In March this year, our previous Communications Officer moved on to new pastures, leaving me to run the department whilst we recruited a replacement. As you can imagine, it has been a very busy and challenging few months running the Communications Team myself, but it has given me a lot of time to reflect on the processes and procedures that were and weren’t in place and look at how we can improve what we do, and how we achieve our goals as an organisation.
Amongst the communication activities, I’ve been working to update and revise our Communication Strategy, Content Processes, Social Media Policies and website, trying to find ways to make life easier for not only our staff, but the audiences that EVOC supports.
Communications at EVOC are often challenging at times – the size of our staff team versus the vast number of different work streams that we work with means there is never a shortage of information to go around but finding ways to disseminate this information and not contribute to the information overload of our colleagues in the Third Sector is always difficult.
On the one hand we want to shout out about the good work that we do and what is going on, but on the other hand we don’t want to put you off with long, daily updates. And therein lies the challenge of finding a balance.
With modern technology, current social media trends and a move towards everything starting to become digitally orientated there are definitely quicker and easier ways to get information out than 8 years ago, but we never want to just put information out for the sake of it.
The top of my list has been a complete overhaul of our website to make information much easier to find, a re-design and re-developed newsletter schedule and making social media work for EVOC as a tool to connect and engage with our audiences.
But being only one person it’s impossible to run a full communications service at EVOC single handedly, so you may have noticed that over the last few months we have been prioritising what we do for Communications.
I’m therefore delighted to announce that as of 21st July 2014, Sarah Wardrop has joined us as our new Communications Officer at EVOC and is currently settling in to her new role.
Sarah brings a wealth of knowledge and experience with her including a Masters in International Marketing, amongst her other skills and talent. You can read all about Sarah on her staff profile page, and I do hope you will take a moment to say hello and introduce yourself.
Over the next few months, we will be working together to restore a full Communications Service on our website, newsletters and social media, as well as planning and refreshing many parts of the way we work.
Exciting times are ahead for the EVOC Communications Team and you can expect to hear more from us in the future. Until then why not signup for our monthly newsletter to make sure you keep up-to-date with what’s happening at EVOC. Or check us out on Twitter and Google +.
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