Group Gordon’s Sophie DeMuth outlines common faculty hang-ups about participating in higher education PR efforts and how to address them.
Faculty research and expertise can be two of the most powerful tools for higher education PR—but only if faculty members are ready and willing to participate. Faculty may be too busy to take interviews, assume they are unfit for the opportunities, feel uncomfortable speaking with reporters, or simply do not understand why PR is worth prioritizing. It’s up to communications professionals to break through these barriers and create partnerships with faculty that lead to impactful results.
You can watch Group Gordon’s full webinar, A Faculty-Forward Approach to PR, for all of our tips and more information about higher education communications strategy, but we’ve also covered a few below.
Show how media and PR benefit faculty. Whether their goals include securing funding through grants or investors, writing and submitting academic papers, attracting speaker slots at research conferences, or building buzz around a future book deal, reputation building through media coverage and marketing can help. Media can capture the attention of a potential industry partner in the private sector, lend credibility to grant applications, attract incoming opportunities, and more. Research also shows a correlation between coverage in popular media and increased citations in peer-reviewed scientific literature. Finding ways to connect how media outcomes can help advance faculty members’ priorities and open new doors for their academic work is a compelling way to bring hesitant spokespeople on board.
While the best spokespeople are willing to make time for interviews and other media opportunities, the communications team can take on a significant amount of the work to make it easier to get involved. Coordinating all scheduling on behalf of the faculty member, providing succinct and comprehensive background material on reporters and interview goals, and helping to brainstorm and outline op-eds and letters to the editor can help get the most value out of the faculty member’s time.
Faculty members with niche areas of expertise may be inclined to defer opportunities to serve as an “expert source” for reporters to others with more direct experience. While it’s good to be humble, it’s not necessary to be the foremost expert in one’s field in order to provide valuable insight to reporters. A brief prep session to outline what reporters are looking for can help resolve skepticism around media opportunities. Most frequently, reporters are looking for someone who has professional experience related to their topic of interest, understands trends and facts in that space, and is available before their deadline. While specific research to supplement the conversation can be an added bonus, it is rarely a requirement for standard commentary opportunities.
Contextualizing what’s really required to be an ideal spokesperson for reporters can help break down faculty hesitancy that might otherwise hold a higher education PR effort back. That said, it may be helpful to “smart small” with opportunities you are confident the faculty member is comfortable with before expanding the scope of your outreach.
In addition to maximizing the visibility and impact of media coverage through amplification techniques like sharing articles on social media and in newsletters, making sure other faculty members see their peers in the media can motivate them to join the media effort. Faculty are often the communications team’s best evangelists on campus. You should also consider a more formal strategy to communicate media placements to the rest of the faculty body, like a monthly or quarterly email round-up.
By employing the tactics above, you’ll find yourself building strong relationships with faculty across your institution that pave the way to impactful media opportunities.
You can download our spokesperson framework (by filling out the form on the right side of the linked page) to help organize your spokespeople, their areas of expertise, the types of stories they prefer to comment on, and any warm relationships they may develop with reporters as they start to take on opportunities.
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