Heriot-Watt University: delivering creative content training
Heriot-Watt University is one of Scotland’s leading universities with campuses in Edinburgh, Dubai and Malaysia. The University is known for strong links with business and industry.
The team at Heriot-Watt University recognised that an audience and content-first approach to marketing and communications would be an important part of their future engagement activities, especially online. Social media engagement was seen as a key part of this.
Alongside a culture-shift that aimed to bring together staff across the University with any role in marketing and communications, the University also commissioned Pickle Jar Communications to deliver a year-long programme of workshops and training to advance content strategy, social media planning and digital creativity.
Having already delivered short-talks and workshops for the University before, we were well placed to dive straight in and bring staff on a year-long journey to challenge their thinking and evolve their skills and know-how.
We worked with the University to develop a bespoke training programme that would appeal to a wide-range of staff. Some sessions consisted of 45-minute talks to larger audiences, followed by 2-hour long interactive workshops for smaller groups, while other topics were better suited to a full 3-hour long workshop.
“Pickle Jar played a pivotal role in delivering a new approach to content planning and skills development. Their expertise and flexibility allowed us to bring together practitioners from across the university community to learn and develop together in a way that was not previously possible and has added real value to what we do and what we deliver.”
Martyn Spence, Director of Marketing and Communications
Throughout the year, we delivered sessions on:
Writing for the web
Using Twitter to best effect for marketing and communications
Creating engaging images for social media
Social media for events
Using social media for research communications
Alongside this, we also delivered a series of workshops specifically for academic staff in the School of Social Sciences. These were designed to help them to create plans for their own individual use of social media, to raise their own profile as thought-leaders in their field, and to develop meaningful connections with others online.
Image sourced under creative commons license, courtesy of Christian Lendl.