Campus Communicators is a group of communication, marketing, design, and development professionals from various UH System colleges, departments, and business units. Meetings are held the third Wednesday of each month to spread information, discuss university and system initiatives, and contribute to policy making. If you would like to be involved in the group and attend meetings, please contact Brandy Holmes.

Attended the 05/15/13 Meeting:

Minutes from May's Meeting

05/15/13

Brandy Holmes: Commencement is over and things have quieted down for the time being. At the end of the meeting I'll take an informal survey about whether we need to continually meet this summer or if we want to take a month off. Our first update is about Promoversity, the online merchandise store that will allow your students, alumni, faculty, and anyone else to create and order custom t-shirts, cozies and other promotional items with your specific logo on it. It doesn't have to go through ad approval because that is already included in the online process. We have an update about the launch from Madeline.

Madeline Nichley: We're progressing nicely as we transfer the logo files (including colleges, departments, programs, business units, etc.) over to Promoversity. I'm also working with our contacts at PromoVersity to make sure they understand our ad approval process so all items will be processed and reviewed the same way we would in house. Please mark your calendars for the launch parties coming up at the end of May. They are open house, so please bring your team and whomever you think needs to know about PromoVersity. The launch parties will be all day long (8:00 – 5:00) on May 30th and May 31st. We'll email the location as that's confirmed but it'll be here on campus. (Later Note: location at 218 Farish Hall) PromoVersity will be set up to show and tell about the website, which should be live at that point, and they will have some of their products to show us. Representatives from PromoVersity and UH Marketing will be on hand to answer questions and have good time. Are there any questions?

Participant: Will there be drinks?

Madeline Nichley: BYOB.  Just kidding, there may be some refreshments and there will be plenty of Promoversity stuff. I think it'll be fun.

Brandy Holmes: And to add onto that, I wanted to share a clarification.  Initially, when we talked about PromoVersity someone asked "does this mean you don't have to get bids anymore"? And my quick answer was no, you don't have to get bids. To clarify, if an order is under $5,000, you don't have to get bids. Just keep that in mind when you are considering quantities. Are there any other questions about Promoversity?

Okay, a brief update on the search for our Associate Vice President of Marketing and Communication. The job has been posted on the UH jobs page. You are encouraged to send the link to your professional network. If you know someone who might be interested in that role, we’re looking for someone who has higher education experience, a marketing/media relations background, a strategist, a great communicator,... everything we loved about working with Karen. Next, Colleen, would you like to update us on our email migration. 

Colleen Walsh: We’re still moving forward with getting the data into iModules.  I'm having a session tomorrow from 1-2 in the UCBB building, room 502.  It's an open forum to ask questions. I have some information that will be used to query groups in iModules, so please stop by and learn more.

Participant: Where is the UCCB?

Colleen Walsh: UCBB, University Classroom and Business Building.  It's right by Melcher Hall, where Bauer is.

Brandy Holmes: Colleen, please remind us again when the launch will take place.

Colleen Walsh: Convio activity ends June 14th.  Then there will be a dead week of no email activity June 17th through 21st. The launch for iModules is June 24th.  People will be trained and very familiar with iModules before the launch date. 

Brandy Holmes:    So "dead week" means?

Colleen Walsh: “Dead Week” means that no messages will be sent that week.

Participant: When we have groups of people that we email to, will that change in iModules and will we need to redefine alumni groups, for instance, or has that already been done?  Do I need to do something?

Colleen Walsh: All the information in UA Advance is going to be in iModules, but the groups will not be set up.  The groups are not going to translate over to iModules. I'm going to do as much as I can to get the groups that were set up in Convio set up in iModules, but iModules is different.  So, you may want to come tomorrow and learn more about how to query. It's going to be different. I don't know how to explain it to you without showing you the tool and we don't have access to it yet.

Participant: So, there are going to be updates and the groups need to get translated to Convio.

Colleen Walsh: Yes, you'll still update your constituents in Advance, the same way you've always done, but groups won’t be pulled from Advance and uploaded into iModules. It's going to automatically sync every night.

Brandy Holmes: Colleen, will you have additional meetings?

Colleen Walsh: Yes, there's a meeting every week. If you're not receiving those updates, let me know.

Brandy Holmes: Any more questions about the email migration?

Okay, quick update about 160/90. Initially the next step in the process was Town Hall meetings, receiving the brand guidelines, holding brand camps and then the official spin launch.  It was the last part of the process and our relationship with the agency.  Because the presentations went so well and because senior leadership (including president Khator) was so happy with the outcome, they are in talks to extend the agreement with 160/90. This changes things. Initially they were going to come in May and do town hall meetings. Now, the town halls meetings and other final deliverables are being rolled into a larger relationship with 160/90, so they're not going to come back to campus until August.  The trip in August will include interfacing with the larger campus community, offering brand camps and delivering the guidelines and toolkit to help you prepare.  In the meantime they're now focusing on some executions of the new brand. There is discussion about a couple of our team members flying up to Philadelphia to also start jumping in on executions and working on brand guidelines, but no decisions yet.  So that's where we currently are.  We initially thought there would be a visit in May, but now it’s in August. Any questions? Ultimately, our relationship with 160/90 is longer than we thought it would be, which is great. We’re excited to see some of their executions of the new brand. 

Let’s talk about June and July meetings. We're all happy summer is upon us.  Just a quick show of hands of who thinks it would be valuable to keep both the June and July Campus Communicator Meetings?  (no/few hands shown) So, obviously we'll drop one.  Who would prefer to keep June and drop July? (no hands) Who would prefer to keep July and drop June? (9 hands)

So, we will not meet next month. Our sign-in sheet is up here at the front. We have a couple of new faces, so let’s go around the room with introductions.  Just your name and what department or area you're with... So, I'll start over here...

Participants: (Introductions)

Brandy Holmes: Are there any announcements, any events, or any success stories? 

Shannon Buggs: CLASS did an event for the second time called "Ready, Set, Commence".  It is two days in which our academic advising team has everything that the graduates need to get through the ceremony. They have their walk cards, they have people from development there to sell them spirit cords and some other things. It has been very successful. We get a large number of students coming through so they're not as jittery and confused on Commencement morning.  We had two commencement ceremonies this year (a morning and an afternoon), so it just helped a lot.  But I mention it because our head of the academic advising said we got several students from other colleges this time looking for their walk cards.  They were Engineering students, Bauer students, who all wanted their walk cards because their friends had gotten their walk cards from us. Janie would be happy to talk to you or whoever in your college if you'd like to se up a "Ready, Set, Commence".  It seems like it's a good thing to do and makes graduation day go more smoothly. It may be that we're the only ones that have that kind of trouble because CLASS is so big.

Brandy Holmes: Who is the contact person for that?

Shannon Buggs: Amy Ramirez would be the person directly involved.  This time she came up with a craft station for graduates who wanted to decorate their mortarboards. They had a great time and enjoyed it.  One woman I asked, "How's it going", she replied "oh, I'm having so much fun, I had finals all week, this is so much fun". Amy Ramirez in CLASS and academic advising will be the one to talk to about setting up something with the colleges.

Brandy Holmes: Great, thank you.

Participant: I have a question. Excuse my ignorance, but what is a "walk card"?

Shannon Buggs: That's the card they read your name off of.  The graduate gets the card and checks their name to make sure its spelled correctly and gives the pronunciation. It’s the card you hand to the reader and he says your name during the ceremony.

Participant: Thank you.

Brandy Holmes: Are there any other like fun commencement stories?

Kathy Major: We did something new this year called Fuel for Finals. We set up a tent between SR1 and the science & research class room building and gave out water and snacks.  We had about 600 students, so of whom weren't in NSM. Everybody wanted a snack. Three NSM Alumni Association members and about five or six faculty members worked the tent. It was fun.

Participant: When did you have it?

Kathy Major: We had it on May 6th, the Monday before graduation. Next time, we might move it closer to the start of finals.

Anne Ness: Does everyone know about Finals Mania?

Participant: Yes, the pancake thing?

Anne Ness: It's the same kind of thing, but it's university-wide and the administration involvement is great.  The administration serves pancakes and sausage to the students the night before finals start. This year it was April 30th. The UH band comes and plays. Shasta and Sasha are there and students are served by the administration. The students think that's really fun. This is a good alternative in case you can’t have your own awesome fun party, it's something you can promote to your students.

Kathy Major: Our alumni had heard about the final thing and they wanted to do something closer to where the science students are.

Anne Ness: That's awesome, the whole idea is supportive. They do it every semester, so I'll try to remember to make an announcement about it in December. Anybody can come, everybody can come, it's just fun and free, and a good time.

Brandy Holmes: Thank you.

Maribel Salazar: I have an announcement, regarding Info Ed Maximus. Please help to make people aware of the system, so Info Ed in particular is the first largest system that we are implementing and it is really a way for faculty to submit their proposals and it's going be more streamlined than the various systems and methods that they are employing are now.

Brandy Holmes: Since this is a centralized system, if they have a research proposal, that they want the university to move through...

Maribel Salazar: …approvals and other related documentation they actually can submit it to us, then we hit submit before it goes out to the sponsor and all the paperwork is in there. We're starting some webinars, there's actually one that's wrapping up right now.  There's one more in a couple weeks, and next week is an actual live presentation introducing the PI's (or anybody) about the 8 steps that they need to setup a proposal in the system, it can be hands off and let their staff handle it, or they can choose to be involved.

Participant: Are we going to launch this soon, or is it getting ready to be launched for the replacement for what you already have?

Maribel Salazar: Right now we have something called RD2K and based from that, there's a web-based system called Rams that pulls info from RD2K and this is going to replace both of them. These are large systems and it’s going to be a year and a half of transition, but we want faculty and their research staff to be aware of it and start getting familiarized with it. In some instances they're already getting their feet wet by searching for funding opportunities.

Participant: Are you informing all of the colleges about this?

Maribel Salazar: Absolutely. Right now it is limited to some key people that are giving us good feedback so that we can tailor it before it goes out to the community.

Participant: What did you say the name of that was?

Maribel Salazar: Info Ed. For more information, you can reach out to me.

Brandy Holmes:  Thank you… Shannon?

Shannon Buggs: I was wondering when the photo library will be updated with 2013 graduation photos.

Brandy: Yes, Commencement happened on the 10th, which was last weekend.  I think it usually takes us a couple weeks to go through all of them.

Enita Torres: Yes, there's quite a bit for the photography team to go through while they are still being called on shoots. We’re working on it.

Brandy Holmes: We typically have them at the beginning of summer.

Shannon Buggs: We need them for newsletter purposes.

Enita Torres: Get in touch with me so we can discuss your needs.

Brandy Holmes:    Any other announcements?

Kathy Major: When I first started working here, I found somebody that had worked here before me and had gotten CD's of photos taken during Commencement. I called and got one that May.  I haven't been able to successfully get a CD of Commencement photos since then.

Brandy Holmes: Our team doesn’t burn CD's anymore because it consumes too much time and resources. We have Gallery 3, so we can upload photos. See Gallery 3 here: https://images.uh.edu/login/index.php

Enita Torres: We don't shoot all the Commencement ceremonies, in fact, our photographers only shoot one or two of them.

Madeline Nichley: Wait, are you talking about the photography company Flash?

Kathy Major: Yes. The company that shoots all the headshots of the graduates and a few other photos.

Madeline Nichley: Talk to Renia Butler in Special Events. I believe she is the contact with Flash, she can give you more info.

Participant: Yes. Flash photography. They took photos of our Commencement and it was great, that way you could comb through shots related to NSM.

Madeline Nichley: Renia would know more…

Participant: Yes, they take individuals of each graduate, plus crowd shots.

Participant: Our college paid Flash, they centrally coordinated it through Special Events but they billed us and gave us the CD.

Kathy Major: Did they stop giving CD's out?

Participant: I don’t know.

Kathy Major: I keep wondering if its going somewhere in NSM but not sent directly to me.

Brandy Holmes: Are there any other announcements?  Thank you for coming.  We will not meet in June, so we will see you again in July.

(Break for roundtable discussions)

Meeting adjourned.