By the time Superstorm Sandy struck New Jersey in late October 2012, Kathy Corbalis, executive director of communications and college relations at Atlantic Cape Community College, and her team were battle-tested. In the 15 months before the hurricane, the college experienced two bomb threats via Twitter, a lockdown due to gunfire, an on-campus…

Engaging with stakeholders on social media channels can burnish a brand's reputation, according to an early 2012 survey conducted by BRANDfog, a social media branding firm that caters to CEOs. The study found that 82 percent of respondents "were more likely to trust a company whose CEO and leadership team engage in social media." In addition, 94…

When a website has become a virtual storage closet rather than a place where useful, usable content is created, published, and organized, there is a problem. If audiences cannot quickly and easily find what they are looking for when they visit a website--and are not interested in what they find when they get there--they will get frustrated and…

The importance of communication during a school crisis has not changed in the 21st century. What has changed--and quite dramatically since 1999--is the way people communicate. Social media tools are now used in some form by 100 percent of all four-year universities in the United States as a way to reach students, according to a 2011 University of…

In fundraising today, a wealth of communications tools makes it increasingly easier to contact prospective donors--but is it getting harder to really connect with them? Do the new tools work as well as the old ones? In the second decade of online marketing, all the tools of the trade are subject to scrutiny. Direct mail has been a mainstay of the…

Alumni relations professionals need a method of measuring alumni engagement, including giving, that goes beyond counting event attendees and the number of Twitter followers. Social media are changing the way things have been done within the alumni relations profession, but that does not mean that people throw out everything they have done in the…

At the end of 2010, for the first time ever, smartphones outsold PCs. Mobile device adoption rates continue to rise rapidly around the world. A recent forecast by Cisco found that global mobile data traffic more than doubled last year, and by the end of 2012, the number of mobile devices in use will outnumber the world's population. In the United…

Many communications offices are so busy working on external communications that they tend to neglect their internal audiences. But the reality is that in higher education, communicating effectively with students, faculty, and staff is critical to achieving an institution's overall communications goals. Having realized that reaching internal…