It’s all about Digital!

As it’s three months since I started in my role as Head of Digital Marketing and Communications I thought a contribution to the team blog was long overdue. So, a very belated… hello!

The introduction of my role, at the University of York, signals a change of direction for the former Web Office, who are being re-named Digital Marketing and Communications (or the Digital Team if you prefer). In a nutshell the focus is shifting from supporting departments to deliver digital communications to leading on the strategies to deliver them.

So what’s been happening in the last few months?

A significant part of our time has been spent preparing for a redesign of the York website. This is something that has been in the pipeline for some time but we have developed a plan to roll-out the new look and feel in a ten-phased project which starts this October. We didn’t want to wait to get everything ‘done’ before we started implementing changes so we’re taking an iterative approach; you’ll see the first changes next month after which we’ll blog about it here to explain what we have changed and why.

University of York staff can also follow the progress of the project on our wiki and find out what’s coming up next.

Speaking of the wiki we have spent some time developing a space to support Digital Marketing and Communications across campus. Within it staff can find information on Social Media, the Visual Identity inc. tone of voice, guides and resources to develop effective content, forms to request our support and details of the projects we’re working on.

Alongside the above we’ve also;

• Developed and launched the Welcome pages for new Undergraduates, in collaboration with our colleagues in the Marketing and Communications office.
• Developed a new process for managing the stories on our homepage (in preparation for the new one!)
• Held some really engaging workshops with Content Strategist, Relly Annett-Baker, and as a result started work to define our tone of voice and developed guidance (available from the wiki) to develop and manage our content.
• Revised the way we run projects (not substantially as Dan and Paul had some excellent processes in place) but we’ve recently gone back to Sprints and started to rotate support so that Amanda has more opportunities to get more involved in project-work.
• Started the re-brand of our Social Media accounts to create a uniformed look and feel (see UniofYork and UoYStudy) and developed guidance around ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ accounts.

All of the above has been happening alongside providing support to colleagues across campus, training staff to use the Web CMS and being involved in the many strategic discussions about the future of digital at York. So, all in all, it’s been a very busy summer!