UK Council for Graduate Education is focusing on smarter, collaborative content strategies to engage with its community.
UKCGE is a member centric charitable organisation with a long standing reputation for providing quality resources, representation and networking opportunities for colleagues in the postgraduate community. However, the rapidly increasing factor of time poor supporters meant the organisation needed to adopt a much flexible approach but still support a ‘traditional’ community for smarter working.
A more flexible approach for the council is being delivered through smarter, collaborative activities which penetrate the value groups engaging with the organisation. Tools such as html email, web analytics and social media activity allow the central office to monitor what content is most relevant to each value group and also the postgraduate sector generally. The potential of these tools are extremely substantial but unless the organisation acts upon the intelligence gained from the data and changes content to suit, it doesn’t mean a thing!
What’s more, being able to record, stream and edit real time activities at events, meetings and activities has given an extended shelf life to some of the most valuable possessions in the organisations product offering, its knowledge share opportunities. Developing a resource repository where members of the organisation can upload practice, watch event videos, construct a blog and highlight useful publications has also improved engagement in line with return on investment.
Recycling opportunities is often forgotten technology that the council have attempted to broaden across its practices. For example, issues and conversations at various events are now forming the back bone of follow up activities in the digital world. A more longitudinal, member led approach to issues and challenges also allows the council to offer a more sustainable member centric business model.
Recently the council has begun working a lot more with associated organisations, often on the periphery of the organisation’s membership. This allows organisations to learn from each other, collaborate and bring people together in/across universities who might not necessary have crossed paths beforehand.
To summarise, UKCGE is not doing anything different to other organisations or universities which are trying to engage a community but it is focusing increasing time on content, followed by more content with some content thrown in for good luck.
