One Year at Fordham University

Today, I’m celebrating my first anniversary at Fordham University! It’s been an incredibly exciting year filled with many valuable learning experiences and opportunities for growth. Over the past year, I’ve focused on developing the Fordham Career Center’s brand and identity with the intention of increasing awareness of services amongst students, employer partners, and donors. After achieving and exceeding all of my initial benchmarks, my work over the course of the next year will focus on supporting donor engagement and increasing brand perception amongst peers and competitors in the higher education career services industry segment.

Areas of Concern

• Limited awareness of full scope of services, resources, and events amongst all audiences
• No formal communications or marketing strategy; efforts not cohesive between two campuses
• Lack of brand guidelines, existing materials not visually engaging and/or adherent to Fordham branding expectations
• Low engagement with social media, emails, and digital resources (ex. YouTube, guides and brochures housed on Issuu)
• Hard-to-navigate website with outdated content

Solutions

• Developed and implemented integrated marketing and communications strategy
  • Social Media: Reduced in-feed posting to no more than 4 times per week, emphasized collaborative posting and community engagement, implemented humor-based posts and short-form videos, placed focus on Instagram and LinkedIn profiles, increased frequency of student and staff features
  • Communication: Expanded audience of liaison communication system, fostered relationship with Fordham Now (formerly Fordham News) team to gain media coverage of events and large-scale initiatives, placed key relevant events on Fordham Now calendar
  • Marketing: Expanded promotional graphic placement to include campus-wide digital screens, installed “This Week at the Career Center” weekly calendar campaign to bolster awareness of smaller events and workshops, published notices when new resources were released to YouTube and Issuu
• Created marketing calendar, including social media post and email dates, to enhance team collaboration and limit redundant or excessive messaging
• Updated all key graphics and informational pieces
  • Created branded PowerPoint/Google Slides templates for small workshops and class presentations
  • Published updated versions of Employer Recruiting Guide and Donor Guide
• Wrote tutorial guides and brand guidelines for creation of all visual and written assets
• Updated website content and structure by consolidating pages and simplifying navigation and web map
  • Added RSS feeds for job listings and upcoming events
• Launched Career Center Blog on WordPress, in partnership with University Marketing and Communications (UMC) team
  • Event calendar simplified upcoming event discovery process, allowed non-Handshake users (faculty, staff, parents) to learn about upcoming events, and contributed to increase of awareness of offerings and audience satisfaction
  • Blog posts paved way for long-form content, featuring community spotlights, announcements, and other topics that were popular in short-form content and/or essential to core audiences
• Collaborated with Student Engagement team to develop livestream workshop series on career basics using OBS
  • Workshops were made immediately available for viewing after the stream ended
  • Select workshops in series were amongst the best attended of the spring 2024 semester

Outcomes

Data based on 2023-2024 Assessment Period (June 1, 2023 – May 13, 2024 versus same period last year)

• +44.86% Social Media Following
  • 1,179 new followers (Calculated based on Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok)
• +23.85% Web Viewership
  • 90,940 views vs. 73,425 views
• +17.42% YouTube Views
  • 2,123 views vs. 1,808 views
• +106.41% YouTube Watch Time
  • 75.4 hours vs. 36.6 hours
• +258.54% Guide & Brochure Views
  • 39,643 views vs. 11,066 views
• +74.15% Guide & Brochure Complete Reads
  • 4,561 reads vs. 2,619 reads
• +11.97% Guide & Brochure Read Time
  • 5m18s vs. 4m44s
• +7.41% Primary/All-Industry Email Newsletter Open Rate
  • 67.67% vs 63%
• +137.5% Positive Earned Media (Articles Only) Mentions
  • 19 articles vs. 8 articles