Who plans the future of your university?
Is it the leadership team? The lecturers? The students?
What if there was a way to get everyone to plan it?
Over the last few years, the University of Manchester has been leading the way in comms innovation. Having their leadership fully onboard definitely helps – their President & Vice-Chancellor, Prof Duncan Ivison, has been front and centre of award-winning experimental formats such as the Oxford Road Chats and the Ask Me Anything sessions.
So when the decision was made to deliver a new 10-year strategy for 2025-2035, no-one involved had any intention of creating a glossy brochure of aspirational jargon to sit and gather dust on faculty shelves for the next decade.
Combining story, film and experience, ‘Manchester 2035: From Manchester for the world’ attracted huge amounts of interest across the sector and beyond, winning a Future Index Architects Award and clocking up 10,000 visits to the micro-website in the first week alone.
But as independent higher education communications and strategy consultant Dr Jules Maclachlan, then working in-house at the university, told us, the real progress wasn’t in the launch communications – “it was in the way we designed the engagement process itself.”
12,000 collaborators
“We wanted to move away from conventional workshops, producing a document and then communicating it at the end. Instead, we tried to create an engagement experience that people genuinely wanted to be part of and that built awareness and ownership throughout the development process.”
More than 12,000 people participated in the strategy consultation. Participants were encouraged to engage multiple times, to help steer the ideas as the strategy evolved.
“We also deliberately varied the ways people could participate. There were facilitated sessions and digital engagement, but we also created the Manchester 2035 Ideas Lab: an immersive physical activation on campus people could visit, explore the emerging ideas, speak to members of the strategy team, vote and respond digitally.”
Foundations vs Leaps
So how did the strategy team transform all this input into a coherent strategy?
If you’d like to know more, you can get into the nitty gritty by reading Jules’s case study over at her website, Jules Mac Consulting, but she told us that the clearest example is embedded into the structure of the strategy itself, and the distinction between ‘Foundations’ and ‘Leaps’.
“One of the strongest messages we heard during consultation was essentially: yes, be ambitious, but fix the basics as well.
“That distinction matters psychologically as well as strategically. Change can be exhausting in a large organisation. We didn’t want the strategy to suggest that the answer was simply another layer of transformation on top of everything else.
“The ‘Foundations’ became the things that need to be true whatever future emerges – the underlying conditions the University needs to get right in order to succeed. The ‘Leaps’, by contrast, are the bolder strategic choices: areas where Manchester believes it can move further and faster over the next decade.“
Finding the voice of the university’s community
The strategy website deploys visuals and music to great effect, built around a layered structure that allows casual visitors to absorb the gist of the strategy through short film and plain-language summaries. Engaged visitors can then explore more deeply if they choose.
As the project’s lead writer, Jules found her immersion in the consultation process enabled her to develop messaging and campaign language that grew organically out of the ideas at the heart of the strategy.
“We weren’t trying to create a separate layer of marketing language around a finished strategy. The challenge was to distil the essence of much longer arguments, and express them in one or two lines that someone would actually remember.
“The explainer film moved across more than 20 locations and featured 17 different community voices. The combination of language, people and place was really important.
“The scripting process involved matching messages with the people who could deliver them most meaningfully, then pairing contributors so that ideas were handed from one person to another.
“That helped reinforce the idea that this wasn’t simply a leadership strategy being communicated downwards; it belonged to the whole University community.”
Got any other shiny examples that blow the dust off traditional HE comms (especially in areas like this where you’d least expect it)? Get in touch with us, either on LinkedIn or via an email to jo@allthingswords.co.uk, and share the HE copy love.