control our end. It’s when I started blogging.
I have a love-love-bit-of-hate relationship with blogging. In that I would love to spend more time doing it. And I think I could make it better work better than I am. But you just keep rethinking how you blog all the time.
I think that’s my big thing, not just with the blogging, but with websites is that it’s not something static. With the 1st version of the website, the major mistake we made was it was static. It didn’t change it. Didn’t have a blog element. And I may be looked at it once every couple of years. And I sent off a note to our web designer. She would charge me £15 to change 2 words on a page.
The way it is, or the way version 2.5 is that all the actual text and layout I can control myself. It’s only when we want to do more technically advanced things like changing pictures and adding new drop downs that I have to contact my designer for. And that’s the level I’m comfortable with.
Jennifer: And you like, you like being able to do some of those things.
Can I ask, did you work with a designer on version 1 of the website?
Jane: Yes and no. Accessibility was always important to us. I come from a disability services background. That’s what I did when I was a civil servant. For most of the times the civil service disparity employment advisor. I was always aware of making things accessible in terms of scaling font and it still looking good.
We had a young designer to do our logo for us. And I love our logo. Would I change it? Probably not. I might tweak it a little bit, but I don’t think I’d actually change it.
But all the text I’ve always written. Partly because I’m quite…Okay. Yeah, let’s be honest…quite arrogant about my use of English language.
Search engine optimization for academic websites
Jane: That has its downside. Because of course, search engine optimization (SEO) wise, I dislike…balancing got to get 5 versions of the keyword into the box pick-it-up vs. flow. I find that a tricky balance. And getting all your metatags right. I find all those things I find quite tricky. So sometimes I will get a bit of help on that side of it.
Jennifer: For some of our readers, they might not know what SEO is. SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s something that people with websites do in order to help more visitors actually find their page. There are specific keywords or phrases that you might go search for on Google.
If those phrases or keywords match up with the phrases or keywords on Jane’s website, for instance, it will help you find her website.
Jane is saying that it’s difficult to balance the number of keywords she puts into the copy she writes for her website and actually writing it. I think that’s something that many people with websites struggle with.
If you’re brand new to websites, this is your very first website, you might not be doing so much SEO work as Jane is. But you do want to have keywords, like your name in there.
Being able to put your name on your website is so important for helping people find it.
Jennifer: Thanks, Jane. I appreciate you bringing that up.
Jane: I think there’s also something really important about keywords in that. Often the keywords we end up having to use to get found and not words we’re comfortable with.
My wife’s previous business was that she ran a telecoms billing platform. She wanted her website to say ‘value.’ Okay, but people don’t type into Google value. They type in ‘cheap.’ So she had to change this whole page…to ‘cheap’ to get her SEO to work, which is not the image she wanted to portray. But it’s what she needed to get people to then come and have that conversation with her.
Jennifer: Yeah. I think with academics in particular, keywords might even be a little bit easier than that because they’re looking for a really specific audience. So if your research is on a specific type of microbiology, for instance and you include that phrase in there, it’s pretty likely to, you know, show up in Google.
It’s definitely harder when you’re looking at a keyword that’s as general as ‘value’ or ‘cheap,’ because there’s only one word. It can make a really big difference in the types of visitors you get.
My recommendation for anyone reading is try to be really specific when you’re thinking about the keywords that are going on your website.
Remember, you’re looking for a specific audience. In this case, you may not be needing money that’s tied to that. Maybe you’re just looking for readers for your publication. So there’s lots of options for keywords.
Jane: Yeah. Yeah. That’s true. And it’s very industry specific. You really have to think through a strategy. Which is why it’s useful to use a designer sometimes.
It’s time to update an old or outdated personal website
Jennifer: Tell me more about what your old website was like. It sounds like you really didn’t like that you couldn’t do update yourself. And that you had to pay for updates. What else didn’t you like about it?
Jane: I think it was mainly just the staticness of it. It was very difficult and expensive to keep it current as you know. Obviously when you start a business, especially now, you can’t start a business without a website.
But in those first 2 years–I mean, I think businesses are always evolving and changing–but in those first 2 years, that’s probably when they move most.
Therefore, if you’ve constantly got to be sending information to somebody else to tweak your content…
The layout was very current, which meant of course, it very quickly became very dated because just like clothes, just like hairstyles–there’s style, and then there’s fashion.
Jennifer: Hm.
Jane: Because I don’t do the graphic aspect of it, I find it very difficult to pinpoint what that is. But it’s things like a Hermès scarf is always stylish. There are other things that are very fashionable for a very short period of time.
I think there are elements of website design, which I hope we’re getting now, which is much more about a classic style. While still being able to bolt on [things like] on Joyce’s site, she’s got the live transcription so that she can vlog rather than blog which connects in with the fact that she’s dyslexic. When she vlogs it will transcribe it live. Speaking as somebody who does audio transcription, it’s good. It’s still not as good as me sitting there and doing it for her will ever be, but it’s a lot quicker than me doing it. Cause it does it live.
Jennifer: So live transcription is one of the ways in which your separate websites revisioned the blog that you were, you were both working.
Jane: Yes.
Jennifer: So you still blog. And [Joyce] vlogs.
Jane: Yes. Well, she’s learning to vlog.
How you blog on your personal website may change
Jane: It’s one of those things like the blogging. I always feel that I’ve got more to learn and I could always do more of it.
And as a writer there’s a great discipline in blogging because it keeps you writing and it keeps the ideas flowing.
Jennifer: Right.
Jane: Often, I don’t know about you, but the ideas always come at the most inconvenient moment, you know? When you’re in the car I can’t really scribble an idea down. And then unless you have something like Otter AI on your phone so you can give yourself a quick note, the idea has gone.
Jennifer: I feel like I have a lot of blog ideas. I keep a list of them on my computer. And then I have time to write a lot of them. [Laughs]. That’s my problem.
Jane: When we first relaunched a new [website], we were religious. One of us blogged every single Monday. But we’ve been so busy. I’ve been so busy writing books. I haven’t had the emotional energy, I think, to blog as well.
Jennifer: That’s interesting. Can you tell me a little more about that? What do you mean by emotional energy to blog?
Jane: There are lots of different approaches to blogging, aren’t there? You can be your intellectual expert, or you can be a raconteur. Cause it’s all about engaging with your particular audience.
Because particularly when I’m doing the family biographies, people are telling me things. It’s not supposed to be a therapeutic thing, but often it becomes therapeutic. Often people will tell us things–cause Joyce does the interviewing and I do the writing–very personal and perhaps stuff they haven’t talked about for years.
So I want my blogs to be quite open to. And I often reflect on something that has happened during the week. If I have been very busy writing, I perhaps haven’t had time to process that myself.
I don’t feel I can blog about it until there’s a little bit of distance.
I think the last blog I did was about the phrase ‘self care.’ I really struggle with the phrase ‘self care.’ I think being middle-aged and British…And anything foregrounded with self gets linked just to words like ‘selfish,’ which is not how I feel about it but it’s kind of like a kick reaction. It took me ages to write that blog because I had to kind of balance it out.
And I think if you blog from the heart, which is what I try and do because I want our customers to know us because we feel very strongly that integrity is something that is impossible to attain, but must be your strongest goal. Sometimes those blogs take a lot of emotional energy.
When I used to copywrite blogs for another company, you know, I can churn out 500 words on why certain photocopiers are the best on the market. Really I can probably do that in about half an hour.
And the other thing I find quite time consuming when I’m blogging is sourcing the illustrations. Cause I always try and put in a couple of irrelevant illustrations.
And I think it was you or somebody in the same meeting we met at who told me about Unsplash.
Jennifer: Yeah!
Jane: And that has made that a lot easier, but actually again, we’re back to keywords. Finding the right keywords to get the image you want…
Jennifer: It can be difficult [chuckles].
Have a personal website you can control
Jane: It’s a constant learning thing, isn’t it? I think that’s that’s the biggest message is if you can always have an element of your website that you control. Even if it’s not the techie stuff. Because it’s an absolutely live document. You will never finish your website.
Jennifer: That’s right. That’s what I teach all of my [website design] clients. The process that I worked through with them, you know, we go through an intensive planning process for their websites to figure out what they actually need.
Then we sit down and we create the copy for the website or they do it on their own. Once that copy is placed, I actually teach them how to
update pages on our website
add new pages
navigate the backend so that they can find what they’re looking for
And they get a recording of that so that they can do it themselves afterwards.
I actually don’t do long-term management for websites that kind of nickel and diming that you were talking about changing two words for £15 pounds, I don’t do that. I want to help as many people as possible. That means that I can’t manage websites long-term.
I really need the academics that I work with to be able to do some of that work themselves. So I think that’s really important having some of that control yourself.
It sounds like it’s making a really big difference for you on your website.
Jane and Joyce used to share a website, now they’ll each have their own
Jane: I also find it much easier to help Joyce. So what we’ve done now is we’ve separated [our websites]. I’ve retained CoomberSewell.co.uk.
We’ve done little things so some of the pages mirror each other totally. And others, obviously her autism pages are a lot more detailed than mine. My pages is like a condensed version on autism, but it links to her website.
So silly things like I know for a fact at the moment because I’ve spent more time on her website than mine, her price list for proofreading as much more up to date than the one on my website, but I’m the one who does the proofreading!
In fact I’ve got a list of jobs to do at the weekend. And it’s this knowing that I was going to talk to you. That led to #6, being “Update price list.”
Do this when preparing to update your old or outdated personal website
Jennifer: It’s good to actually create a list like you’re doing right now. Like what are the things that I need to change on my website?
If you are approaching a website update project, I do recommend make a list of all the things that you
don’t like about your website
do like about your website
things that you need to change.
Then once you have that list, go ahead and schedule it in your agenda.
Maybe you don’t have time to accomplish all the things on your list right away, but if you space it out over time, you’re going to get those updates made.
You don’t want to wait 1-2 years between updates on your website. Things get outdated more quickly than you think.
Jane: And that is very, very true. I also think it’s good to have an honest friend. A really honest friend. I had a very amusing phone call today, a video call actually. My longest term friend, we’ve known each other since I was 5 months old, contacted me today on video call.
She’s just about to launch a professional photography website. The one thing that she’s not good at is photos of herself.
And whilst, perhaps that was a little over blunt, it did help her choose the pictures that she was going to choose. And acknowledge the fact that it’s only going to be a holding picture till she can get some new ones done.
Jennifer: Yeah. That’s important. And having that honesty and that rapport with you, it helped her move forward in her thinking of it.
Jane: I think particularly on the visual side. And on the text side, because I mean, as a proofreader, there’s one rule that I have. It’s just proofread to proofread thyself. Because it is almost impossible when you’ve written something and edited it and re-edited it…
I mean, you know, where I’ve been sort of trying to convert my, my thesis into a book, I am aghast at the mistakes have slipped through as I’ve put it to bed for 6 months and then come back to it.
Really, did I say that? Was I on said drugs at the time?
Jennifer: [Laughter]. And you’re a professional, you’re a proofreader.
Jane: It’s the hardest thing in the world to proofread your own work.
Jennifer: That’s so true.
Jane: So having a trusted friend who is good at being straight, but also kind is really, really important.
I think in business, we get very hooked up on should I be paying for this? Should I be paying for that? 99.9% of the time, I would say, Yes. But occasionally it’s okay, especially if it’s just a quick check to ask a friend for a favor because this guarantee there’s a bit of skills barter that can go on.
Jennifer: I think so. That I explain it to my clients is that your friend, they love you and they care about you. They’re actually going to be reading and examining your website with greater depth than your average visitor.
They’re going to stay on it longer.
They’re going to read into it more, try to understand it more so that they can talk with you about it. And that’s more than your average website visitor is doing.
If your friend is telling you that something’s
Confusing
Distracting
That it shouldn’t be there
well that’s something that you should listen to because other people aren’t even going to give you as much time or attention as a friend is. So it’s worth listening to what they have to say.
You don’t have to, you don’t have to respond to it. You know, you don’t have to do it, but getting that opinion is so helpful.
Do it while you remember (or write it down so you don’t forget)
Jane: And I think, I think also we’ve talked about planning and making sure we prioritize, but I think there’s also some times merit in striking while the iron is hot as well.
I mean a year ago you said to me, “Jane, you need to make more of the fact that your ‘bilingual.’” Do you remember this conversation? It was, it was a, it was a comment about my proofreading, the fact that I’m being of Canadian heritage, that I can proofread in
Canadian English
American English
English English
You said you need to make that much clearer on your website and you should blog about it. I still haven’t done it because I didn’t do it in that moment. And if I had done, it would have been very much more impactful.
I am going to get round to it. I am going to blog on it, but I don’t think it will be as good a blog as if I’d done it within 24 hours.
Jennifer: Oh, I don’t know that that’s the case. It’s possible that even that you’re thinking about it for the last year is going to add even just one sentence to that blog that is emotionally in a better space now than it would have been then.
So you never know that. I think it’s totally going to be awesome when you do it now.
Jane: Interestingly though, I have remembered to use the phrase when I’ve been talking to people.
Jennifer: Wonderful.
Jane: And I think I’ve pretty much got every American PhD student at my university now sending me their theses for proofreading.
Jennifer: I love that. I love that. I remember that conversation so well, and you were telling me about all the amazing things you were doing. And I was like, oh, I just read your website and it didn’t say that. Like, that was so awesome how you have a skill that really is going to help people that are English language speakers bet the proofreading that they need.
I also think that the way that you go about updating your website to meet your needs is so awesome. It sounds like version 1 and version 2 were both joint websites. And now version 2.5 is like separating that a little bit.
But what it does is it gives you each more space. So it’s like your website is growing. It’s like your needs are growing, your website’s growing and all of that copy, all of the things that you know, can be updated, hey–everything gets updated with time. That makes sense.
Jane: I think it also provides a lot of clarity. We were trying to be all things to all people. And although we work together and our sides of the business compliment each other. They’re not the same.
Joyce, certainly couldn’t do what I do. I know, I don’t have the patience, I think, to do what she does.
At the moment, they’re very similar. I’ve done a way updates, but I think over time as she grows the vlogging side of it…I’m teaching her how to edit. It’s going to be hysterical cause she’s even more of a Luddite than I am…And as I continue to blog, I think it will give me the room.
How Jane shared her thesis and publications on her personal website
Jane: One of the other things I did based off the conversation you had with me is that I changed one of the pages entirely. You said to me earlier, I’ve just remembered this, you know, is your thesis on your website?
Well, I took a sidebar. And that now has every journal article every, every time I’ve contributed to a podcast. It’s all on there. There’s a publication sidebar. So you don’t even have to go to a separate page for it.
If you’re interested in having me write a biography for you. You can get a sample of my writing by clicking on the sidebar. It was actually me being tight because I didn’t want to pay to have another page created. Actually it works really well.
Jennifer: Well I love that innovation can cause you to adapt. It sounds like you didn’t want to pay for another page so you needed to find another solution and that creative solution ended up working out for you.
That’s what websites are all about: experimenting to see what’s going to work well for you long term. And if it doesn’t, well, that’s something that needs to be changed.
I think that adapting with your website, making room for it to grow, it’s not going to happen all at once.
Jane: Right.
Your website will change, and that’s a good thing
Jennifer: You’ve had now 2.5 versions of this website, and you can still see it changing in the future. So for anyone who’s reading this interview, I definitely want to let you know that your website, it’s probably is going to grow or change over time.
Even if he just have a simple 1-page website that has your bio and a photo on it. Those elements are going to change. Your bio will be updated over time. Your photo. You’re going to want to change that over time so that it looks like you.
I think that being open to that is such a great quality to have when you’re building a website. And when you’re approaching a big update.
Jane, I just want to thank you so much for your candor in talking about how that website change has been for you.
What’s it like to work with multiple designers on your website over the years?
Jennifer: I want to ask a little bit more about what it’s like to work with someone since you worked with, it sounds like multiple designers on your website.
Jane: Two, yeah. So we had our original website designer. There were some design elements that came from other people, but as such, we had our original website designer and then we’ve got our current website designer.
And I think there’s something really important to say about I current website designer, not so much about his technical skills as a designer, although they’re very strong. It’s about personality matching. You know, particularly for, for joy as an autistic.
Choosing a website designer
Her technical skills are very different from mine. Actually, they’re great, but she worries about them. And so we needed a designer who got how you talk to this person on the spectrum. Because actually once you’ve met one person on the spectrum, you’ve met one person on spectrum.
A lot of the problems with our previous version is that I’m not convinced our previous designer was quite on particularly Joyce’s wavelength.
From that point of view, I would encourage people that if you feel like somebody is talking a load of jargon and your constantly running to catch up, they’re possibly not the right designer for you.
Jennifer: Oooh, that’s so important. So picking a designer is not just about budget. It’s not just about location or what their portfolio is. It’s also about how they get along with you and how well you communicate with each other.
Jane: I mean after all. I think we both know that you can go and buy a product. You could go buy website product. Most of my Canadian and American friends tend to use SquareSpace. If they’re building it from scratch and over here, it will be something like GoDaddy. But ultimately if you’re going to invest in that tailored service…People buy people. They don’t buy a product. They buy people. So get to know your designer.
I am fortunate in that our designer is the partner of a friend of ours. And he will come and train Joyce in exchange for a handmade pizza. But, from that point of view, it is worth spending the time not just getting quotes, not just finding out what particular language they’re skilled in, or design they’re skilled in…
You know, have a coffee with them if you can in these days of masks. Take your time. It might not be a big investments in dollars or pounds, but it’s a big investment in terms of your business. Or your future in terms of the academic reputation that you want.
So take your time. Yes, you can change later on. Because we’ve been talking about keeping the websites updated, constantly.
But actually, if you’re going to move that whole relationship to another designer, it is a bit of a hassle. You know, getting them to shift domain names from one host to another, it’s not a big job, but it is a hasley job. So take your time picking your person.
Jennifer: Oh, well, wonderful advice. You know, meeting someone in advance can make a whole difference in how you understand them. Seeing their facial expressions, seeing how they respond to questions or how they ask questions of you can make a big difference for people’s comfort levels.
Thank you so much for sharing that with me.
Jane’s new article on Sara Paretsky’s Guardian Angel
Jennifer: Speaking of academic reputation, you were telling me about a new article that you have out about your favorite lockdown read. Tell me a little bit more about that.
Jane: Oh, that was wonderful. I think that again is something I’ve learned about academia this year. I’ve written or half written or even sent off terribly intellectually worthy articles. And they tend to fall over.
I’m often always telling my students, don’t overcomplicate things. Go with your first instinct. Build on your first instinct. If you’ve made the right choices, it will flow.
I just happened to see this call for paper and I drafted out this article in about 40 minutes.
Jennifer: Pretty quickly.
Jane: It didn’t even have a single edit on it. Because it was passionate. I’m probably underselling my skills here because that’s what I do.
It’s a piece in the South Central Review. They did a lockdown special. I think they chose 25 articles in the end. They ask people to write on their favorite lockdown re-read. I chose a book by Sara Paretsky.
Jane: To be honest, I could have chosen any book by Sara Paretsky because I love them all. It was a joy to write, and I think that’s what comes through in the reading of it.
My major message from it was about independent researchers. I find Paretsky a very brave writer. She’s always gone with the flow and she’s changed publishers when she’s needed to. If she believes in something, she goes for it. Even if people tell her not to.
And I think to be an independent researcher, which is what I am, and to an extent what you are…
Jennifer: That’s right.
Jane: …is a brave place to be. And I think academia needs to take us a little bit more seriously. Because actually for us to stick our necks out with no institution backing us, with no access to other funding. You know, there used to be this attitude and I think there still is this attitude that if you’re not sponsored, you can’t be any good. But actually I think it’s the other way round. I think if, if you survive without an institution backing you or without permanent post, you are brave. You actually you’re showing your metal.
I was self-funded through my PhD. You don’t set out to spend £25,000+ unless you’re sure you can produce the goods or at least you’re brave enough to find out.
I think that was my big message in this article is academic world, you’ve really got to stop underestimating and putting barriers in the way of us independent researchers.
I’m doing a piece of research next week which I feel rushed on because it’s the last piece I was able to get ethical approval on before I finished my PhD.
I have more options in the arts than my wife does in the sciences because there are publications who will take me without being without ethical approval as long as I’ve gone through my own kind of ethical quality assurance.
But stop putting barriers in the way of us independents, because we’ve got plenty to say. Because we’re independent. Sometimes we can do things that you can’t.
Jennifer: I think that academia does need to listen up to independent researchers and where they’re at because so many PhD students that are graduating these days will end up as independent researchers in some way or another.
There are not enough teaching positions to go around at the university level. And the adjunctification of the university is prolific. And it’s and it’s not changing. It’s not going to go down. I mean, I hope it does, but that’s not what the trends are saying.
We do need to have more conversations like this. We do need to talk about things like open access and journals accepting independent researchers and appreciating the contributions that they make unfunded, frankly.
I’m so glad that this kind of lockdown reread inspired you to just kind of jump into a new article and get it out into the world.
Which book did you choose by the way?
Jane: I chose Guardian Angel (1992).As I say, I could have chosen any. There was another one I didn’t choose because I realized the specific remit was what’s your favorite re-read? I could have chosen one of the others.
But I realized it was my favorite purely because I’d won my copy in competition.
And bless her, Sara Paretsky had posted to me herself. And being daft enough bless her—sorry, Sara—to leave her home address on the envelope.
Which I promise you faithfully, Sara I’m not going to come and stalk you. But I do still have the old envelope and it is very carefully preserved.
Jennifer: That’s sweet. It meant a lot to you. And that’s why you felt so strongly about the book.
Well, the people who ran the organization or the competition for that book are like, “Yes! Our competition really inspired someone to love this book.”
Jane: I really hope. Yes, I really hope so.
Jennifer: Well, Jane, thank you so much for our conversation today. I have really loved talking with you about your website and how it’s changed throughout the years.
Is there anything else that you’d like to add before we wrap up?
Jane: No. I think I would just, just underline: your website is never finished and that’s okay.
Jennifer: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Jane! We’ll see you again in 2022. Bye, bye.
Jane: Lovely. Thank you for inviting me, you take good care.
Having had a previous incarnation as a Civil Servant and public sector manager, Jane CoomberSewell(@JaneCoSe) is an independent researcher/biographer based in Kent, South East England. Jane completed her Doctorate in 2020, with a thesis re-examining the socio-political contributions of monologuist and entertainer Joyce Grenfell. Jane’s research interests include reception theory and female-led detective fiction.
Jane is an advocate for change in the way independent researchers are viewed by the establishment, believing that those who succeed in publication without the support of a University may be some of the strongest researchers in their field, certainly in terms of determination. When not working on one of the several biographies and other research projects she has under way at the moment, Jane can be found walking with her wife Joyce, an autism advocate or working in the garden to progress the couple’s drive for self-sufficiency. This may or may not include having lively conversations with her chickens about the history podcasts she plays to them.
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Retreats and Conferences
The Grad School Success Summit replays (virtual) FREE
Are you in graduate school? Do you know someone heading to grad school in the new year? This virtual summit has great sessions on school-life balance, wellness, and more. Get ready with a boost of motivation brought to you by Allanté Whitmore of the Blk + In Grad School podcast. You’ll get free access to the replays (including my session on How to Manage Your Online Presence in Grad School).
Books
25 Ways to Say ‘No’ in A Professional Way
Having a difficult time saying ‘no’ in the workplace? Here’s how to communicate in a professional and confident way.
This digital download is from Dr. Monica Cox.
Stronger Than You Think: The 10 Blind Spots That Undermine Your Relationship and How to See Past Them
Whether you’re in grad school, teaching, or in the lab, relationships can be hard. Appreciate the love you have, or find the one you want and deserve. Dr. Gary Lewandowski Jr. is an expert on relationships. This is a book I read last year I think is great for academics. I learned a lot, and hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Laziness Does Not Exist
Dr. Devon Price used to believe that productivity was the best way to measure self-worth. Now they dive into the history and origins of the ‘laziness lie.’ It goes back to the Puritans! Most of us feel like we’re not doing enough even though people today do more work than other humans in history. My friends recommended this to me and now I’m sharing it with you!
Cate Adamson is working on her doctorate in New York under an impossible, sexist advisor. She struggles until she discovers a hidden painting. Is it a masterpiece? Join Cate’s journey to Spain as she uncovers an art mystery.
PhD Balance is a community creating space for graduate students to openly discuss mental health. Join the community for access to webinars, challenges, and conversation.
The Personal Finance for PhDs Community
Emily Roberts, PhD sets you up for success with your personal finances. From paying down debt to taxes, this community helps PhDs make the most of your money.
Game
Dead Theorists: A Card Game
A satirical card game for philosophers and aspiring academics for 2-4 players.
Other Gift Ideas for Academics
Professional memberships to associations and organizations
Support the academic in your life with an annual membership to a professional organization or association in their field. For graduate students especially, this is a valuable line on their CV that opens their world to new conferences and networking opportunities.
Money towards professional development activities
Help a professor, researcher, or graduate student gain professional development with money for
Conferences
Award submission
Research travel
Working with a coach
Joining a training or course
A spa day
Give the gift of relaxation with a day at the spa. A hot stone massage can help relieve those post-semester grading muscle aches.
A weekend away
Sometimes the best gift is a night away. Take a trip and leave the work behind for the ultimate weekend getaway.
RJ Thompson talks about Higher Education as a professor and marketer
In this featured interview interview, meet RJ Thompson, MFA, the Director of Digital Marketing at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh.
Many professors and graduate students aren’t sure what the marketing and communications offices at their universities do. That’s why I invited RJ for this featured interview.
What’s it like to be on the staff side and the faculty side of a university?
Awards and accolades have been helpful for RJ’s career, why to put yourself up for more awards.
Learn how to be more creative, especially if you think you’re not creative at all.
Many professors and researchers have fear or anxiety about sharing their accomplishments.
Do you want to know how to get better students? RJ has a secret to share with you.
RJ’s story is inspiring. From his frankness about what professors can get from being open with university communication teams, to opening up about living with an invisible disability, this featured interview is a can’t miss. Watch, listen, or read the interview below.
Jennifer: Hi everyone, I’m Jennifer van Alstyne. Welcome to The Social Academic. Today we’re recording the new featured interview. Actually this is the last featured interview of 2021. So, welcome RJ Thompson. Could you start us out by introducing yourself?
RJ: Hey, thanks Jen for having me, this is really great! And I’m so glad you saved the best for last.
Yeah, my name is RJ Thompson. I am the Director of Digital Marketing for The Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh.
And on top of that, I do a number of other things. I do market research. I do graphic design.
I teach graphic design at Point Park University and the Community College of Allegheny County.
And starting next semester, I’ll be teaching in the business school at Pitt, teaching advertising.
So, I’m kind of all over the place.
And if you’re listening or paying attention, you might’ve seen me through the HigherEdSocial group and the Marketing and Communications (MarComm) group by HigherEdSocial. So I’m everywhere.
Jennifer: That’s exactly why I wanted to invite you on this show and why I wanted to feature your interview especially. Because so many professors, grad students, researchers that are connected with universities out there don’t really know what the marketing communications teams at universities do.
And you’re someone who is on both sides of the aisle.
So, could you tell me a little bit about what you do?
What does a higher education marketing and communications professional do?
RJ: Yeah, you know, to your point, it is an unusual divide, especially like between
design and marketing professors
and design and marketing teams
For as many similarities as there are, there’s many differences.
On the staff side, primarily what we do is, we’re a marketing and communications department. Our work includes, promoting
our programs
the business college and its programs to prospective students
so there’s an enrollment piece to that.
There’s also a heavy public relations component where we’re trying to promote the goodwill and works that we’re doing to not just the local, but the greater regional, national and global communities.
And also along with that on the communication side, we’re doing a lot of internal marketing and communications to our students, to the broader university, University of Pittsburgh.
It’s all inclusive. So, if you needed admissions campaign, we’re gonna work with the admissions team to produce that.If it’s for social media, we’re gonna develop out that social strategy plan, but also the ad spends, the ad spend strategy and execution.
If we’re putting together a magazine, alumni magazine, we’ll work with philanthropic and alumni engagement to produce that.
So, we are at the center of all of these deliverables and we collaborate with the different corresponding units to help them get their messaging out and ultimately create value for the students and alumni.
That value manifests as, primarily as
brand reinforcement
brand management
making sure that the reputation of their degree not only maintains but exceeds and grows.
So, that’s really what we do.
And myself as the Director of Digital Marketing, I am responsible for designing and maintaining our web properties be it our primary website, our micro-site, PPC [Pay-Per-Click] campaigns.
I have responsibility to our social media and also our digital advertising. If it’s digital, I own it.
Jennifer: So, it sounds like you’re working with a lot of different teams. You’re working with people across the university and with your own team in order to share good things about the
University
Student
Alumni
Community
And it really takes that kind of all encompassing approach to really communicate the amazing things that universities can do.
RJ talks about leaving his tenured position and how he loves continuing to teach
Jennifer: Now, it’s really interesting that you’re able to do that and also teach. You have this real passion for teaching and really helping students get to the next place in their careers. Let’s talk about your teaching.
RJ: Sure, so the first part of my career, I’ve spent 13 years on the faculty side.
I’ve taught at so many different institutions. The last one that I was at Youngstown State. I was there for seven years. I was tenured faculty.
To make a long story short, the commute from Pittsburgh to Youngstown, it’s about an hour each way. It was really starting to wear down my body.
I missed a lot of time with my daughter who’s six, so, a decent amount of her infancy I missed.
And one of the things that Youngstown is experiencing now is significant brain drain and enrollment decline. If you look at the data, you can kind of sort of see that coming.
So, I got out about in the summer of 2019. That is when I left the university.
HigherEd is my life. It’s where I belong. It’s where I fit. I never want to leave this industry. I always wanna be on the teaching side. I’m loving the staff side.
But unfortunately, when I decided to transition out of Youngstown State University, there weren’t any full time tenure track positions available in Pittsburgh.
I decided to try something new and pursue the staff route and it’s been amazing actually. It lets me do both things, so I get the salary I want with a good work-life balance. As a part of that balance, it also gives me the time to do a lot of
Side teaching
Freelance
Extracurricular stuff.
And, I made this remark to my wife the other day: “I’ve never felt so liberated.”
When you’re on the faculty side, especially when you’re chasing tenure and promotion, you are always doing some kind of peer reviewed research, peer reviewed projects that help you build your reputation, build your bona fides. Those are typically passion projects you don’t necessarily get paid for. They take an extreme amount of time investment. And I felt like I hit a peak at Youngstown State University.
That’s when I switched gears. When I became staff side, I started taking on more practical work, freelance stuff. I started doing more professional development and certifications.
I read a book! Let me be very clear, you would think that that is like, why is that at such an important point? Some faculty don’t have time to read, I never did. I never had time to actually sit down and read a book, be it fiction or non-fiction. So I have time for that now.
And all the other crazy things that I do that you would see on LinkedIn,
getting involved in HigherEdSocial
starting the competitions
painting a mural
being a poll worker
like I’m just checking off the bucket list stuff. And by the way, you’re absolutely allowed to criticize me for having poll worker on my bucket list.
Jennifer: No, I think that’s so exciting and yesterday must have been a good day for you. This interview was recorded live on November 3, 2021, the day after United States elections.
RJ: It was a long. It was long, long day. For sure.
Jennifer: You know, you’ve done so many things and I just, I’m so glad that you came on this The Social Academic to talk about it. Because, even though you’re talking about how much time that took, you’re still teaching. You’re still doing this and keeping this as part of your life.
You’re working with faculty, you’re working with graduate students to tell their stories through some of the marketing work that you do.
I mean, you really are able to do it all.
So, when you talk about liberation, when you talk about the freedom that this job gives you, it sounds like one of the things that you love most is being able to work on all of those things.
Whereas before maybe your focus would only been able to be research as like the main priority.
RJ: Yeah, yeah.
When it comes to liberation, it wasn’t just the ability to do new things and different things, but it was also the ability to explore my creativity in an area that mattered, in something that mattered a lot.
I’ve become disillusioned with freelance work over the past number of years and a lot of it has to do with clients that I call the low hanging fruit. These are typically the clients that want the world on a shoestring budget with a deadline of yesterday. That’s really stressful for a design faculty person chasing tenure and promotion. So I just decided to put that stuff away.
Awards are important to RJ, why to put yourself up for awards too
RJ: When I came to the business school at Pitt, they’ve got such a great marketing team, but they always had limited capacity to really just rip the lid off of it, go for broke and do some really strategic and creative things.
And, they just let me go. That resulted in a profound amount of accolades. Like I was, not to brag, but just to illustrate the point…
The websites I designed for the business school, back-to-back award winner in the Best of American Web Design by GDUSA [Graphic Design USA], which is one of the top…[Jennifer clapping]. Thank you…one of the top periodicals for the design industry.
Being able to meet folks like you and speak at conferences and help #HigherEdSocial build their foundation, it’s just exciting.
Jennifer: Wow, bragging is one thing that I actually wanted to talk with you about because when we first met, you had invited me on onto your podcast and you had mentioned that awards were something that were important to you.
Not only important for you, but important to put your team up for it, to encourage other people to apply for awards.
I love celebrating with you. I see your news on social media, on Facebook, on Twitter. It’s exciting when something good happens to people. I enjoy seeing that and so, I love cheering you on.
Can you tell me more about looking for awards and why that’s important to you?
I’ve been a competitive graphic designer for 25 years
RJ: Yeah, so this is layered.
The first part is, I’ve been a designer for 25 years. I’m 36. I’ve been doing this since I was a kid. And graphic designers tend to be very competitive people.
They need to be because, they’re competing against each other for jobs in industry and industry typically tends to choose the most talented people.
So, I’m fortunate in that I’ve been doing, I’ve been a designer my entire life, and I know all facets of it. I don’t claim to be a master of any of them, but, you need me to animate something, I can do that. You need to do some video, I can do that. I have a Jack of all trades vibe.
Being able to work in the different aspects of design and compete with others is exciting to me.
And what I get out of that is, it’s not necessarily a satisfaction, it’s like a justification. It’s more like, “hey, you know, you said you could do it and you did it.” And you put all of the work in to get to that point.
Accolades were the foundation for RJ’s career
So the Pitt Business website, when I redesigned it, it took 13 months. That’s all I did every day. It was a real labor of love and I was proud of the work. It’s also important to me that when you do a project like that, you don’t ever do it alone.
To reinforce the point that you made about getting people to submit their work, I made sure that my entire marketing team had their names on that project. My marketing team save for my designer, are in their early career. It’s important to get them those accolades because that’s the foundation for the rest of their career.
I would not have been able to get where I am and doing what I’m doing, had I not pursued design competitively. Those accolades got me my next job and my next job and opened up so many opportunities.
It opened up teaching to me, frankly. I won an award for a book I made. A faculty person happened to see it, and they’re like, “you should teach.”
Four months later I got a teaching job.
So, it’s kind of proof positive. There’s the benefits you get from asserting yourself and putting yourself out there as a competitive person, a high performance kind of person. I think that is attractive to a lot of different people.
RJ has cystic fibrosis, an invisible disability
The third part is, I’m a person with an invisible disability. I have a genetic disease called cystic fibrosis.
Had you met me when I was a kid, I was scrawny and frail and sickly. Over the years, I’ve gotten better and now I’m on gene therapy and my symptoms are gone. I’ve made amazing, great strides in my self care.
But I had a doctor tell me once, “you’re not gonna live to see 40.”
I’m 36.
Now, what that doctor doesn’t know is that I’m actually immortal and I’ll never die.
But what that did was that motivated me to shoot for as far and as wide and as fast as towards my goals as I could. I mean, in high school, I was moderate student, average, but when I got to college, I made it a point to like be A’s across the board. I knew that grades would not necessarily matter when I entered the industry. It was more about personal pride and the stakes that I put into performing.
I put all of my effort, all of myself into my work.
Even at the college level, I got awards there that led on to internships at agencies and the like. It’s been a beneficial thing for me.
At the end of my career, I want to be able to say, I didn’t get to everything I wanted to, but the things that I did get to, I did really well at.
And then I can wipe my hands of it and put it away and go build a bird house or something. Whatever retired people do.
I don’t think I’ll retire ever. Even if, you know, once a designer, always a designer, I’ll still be making something.
Building CommCentered, an archive to celebrate Higher Education Marketers
RJ: So, CommCentered is an interesting little story that started with another inventory that I built. One of the things that I like to do is, I like to understand systems comprehensively, holistically, and I like looking at trends and commonalities.
Myself and one of my colleagues, a retired computer science professor, one of the things that we did was we did an inventory of all of the logos of municipalities in America with populations of 10,000 or above.
We collected thousands of logos, thousands, and I put them into an archive. I was able to look at everything and say like, wow, when you look at the 4,000 logos or whatever it is that we found, half of them have a specifically designed brand concept and then the others are municipal seals.
When you start to really narrow the focus, and understand why half was the way that it was,
and the other half, etc, you learn that it came down to a lot of like complex things like
Elected leadership
Municipal governance
Laws
How communities were financed
That was an informative lesson for me because the company I run is called Plus Public. Part of our work is in branding communities. So I wanted to understand why some of these communities don’t have good marketing.
That inventory was very informative with respect to that.
Are you a professor, researcher, or Higher Education staff member communicating publicly for your school? Whether you’re working on marketing and communications at the program, department, college, or university, HigherEdSocial is an amazing professional society you should join. RJ and Jennifer are both official members of the HigherEdSocial Community, join them!
The sense that I was getting was that a lot of these folks did not have a great swell of pride in their work. Even in the little tiny corners of the world that they work, they may not have had a lot of pride in their work because their messaging is very highly overseen.
Their protocols for how to communicate with people and in some cases, especially on the social media side, it’s kind of a thankless job.
I want to celebrate those people. I want to celebrate
The work that they’re doing
How they’re doing it
Why they’re doing it
The concept of having to advertise education is fascinating to me. This is an act that people learn something new every day, whether or not they are trying. That’s just a part of the human experience. So, the fact that we have to advertise it is just really compelling to me.
Taking that concept and then also wanting to be the biggest cheerleader for these people and celebrate their work led to CommCentered.
When you layer in that brand’s inventory for the community brands inventory, I basically did a study where we took all of the institutions, HigherEd institutions in every state and we looked at the commonalities.
Every state has their own set of trends that some correlate to others. Some do not. It’s been really, really informative.
Right now I’m finishing my series of 50 posts on the brands of HigherEd, just for the United States. And I have plans on expanding that globally.
You know, when you told me that this project had suddenly been created, I was shocked because last time we had spoken, you had said that you were gonna be updating your personal website.
We’d actually chatted about it and you had this plan. Then all of a sudden, there was this massive archive, this big website that really can help people around the world understand more about HigherEd Marketing. That can really celebrate their work in a way that the public can see, that each other can see. It was astounding that you’d created this massive project.
And you’re also working on these other things. You have your job, you have your teaching and here you are creating this non-profit project.
I was just so amazed by you. I think my heart grows bigger every time I talk to you, because you’re so generous with what you give to the world.
RJ: Well, thank you for that.
There was one lesson I learned a long time ago is that nothing happens until someone gets excited. Leave it to an advertising guy to say that. But it’s absolutely true, and I believe that wholeheartedly.
Whatever effort I put into something, I hope that it excites people double the effort that I put in.
Fortunately, I kind of have a knack for choosing the right things. Sometimes I don’t, but for the most part I do and it’s always exciting to build community around common threads.
The thing with people in HigherEd, I think most of them would stay and talent would be retained at a higher frequency, at a higher rate, if certain conditions were met relative to just the work, the daily working life and the process and the experience of those types of jobs.
With CommCentered, it was really important to me to not only be a contrast to some of the other HigherEd marketers that you’ll see out there. I didn’t wanna tell people how the work was done. They know how the work is done.
I wanna show them what work was done. The thinking here is a picture’s worth a thousand words.
If you see one logo, or if you see one ad campaign, that’s gonna kick off a spiral of new ideas for the people that are looking at it.
I also have an additional point to that but I think is a propos. On Twitter, on social media, even in the HigherEdSocial groups, there are a ton of people that assert themselves as HigherEd marketing thought leaders. I’ll use the term know-it-alls as positively as possible.
There are a lot of authors that assert their knowledge and wisdom and it’s valuable. But it consistently skews more towards :here’s the roadmap, here’s the foundation, here are some of the strategies. And that’s where it ends.
Okay, well, thank you, I loved reading your 400 page book. The fact that the strategies and the roadmaps are great, but what have people done with it? I wanna see what people have done with it.
CommCentered, I wanna feature the work that people are creating so that they can understand the context or the outputs of those roadmaps and get inspired on their own.
A bad impression of someone else can create something completely original
The last part of this is I love voice actors. This is a really unique hobby of mine. I watch cartoons with my daughter and I’m able to pick out, oh, that’s Rob Paulsen.
Jennifer: You can recognize them.
RJ: I can recognize the voices, even if they are doing a completely different voice. If you listen to some of the podcasts from voice actors, they love their jobs so much because all they do is play. Playing to them is doing a bad impression of someone else. So it’s additive.
For example, if I did…and I won’t do any impressions, I won’t embarrass myself to that degree…But if I did an impression of Christopher Walken, and it was terrible. That’s okay, because I’ve just created a new character, something completely original.
I can intentionally do something bad and create something really good and funny out of it. That was one of the other inspirations behind doing the archive, the logo inventory, featuring, doing assessments on social media ads and all of that stuff.
When I look at your work, or someone else’s work, I judge it. I’m like, damn, that’s a good idea, I really like that. How can I take that idea, if it’s a box, how can I push one side in and rotate it and make it my own? It needs to be malleable.
So, and the last part to that is that concept, that theme is absolutely part and parcel to who I am as a person and how I teach creativity.
That’s kind of the overarching through line of my entire life and career and teaching career too.
Professors and researchers, do you think you lack creativity?
Jennifer: You teach creativity, I really like that. A lot of professors, a lot of graduate students don’t believe they have creativity. It doesn’t matter what field they’re in.
You talk about creativity as something that can be taught. I think that a lot of those people who feel like they don’t have creativity actually do, and maybe they don’t necessarily recognize it in themselves. What do you think about that?
RJ: So there’s kind of an anecdote or a dosh that I share with my students: I can teach you all the software in the world, but if you can’t think creatively, then all of that knowledge is not really useful.
You’re solving problems that are very finite and technical. And dare I say, just kind of binary, yes or no one way or the other.
Creativity is something that can be, you can be born just with this incredible intrinsic creativity, but you have deficits in other areas.
I relay a story to my students where I’ve always been an ambitious, creative person, even when I was like a five-year-old. When I was four or five, I opened up my parents’ typewriter, typewriter, and I made stories. I pinpecked at the keyboard.
Then I moved on to a neighborhood newspaper. Five, six years old doing this. Who does that? I’m sure it does happen. And I’m not saying that I’m special by any means, but it’s at least indicative of how my creativity manifested organically, naturally.
There are some people that feel that they are not creative at all. And to them, I say, you are creative, but you are maybe a different aspect or facet of creativity.
For the most part, the problem is that people don’t understand the steps in which to be creative. One of the things that I teach them is how to solve problems using a creative inquiry. That’s essentially also an aspect of design thinking.
I had mentioned the project, I didn’t tell you what it was that kicked off my teaching career. It was a book called Thompson Design Methodologies. It was all about all about solving problems visually. This is something I deal with with my clients.
If I’m making a logo for you, Jen, what’s one word that you would want your clientele to associate you with? Let’s say, it’s integrity.
What does integrity look like as a box or a shape rather? Is it a rectangle? Is it a triangle?
Is a triangle proportional? Or is it skewed?
If you had to hold it in your hand, how heavy would it be?
What’s the texture?
Ask really abstract questions to fire up the creative parts of their brain and purposely getting them to zag instead of zig
If you’re always zigging on something, you’re always making the same type of choice. If I put you in a box and make you do something different, that is forcing creativity on you, because you don’t know what comes next.
Then as you branch out from there, every decision you make is based on an unknown output. It’s a lot about challenging conventions, challenging your comfort zones. I talk a lot about fear and the boxes of fear and complacency and all that stuff.
Once people start to really understand why they are in the box and they can’t get out of the box, once they start to understand that, they realize that this isn’t like some tried and true foundation for making creativity happen. It’s more of an understanding and recognition of their own hesitancies and character flaws that they perceive that they have to work out of.
It’s more psychological about them as a person and then once you kind of overcome some of those things, solving problems isn’t hard, it’s fun. If you know how to solve those problems, you have a 12 like a step process and your process is built with error and experimentation built into it, then your work becomes more fun.
But the best thing of all is that your work becomes more informed and it’s of a higher quality so much so that you start solving problems unlike anybody else.
When your employer sees help deeply and immersively you understand a problem and how you use that deep immersion to create a unique and amazing and equally immersive solution, they don’t wanna lose you. I could go on and on, but it’s absolutely true.
It’s one of my favorite things about teaching. Seeing people really break out of the box and rise above and into their careers and meeting their self-concept.
This idea of the idealized self-concept. Who are you in your most ideal sense? If you can use these design methodologies, these creative problem solving tactics, you can get closer and closer to that thing.
If your dream for your career has always been to be a director of digital marketing, and then when you get there and it’s like, oh wow, I was able to get there using these tactics and techniques, what do I do next?
Some people may not have envisioned the next thing beyond that ultimate thing. So it’s liberating in that respect too.
Facing backlash from colleagues when sharing good news (and why to share your accomplishments anyway)
Jennifer: One of the things that you brought up while you were just talking was fear and anxiety, and it actually reminded me that I wanted to ask you about that as it relates to awards that you’ve won.
Professors that I work with and people who are in my courses, feel really anxious when talking about their awards on social media, especially sharing it with their department, even internally. There’s a lot of anxiety when it comes to that.
Have you ever experienced any backlash for sharing your awards?
RJ: As a matter of fact, yes. It’s what led me to leave my tenure teaching position. It’s unfortunate that it worked out the way that it did.
One of the things that I dealt with specifically was, I put all of myself into my work. And I believe in my work whole heartedly. When you put me into a position where you basically say, ‘Hey, in order to get tenure and promotion, you have to have peer-reviewed evaluations of your work. Part of that are competitions, juried exhibitions. That’s part of the game. That is the game.’
I made it a point to put all of my effort into playing that game well.
And I did, so much so that I received one of Ohio’s highest honors in art. I received an art award from the governor and I got to meet him and his wife and everything.
What that did was the community that I was in, they celebrated that work. Because the thing that I made that got me that award was ultimately for the Youngstown region. It celebrated them.
But on the faculty level, all that did was breed jealousy and resentment and inferiority complexes shot through the roof. Because I was junior faculty, that was used against me.
Instead of seeing that as an opportunity to build into my energy, collaborate, let’s share our successes together…
Instead what happened was, some of my peer faculty grew resentful. They grew jealous. They use tactics to essentially punish me.
They made sure that my tenure process was hell. On paper I was very tenurable, so, that’s one of the reasons why I got it. But I know that the spirit of celebrating your peers was not there.
A lot of that came back to graphic design was a popular major. The professors that were jealous and resentful of me were not in graphic design. More importantly, they didn’t understand the forest for the trees. I was responsible for bringing a lot of new students to the design program and also those fine art programs.
And I realized that, that summer of 2019, I didn’t wanna leave tenure, I fought so hard for it. But no amount of tenure or promotion was going to be worth the mental stress and anxiety that they would place on me just by virtue of wanting to do my job really well.
Jennifer: Especially when it’s for, in this specific instance, this is for the community, this is something that you were doing for the town of Youngstown.
RJ: Yeah, they basically said I was trying to be a showboat. And I was being obnoxious with…
I’m a marketer.
I understand how branding works. I understand how marketing works. If I’m gonna put all of my effort into something, I wanna make sure that people know about it. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Frankly, for some of the folks that are concerned about, if they’re too timid to promote themselves in their work, I completely get that because of what I went through. And I say to hell with them, rise above it.
If you submit your work to a competition and you get acknowledged, the people in your life, if they’re worth keeping around, they will celebrate your efforts. They will support you.They will champion you. And you will do the same for them in return.
If they don’t do that for you, then you need to consider your place in that community.
Do I want you to leave that community? Absolutely not.
But it is much easier to leave a situation than it is to change an entire community of people that ultimately don’t want you to be successful. They want the successes that you captured for themselves.
And no one wants to be around folks like that. No one grows when resentment breeds eternal like that.
The benefits from an award hopefully exceeds the criticism you get
RJ: If you believe in your work, you put yourself into it completely, and you have some money to spare to put it into a competition or any peer reviewed situation like that, do it. Because the benefits you get from it will hopefully far exceed the criticism that you get.
To give you an example, when I did that work for Youngstown and got the award from the Ohio governor, I had a number of communities knocking on my door saying, we want you to replicate that work here. We’ll pay you a market value for what you do. We’ll defer to your expertise. We just want good work and you’re a proven commodity. Okay, let’s do it, and so we did.
In the case of just to switch gears real quick, in the case of Pitt Business School, it was really important to me that I was given so much freedom and latitude to essentially do what I felt was best from a marketing perspective, from a design perspective. I was able to completely reboot all of our marketing collateral.
I didn’t do it alone, and I wanted people to know in my college that my marketing team, the one I’m on, is the best. We’re the best ones for the job.
I also wanted to tell all the 300 some odd marketers at the University of Pittsburgh that we’re the best marketing team on campus. And we did it two years in a row. When we do that, we say, yeah, we believe in our work enough to do this.
Let us help you. We will do this because we’re colleagues, because we want to see you succeed as well.
So you build a spirit of camaraderie in this community and rising tide lifts all ships. The ultimate goal would be, hey, my marketing team give some advice to all the different colleges at Pitt and maybe they come out with some better looking work and they see increased enrollment and everybody prospers. So, that’s kind of the intent.
Let me just say that, I think for my supervisors, for my marketing team, they like the acknowledgement. It makes them feel good. It builds confidence in their work and it energizes them to do more ambitious work or more involved work.
It’s not just going through the motions anymore, we’re building something. And it’s that paradigm shift that has caused a lot of our success and just good feelings about our jobs.
How professors and researchers can work with universities to better promote their work
Faculty are busy, there are only so many hours in the day
Jennifer: Thanks for sharing that.
Now, I wanted to ask for the professors and researchers out there, what are some ways in which you as a marketing department have collaborated with them to tell their stories?
RJ: You know, I think, I would say first off, and I know many HigherEd marketers can relate to this. There is a perception in a well-founded perception that faculty generally are too busy to participate in marketing efforts. To an extent that is true. And there’s nothing wrong with that because they’re doing their jobs, right? We only have so many hours in the day.
Part of our goal is we want to celebrate our faculty as much as we celebrate the outcomes and career goals of our students. Fortunately, we have very proactive, productive faculty that are doing world changing work. And they understand the value of marketing that, and they work with us to do that. But it doesn’t mean it’s easy,
It’s not often easy to work with your faculty, to get what you need from them.
Build your reputation within the community, faculty, and student body
If you’re a faculty member and you open yourself up to being promoted, the work that you’re doing, you want it to be signal boosted, because that builds your reputation in your
Community
Faculty
Student body
Be open to letting us help you signal boost your work.
We can do some amazing and creative things if you just give us the time of day. Give us a couple hours every week and we will work our asses off for you.
Collaborating with marketing and communication teams takes reciprocal respect
It’s reciprocal and it’s a reciprocal respect and understanding that in order for collaboration to be successful for all stakeholders and all beneficiaries, you gotta put the time in.
And we have a lot of faculty that are writing books, we just won an $800,000 grant from one of our marketing faculty won this massive grant. We wanna put that out into the world, so, let us help you.
If you’re a faculty person, and you’re wondering how to get promoted, work with us. Respect our work. Respect our capabilities. You don’t have to do it alone. We champion our entire community.
I think that is the best way to do it.
And don’t be afraid to shout your accolades from the roof. It’s okay!
Our students want professors that are doing amazing work.
When I was a tenure track, and even still to this day is on the faculty side, I always show real world practical work that I’m doing because it contextualizes the professional experience for my students: “Oh, wow, he’s still doing something. That’s awesome I can learn from him because he’s still in play.”
Let us in, we’ll tell your story and that will create ripple effects all through our marketing.
Learn a secret to getting better students for the classes you teach
There’s also another basic sort of formula here: The more you help us promote you, the better the students you’ll get.
Every faculty person wants better students, every single one. It makes the teaching experience more enriching for them and for us. We don’t necessarily like having to go through the lecture, here’s the homework assignment, go on your merry way. We don’t wanna go through the motions, if we don’t have to. We have a profound amount of knowledge to share.
If we have better students, they’re gonna be more engaged and more interested in learning those little details, those anecdotes from practice or whatever.
It makes faculty feel good about their job and about the work that they do. So, I think that that is an operative sort of thing to think about.
Avoid going through your dean or department chair
Also consider the opposite, you don’t participate, you ignore us. That makes our lives a lot more difficult because we’ve got to track you down. If you don’t respond to us, then we have to talk to the chair or the dean. Then the dean and the chair come down on you. No faculty person really ever wants to talk to their chair or dean. I kid, I kid. But it’s true. It doesn’t have to come to that.
So just work with us and we will do what we can 100%.
Jennifer: I think that’s such an important sentiment. It’s gonna take work on both sides.
You guys have so much expertise, you’re hoping to share with the faculty who wanna promote themselves and promote their research,
I think that’s wonderful. But it sounds like maybe faculty really don’t know what to expect, they don’t know what the potential is for themselves.
So, there are ways for you to celebrate them, but the faculty need to be more open about it in order for you to even be aware of each other.
RJ: So, on that note, one tactic that I’ve taken recently is I’ve added all 125 of our faculty to LinkedIn. I track their profiles because they’re more prone to update their LinkedIn and self-promote versus telling us.
As soon as I see something, it’s going over here, and then I just traffic control the content. And that actually brings in another point where…
Marketing and communication teams what to make it as easy for professors as possible
Hey, faculty, we wanna work with you as much as possible, but guess what? We wanna make the process as easy for you as possible.
If we need you to record a video, we’re gonna script the whole thing, put it on a teleprompter. You come in, spend 10 minutes with us, read it and you’re out.
You have to go teach their classes and depending on your institution and mine, rankings are extremely important. We need our faculty in the classroom, teaching our students well so our rankings go up, so our student body becomes more enriched and we pull in better prospects and everybody wins.
Jennifer: So if faculty are more open about their accomplishments with their marketing teams and more willing to put in some effort, in order to help those marketing teams promote their work, then it can make a big difference for everyone.
The faculty can get better students, the student body can hear more awesome news about their faculty, and it can really reach a larger audience. I see lots of HigherEd posts about professors, about scientists and researchers, being shared with much wider audiences than just the community. It can reach people around the world. So, this is great.
Your university would love if you join Twitter or other social media platforms
RJ: And you know the next step to that is, they see the results and then they decide to be proactive and really participate.
If I could have 125 different Twitter accounts for every single faculty member and they were off and running and doing really well with it, awesome. Oh my God, the marketing ecosystem that would be working with would be profound and huge. And yeah, It would probably be stressful as hell, but we would have 125 of our biggest advocates out there in the world telling other people how good our programs are. You know, and that’s good branding.
But they’re researchers. By virtue of the description of their positions, they’ve gotta be researching. They’ve gotta be teaching and writing grants, and that’s what they do.
Social media doesn’t have to take all of your time. Just a little bit of practice talking about yourself, maybe talking about your research and sharing it publicly is going to make a big difference for you.
“Eventually I hit a wall…this has all been done before,” and persevering through that feeling
Jennifer: RJ, I’m so glad we’ve had all of these conversations. We’ve talked about your work as a director of marketing, we’ve talked about Plus Public, your business. We talked about CommCentered. We talked about what it’s like to be a faculty member at the same time.
Is there anything else that you’d like to share or chat about before we wrap up?
RJ: I’m all over the place with my interests, but they are mostly HigherEd specific. And I walk on both sides of that HigherEd dividing line.
I’m on the staff side and I’m on the faculty. It’s the best place to be as a marketer because it lets me understand what my audiences want. It’s a very organic transition of data and learning. My marketing savvy helps me teach better, because it’s vocal, it’s public speaking, it’s presentation of my PowerPoints and other things.
On the opposite side, I’m learning how to better communicate with my students, but also prospective students, so they they’re mutually beneficial.
With my HigherEd research on CommCentered, now I’m getting some of that research on the faculty side that I can apply to the staff side.
One thing that I’ve been struggling with that I wanted to share was, and maybe some of the faculty listening can understand that. I often say when the muse speaks, listen. It may not always make sense. It may not always be compatible.
I often have these moments where I’ve just got, the gears are turning in my head, it just randomly clicks on and I just start writing ideas down. Like last Saturday, it was a birthday party for one of my daughter’s friends. I was sitting in a Chuck E. Cheese and I’m at a table by myself with a notebook, like a super nerd and ignoring everyone else and I’m writing down pages of notes, just things that are firing through my head. My energy is like, “oh my God, this is so awesome. I think I can do this.”
Then I eventually hit a wall and like, I look at my notes and I’m just thinking like, this has all been done before.
So if you’re out there and like, you feel like you have this energy to like write a book or a series of books or contribute to the knowledge base in a big way, you actually can and you should.
Don’t be afraid of imposter syndrome or that you feel like everything that has been said or done, can be said or done, has already been said or done.
One of the things that I did was, I reached out to a few people and I said, I’ve got this energy, I know what I wanna say and how to say it, but I don’t quite know the format. Alexa Heinrich, our friend in HigherEdSocial, she said, “Everything that can be said or done in accessibility has been said and done.” The difference is her perspective on it. And she recognized that upfront. Learn about making your social media posts more accessible on Alexa’s website.
That was for me really hard to swallow, to accept, because I come from this faculty academic side where original thought is highly coveted and valued, and I just couldn’t quite get there for whatever reason, confidence issues, self-esteem. I just didn’t have a good mentor to help me guide through this process. And Alexa just, she nailed it.
I was feeling really down on CommCentered, because I hadn’t blogged in a while.
And then I talked to Amy Jauman, who’s the Chief Education Officer for the National Institute for Social Media. Who wrote quite literally a book, this thick on social media. And I said, how did you get to that point? She basically said, “oh, I just sat down at the computer and started writing.”
And I’m like screw you, get out of here. I don’t wanna hear it, I don’t wanna hear it.
But she gave me some really great advice, and then I started to turn the gears a little bit and I’m like, okay, CommCentered should be what it already is. It’s a website. It’s active. It’s an archive. It’s the only inventory of HigherEd logos on the internet.
I’ve already checked the boxes, but because of some lack of objectivity or lack of confidence or something, I feel, I felt like it wasn’t original. And sure enough it is.
It’s one of the reasons why you and I connected and we keep circling this conversation.
As I’m starting to get my confidence back…And if, again, if you’re an academic researcher and you hit that wall where you think no one’s gonna care, this is why you have to stay the course and continue on.
Randomly, I got an email from a journalist at the Australian equivalent of The Chronicle of Higher Education. He’s like, ‘Hey, I came across CommCentered, and it is absolutely stunning. No one else, I’ve never seen anyone do anything like this, period.”
All of a sudden my soul left my body and all of the energy that I took from the universe came right back into my body and I started writing those blog posts.
The other parts of his message was, I wanna have you speak on these topics at Australia’s biggest HigherEd conference. And I wanna have you be a panelist. I wanna learn more about that work. So we got the ball rolling. But that’s not where it ends.
Where it ends is to present day where, I looked at his website and all of the articles and I’m thinking, the Marketing and Communications sector of higher education is gigantic. There are over 9,000 universities globally. But there’s no centralized knowledge base for those people.
So now I’m looking at all right, well, CommCentered was just a champion for the work. CommCentered 2.0, can be something else entirely.
What that is just yet, I don’t know, but it could be big on that scale.
So, stay the course, researchers, what you’re doing absolutely has value.
Jennifer: Ah, thank you so much, RJ. I have loved this conversation. Thank you so much for joining me today.
RJ Thompson, MFA is an award-winning marketing and design professional. He is Director of Digital Marketing at the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business and College of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh.
Before joining Pitt, RJ was a tenured Assistant Professor of Graphic + Interactive Design in the Department of Art at Youngstown State University. Previous to Youngstown State, RJ taught at Carnegie Mellon University, La Roche University, and Edinboro University of Pennsylvania. Continuing his career in education, RJ has been an Adjunct Professor of Graphic & Interactive Design at Point Park University since 2019 where he was responsible for writing and teaching the interactive design curriculum. In 2020, he began teaching at the Community College of Allegheny County.
Outside of marketing, design, and teaching, RJ is also the Co-Principal and Creative Strategist for +Public, a Pennsylvania-based social enterprise that focuses on cultivating community and economic development impact through the creation of branded communication platforms, creative place-making, and storytelling initiatives for communities-in-revival.
Throughout his career, RJ has received many accolades for his creative works: In 2015, he was one of several recipients of the National Endowment for the Arts “Our Town” grant, valued at $100,000, for the INPLACE (“Innovative Plan for Leveraging Arts & Community Engagement”) project. In 2017, RJ received a “Best of Marketing Award” from the Ohio Economic Development Association for his efforts in rebranding the City of Youngstown, Ohio. In 2018, RJ was accepted into the prestigious Cohort 2 of the National Arts Marketing Project, a program supported by Americans for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. In 2019, RJ also received a scholarship to join the National Arts Strategies Executive Program in Arts & Culture Strategy through the School of Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania.
In 2019, RJ was honored with the Ohio Governors Award in the Arts in Community Development, the state of Ohio’s highest recognition in the arts sector. Recently, RJ was the recipient of a certification scholarship from the National Institute for Social Media and received accolades from GDUSA and the University & College Designers Association for “Pitt Business Backstory” and “Business.Pitt.Edu” websites. RJ is presently a board member of the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Marketing Association.
Yes! I am excited! We are getting back into the training and development mode with the Texas Social Media Research Institute (and the Rural Communication Institute)! Are you looking for a FREE conference focused on social media and rural communication? Check out our conference schedule!
Tuesday, November 2nd
5pm – Journal Club (Discussing “Reality check: How adolescents use
TikTok as a digital backchanneling medium to speak back against
This year has been an exceptional year for teaching. We are just transitioning out of a COVID19 time period and our students are ready and eager to engage with faculty!
Before the semester began, I made the decision to travel to a Texas State Park. I realized that I write best papers when I am sitting outside in camping chair, cooking lunch with a foldable cookstove, and surrounding myself with the most amazing bug spray ever.
So, while I was “in nature”, I thought about some out of the box strategies that I could use for the upcoming semester. One of these strategies was centered around one of my husband’s experiences during his graduate program at Texas A&M University – The Journal Club. Now, keep in mind – I teaching in the Communication Department and journal clubs are primarily held in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields (STEM).
So, I jumped into the Journal Club game HEAD FIRST and I decided to integrate the experience on my syllabus. My graduate students did not have any experience with a journal club and I had to demonstrate and explain the purpose of the activity. ALL of my students are online and this meant that the best way to explain the journal club was to demonstrate how it works. So, here’s my demonstration video…
After the students viewed the video, they were able to select the days and the associated articles that they wanted to highlight in the journal club. The students had to present two times and they had to attend at least one session. Each session has two facilitators and they basically divide the article in half. Many of the students have attended more than three sessions. Here are the articles we reviewed this semester…
Overall, it is a great learning experience for them and I will definitely integrate it next year. The students are reflecting about the articles and are highlighting how the articles have implications for many fields.
In fact, the Rural Communication and the Texas Social Media Research Institutes are hosting Texas Social Media Conference MONTH in November. You are welcome to attend our Journal Club sessions via Zoom, chat and network with others through our Thursday night Twitter chats, and hear some AMAZING presentations! I will post registration soon. In the meantime, check out the month-long schedule.
Last week, I had the opportunity to present at the Open Education Conference. It was virtual and the content was definitely interesting!
My session was held on Monday, October 18 • 3:45pm – 4:25pm and it was titled, “Designing an Interactive OER Syllabus as an Equitable Practice”.
During the session, I talked about my interactive OER syllabus and I had the opportunity to network with some amazing colleagues. One of the amazing faculty members from my institution attended as well – shout out to Dr. Trina Geye!
I am passionate about open educational resources and I like fact that OERs can save students money. This is very important for our Texas college students. Open Educational Resources are equitable resources!
Here are the notes from the presentation:
I know some of you are wondering WHY I incorporate OERs instead of textbooks for my courses…. This is why…
Day-One Access/No-Cost (Equitable)
Easier for the Student
Mobile Access
Linkable to Canvas
Easier for the Professor (Updates/Changes)
I always emphasize partnering with the library to find additional educational resources. Here are some starting points!
Podcast Links
Guides from Prior Semesters (Student Approved Work)
YouTube Videos
Database Article Links
E-Books
Lib Guides
As you transition from semester-to-semester, I always recommend this checklist for “refreshing” your OER syllabus:
Check Your Links
Check for More Relevant Resources
Develop a Pre and Post Semester Checklist
Integrate Your OER Endeavors with Research
In fact, here’s a copy of my OER syllabi:
I also design a syllabus and Canvas tour for my students to help them become more familiar with the content.
Students in my classes (both graduate and undergraduate students) REALLY enjoy the free resources and they are also “more up-to-date” than a traditional textbook.
With the Comprehensive Spending Review due next Wednesday, I thought it might be worth making some general points about student loans (in anticipation of potential changes to repayment thresholds and other parameters).
I do not think student loans are a good vehicle for redistributive measures.
As I told a couple of parliamentary committees in 2017, the current redistributive aspects are an accidental function of the decision to lower the financial reporting discount rate for student loans from RPI plus 2.2 percent to RPI plus 0.7. Such a downwards revision elevates the value of future cash repayments and in this case it meant that the payments projected to be received from higher earners began to exceed the value of the initial cash outlay.
The caveat here: in the eyes of government. That is the government’s discount rate, not necessarily yours. One of the reasons I favour zero real interest rates over other options is that it simplifies considerations of the future value of payments made from the individual borrower’s perspective.
Originally, student loans were proposed as a way to eliminate a middle class subsidy – free tuition – and have now become embedded as a way to fund mass, but not universal, provision.
I believe that if you are concerned about redistribution, then it is best to concentrate on the broader tax system, rather than focusing solely on the progressivity or otherwise of student loans. You can see from the original designs for the 2012 changes that the idea of the higher interest rates were meant to make the loan scheme mimic a proportionate graduate tax and eliminate the interest rate subsidy enjoyed by higher earners on older loans. The original choice of “post-2012” student loan interest rates of RPI + 0 to 3 percentage points was meant to match roughly the old discount rate of RPI plus 2.2%. Again, see my submission to the Treasury select committee for more detail.
I will just set out a few illustrative examples here as to why some of the debates about fairness in relation to repayment terms need a broader lens.
It is often observed that two graduates on the same salaries are left with different disposable incomes, if one has benefited from their parents, say, paying their tuition fees and costs of living during study so that they don’t lose 9 per cent of their salary over the repayment threshold (just under £20,000 per year for pre-2012 loans; just over £27,000 for post-2012 loans).
That’s clearly the case.
But the parents had to pay c. £50,000 upfront to gain that benefit for their child. And it is by no means certain that option is the best use of such available money. Only a minority of borrowers go on to repay the equivalent of what they borrowed using the government’s discount rate, and as an individual you should probably have a higher discount rate than the government. You also forego the built-in death and disability insurance in student loans.
Payment upfront is therefore a gamble, one where the odds differ markedly for men and women. (See analyses by London Economics and Institute for Fiscal Affairs for the breakdowns on the different percentages of men and women who do pay the equivalent of more than they borrowed.)
If a family has the £50,000 spare (certainly don’t borrow it from elsewhere), then the following options are likely more sensible:
pledge to cover your child’s rent until the £50,000 runs out: this allows student to avoid taking on excessive paid work during study and will boost their disposable income afterwards;
provide the £50,000 as a deposit towards a house purchase;
even put the £50,000 in a pot to cover the student loan repayments as they arise;
etc.
In two of those cases, you’ll have a useful contingency fund too.
All strike me as better options than eschewing the government-subsidised loan scheme.
Moreover, those three options remain in the event of a graduate tax or the abolition of tuition fees.
That fundamental unfairness – family wealth – isn’t addressed by changing the HE funding system. (I write as someone who helped craft the HE pledges in Labour’s 2015 and 2017 manifestos).
In many ways, the government prefers people to pay upfront because it reduces the immediate cash demand. From that perspective, upfront payment works as a form of voluntary wealth taxation (at least in the short-run). Arguably, those who pay upfront have been taxed at the beginning and are gambling on outcomes that mean that future “rebates” exceed the original payment for their children.
Perhaps this line of reasoning opens up debates about means-testing fees and emphasises the need to restore maintenance grants … but really it points to harder problems regarding the taxation of intergenerational transfers and disposable wealth.
I am not a certified financial advisor so comments above are simply my opinions. You should not base investment decisions on them.
