As the 2018–19 academic year comes to a close, we have a few updates about our office’s progress toward building internal communications tools to replace Trinity Today.

First, I want to say thank you.

I acknowledge that adopting a new process isn’t always easy, and the campus community has been wonderfully flexible with our temporary methods to publish announcements. We’ve spent the year hard at work with our campus partners to determine the best design for 1) an internal campus events calendar that pairs with our public events calendar, and 2) build a tool to publish announcements.

What We’ve Accomplished

In August we launched the college’s new website and public events calendar. The calendar is designed to highlight the rich diversity of events and activities at Trinity, and to help promote public events to audiences on campus and off. The new calendar and website required some significant changes to the way we promote events and share announcements for the campus community. In particular, it meant that Trinity Today—both the website and email—needed to change.

We detailed the changes in a post at the beginning of the year, but in a nutshell: The daily email from Trinity Today ceased; the Trinity Today website continues to exist as a tool for promoting announcements, and we have spent this past year in a transition period which we—together as a community—have worked to determine the best ways to meet our campus communications needs.

During this year’s period of transition, we implemented three specific ways to members of the campus community to share announcements:

1. Global Emails: Anyone who had previously made use of Trinity Today for important institutional announcements was able to make use of the global distribution email lists for faculty, staff, and students. We expanded access to the campus’s global distribution email lists
2. Announcements on the Trinity Today website: Our office posted campus announcements on behalf of faculty, staff, and students on the Trinity Today website. Additionally, we expanded the definition for announcements to include items that are events that would be found on the calendar, rather than limiting our definition to informational announcements.
3. Weekly Digest: The email distribution of Trinity Today was important to many, and so during this transition, our office sent out a weekly email that is a digest of announcements published on the Trinity Today website.

The work to determine the campus’s communications needs was driven by by the Communications Advisory Group (CAG).The group’s members led a process to learn more from the campus community about communications preferences, and they provided input and feedback for our office and Information Services in developing solutions. Their work has been enormously valuable in helping to determine the right mix of components.

What’s Next?

The goal of a redesigned Trinity Today is to provide an information hub for the campus community. This includes events, announcements, and and other need-to-know information. We have also heard quite clearly that many on campus like receiving this information in email. There are a variety of preferences, however, on the frequency and content of the emails.

The three major components of our redeveloped campus communications tools are:

1. Campus Events Calendar: An internally focused campus life events calendar. This will complement our public events calendar, which is intended to promote events that are open broadly, including to the public.
2. Announcements: A tool for submitting and publishing your announcements.
3. Email subscription preferences: Not only will Trinity Today emails resume, but you will be able to make choices about the frequency and content of the emails you receive. Many felt the loss of the daily email, while others wished for a less frequent delivery or mix of content. Choices like these will be possible.
4. Web: All of the events, announcements, and other information tools will be part of a modern, redesigned Trinity Today website. This will serve as a central hub for internal communications at the college.

We will share some brief updates as we aim to build out these components over the summer. These updates may include sneak previews of designs, updates about features, or requests for feedback. Our goal is to relaunch Trinity Today at the start of the 2019–20 academic year.

As always, your feedback is the most important thing we can receive, and we always want to hear what you think. Please be in touch with your thoughts and feedback at any time.

 

Photo by AbsolutVision on Unsplash