Supporting Student Success and Department Reach through Social Media and Branding Strategy

Abstract

In the past year, the Kennesaw State University (KSU) English department undertook an ambitious project to enhance our media reach while providing high-impact learning experiences to students. Key features of the project included successfully proposing a faculty administrative role to coordinate this work that is supported with reassigned time and a stipend; hiring student assistants to create content for department outlets; and periodically assessing the effort through media analytics and narrative evaluation of student experiences. The project successfully resulted in enhanced community engagement as well as sustainable internal student employment and internships that enable qualified students to develop career-oriented skill sets and portfolio exhibits. In an era of heightened pressure to increase enrollments and provide students with strong professional outcomes, we believe other departments can benefit from considering how our experience might apply to their needs.

Given the pressures of the upcoming enrollment cliff, it has become increasingly common for departments to think carefully about their marketing strategies, especially in fields with declining enrollments. Moreover, with increased student, parent, and social expectations for a return on investment, many faculty have developed a broader interest in supporting the career readiness of their students. Indeed, for disciplines whose career outcomes may be unclear to students, these goals are interrelated: Those disciplines bear a greater burden of articulating their value to students. One way to address this challenge is through media storytelling that focuses on student experiences that lead to positive outcomes (Muir and Oliver 2021). A recent report from our disciplinary society, the American Departments of English, insisted that “when we place students, their concerns, and their authentic ambitions at the center of our focus, we find that career preparation is not optional or additional to what we do in English departments, it is imperative” (American Departments of English Ad Hoc Committee on English Majors' Career Preparation and Outcomes 2024, 3). With this goal of supporting student success in mind, the KSU English social media team regularly highlighted student achievements externally on the department channels as well as emphasized professional development internally in training and mentoring student team members.

Universities turning to media to engage potential students is not new (Ranta 1994), and media strategy should not be the only component of a department's effort to engage its audiences, as physical events such as meetings continue to have their place (Assimkopoulos et al. 2017). However, media highlighting department-level (as opposed to university-level) content has several benefits. It provides department audiences with more personalized engagement with the faculty and students whose work is at the epicenter of an institution's academic mission (Buermann et al. 2020). Involving students in this work, moreover, provides opportunities for meaningful learning regarding both practical content creation and critical insight into institutional structures and communication practices (Redfern 2015; Verzosa Hurley and Kimme Hea 2014; Walls and Vie 2017). It also offers an opportunity to develop a professional portfolio of accomplishments that can be shared with potential networks and employers. As such, growing consensus supports the value of internal internships to student success outcomes (American Departments of English Ad Hoc Committee on English Majors' Career Preparation and Outcomes 2024), and regularized student positions as content creators for department media is a sustainable internship concept.

We found many of these factors to be true of our department context. Our project was in part borne out of our 2022–2023 six-year programmatic assessment for our English BA and MA in professional writing. Institutionally termed an academic program review, this long-term assessment is intended to drive programmatic strategy for the following six-year period. Our reviews indicated a few findings relevant to our media and branding work. First, like many institutions, KSU has experienced the national trend of student disengagement with humanities. Although enrollments in our programs appear healthy—for instance, experiencing only a slight decline from 359 English majors in 2015 to 334 in 2022—this status quo occurred in the context of KSU's massive overall growth from 33,252 students in 2015 to 43,268 in 2022. As such, the proportion of English majors to the overall enrollment of the institution declined significantly. This trend underscored the need to articulate the relevance of the humanities to broader audiences. Related to this, our assessments revealed students' desires for more explicit instruction in leveraging the skills they learn in their English courses to achieve positive career outcomes, consistent with the best practices noted earlier. This insight motivated our desire to create more internal student assistant and internship opportunities. Lastly, the assessment noted the negative impact of underresourcing the department's administrative structure as well as frequent turnover among department leadership. This revelation motivated our desire to make the case for improved support structures to our dean and to create opportunities for leadership development and succession planning within that structure. As such, we successfully secured our dean's support and launched our project in 2023–2024.

The inaugural social media team consisted of a faculty coordinator and three student team members (two undergraduate assistants and one graduate assistant), primarily responsible for social media content creation, editing, and posting. The team operated via email, Teams, Canva, and Meta Business Suite and met every other week for half an hour throughout the fall semester to check in (switching to weekly in spring 2024). After setting initial strategic goals with the department chair, the faculty coordinator planned each week's content and collected media assets. Student team members received content assignments via email and a shared spreadsheet at the beginning of every week to designate responsibilities for creating or editing specific content tasks, along with deadlines for each stage. Our target was 3 to 5 posts per week, which we achieved with 123 Instagram/Facebook posts during the 2023–2024 academic year (up from a prior pace of 56 posts during the 2021–2022 academic year and 66 posts over the 2022–2023 academic year). At the end of each semester, team members submitted portfolios of the content they were most proud of creating, along with a reflection statement connecting their work on the team to their broader professional goals.

As part of our assessment, we compiled analytics reports at the end of October 2023 and again in May 2024, which were used to reflect, assess, and strategize about what worked well, along with identifying areas for improvement. Overall, the analytics data demonstrated steady growth in response to the team's work (see figure 1). As of May 2024, our Instagram reach was 3.1K, up 352.5 percent compared to the prior academic year. Our content interactions were 1.2K, up 100 percent from the prior academic year, and we gained 154 new followers. Although these are not viral numbers in the grand scheme of social media, they demonstrate a positive response to a consistent, engaged departmental presence on our focal Instagram/Facebook channels.

Erin Kathleen Bahl is associate professor of applied and professional writing and the department's social media and branding coordinator, Jenny Rissen is a graduate student in the Master of Arts in Professional Writing Program, and John C. Havard is professor and chair of the Department of English at Kennesaw State University. Email: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]