Strategy Case Study — UCLA
Helping the nation’s #1 public university communicate with its many internal constituencies
The Problem
The UCLA Strategic Communications team was frustrated. This small, resourceful group managed all of UCLA’s main channels – its home page, newsroom, magazine, and all of its social channels – and yet, with a campus full of people and stories, they still found themselves scrambling for appropriate content to feature. How could we help them become more efficient creators and curators?
The Program
Publishing daily content from what is, in essence, a small city requires airtight processes and content standards to be defined and communicated widely. We were asked to:
Develop a multi-channel content strategy, expressing audience and channel goals to help the team have a “who” and a “why” for content creation and collaboration.
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Design and configure content workflows to help creators easily participate in content ideation and submission.
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Conduct research and discovery, to understand and deliver insights around content creation and distribution challenges.
3
Stakeholder Research
We conducted dozens of interviews across 21 UCLA departments in order to understand their audiences, capture their content challenges and pain points, and share out the university’s broader vision and needs.
We discovered that, on the whole, they didn’t understand the criteria and process for content planning, scheduling, and promotion. Additionally, they weren’t clear on what metrics were being measured to determine content success.
Content Strategy
We developed a content strategy to crystallize the purpose and audience for each of UCLA’s channels and publications. The strategy serves as a foundational “filter” through which content creation goals and processes can be run.
Our accompanying content creation playbook served as a roadmap for content creation.
Content Workflows
Our workflows and accompanying processes documentation streamline and operationalize story-pitching, story-selection, and submission processes via narrative and designed diagrams.
The results:
Our work with UCLA supported multiple initiatives:
The debut of the new UCLA home page.
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Supporting UCLA’s evolving diversity, equity, and inclusion goals.
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Having processes in place that allow the gatekeepers to make clear content decisions.
