When internal communications fail, people notice. There’s no one at your event. Students don’t do things on time. People say, “but you never told me.”

At times like those, we might say, “Ugh. If students/faculty/whoever would just read their email….”

We’ve all said it—or at least thought it. But what if we looked at this problem not as a problem with our audiences, but as a psychology problem? A strategy problem? A governance problem? A design problem? Follow this path, and you can make real change in your internal communications.

This presentation will show you how to follow that path, by:

- Understanding the context: You’re overwhelmed. So are your audiences. Find out how the concept of cognitive load can help you craft better communications. And learn how to gauge your audience’s communications preferences.
- Finding your champions: You can’t follow this path alone. Learn how to find champions and companions across your school and work with them to make change.
- Making your plan: Use what you’ve learned to choose the right channels, find the right cadence, and choose the right things to communicate
- Playing well with others: Learn about working with and training non-communications people across campus to raise your institution’s level of practice

Internal communications can get better if you learn how to design and govern them.

Key takeaways:

• Understanding the psychology of your internal audiences will enable you to meet those audiences where they are. Add in research and data about your particular audiences and your internal communications can be much more effective.

• Because internal communications are, like the information on your website, typically decentralized, concepts from web governance should be applied to manage them.

• You can't do it all. Offering training to staff and faculty who do the actual communications can help.

About Mike Powers

Mike Powers is executive director of marketing and communications at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) and an award-winning higher ed speaker. A former academic, Mike has worked for IUP since 1999. Since 2007, he’s overseen IUP’s transition to a CMS and then to a responsive site, put IUP on social media, worked on IUP’s smartphone app and student portal, and managed many other projects. Currently, he manages a team of creatives working in media from digital to print to video to social media. He’s used the term content strategyto describe much of what he does since sometime in 2010.