4 Key Mindsets for College Communications

4 Key Mindsets for College Communications

Picture this: You’re at your desk, and you’re told that something is happening worldwide and you need a few new mindsets for college communications–fast. It’s sending students home for weeks at a time and is projected to give your school a set of obstacles that you’ve never seen before.

Now, your school is nearly finished with the semester. Students are almost finished with their finals, and now you’re just trying to set goals for the next semester. With that said, here's a collection of four key mindsets for college communications. These will help you stay on the right trajectory when strategizing your communications plan going forward.

1. Incorporate creativity into your mindsets for college communications

The Harvard Business Review has boasted before that "a great strategy requires creativity." Creativity is needed when conventionality is no longer working. This is important to remember now, more than ever, because COVID is the least conventional thing that has happened in a century. 

No one has ever experienced a pandemic and COVID-induced lockdowns before. At the same time, students have never before relied on technology for their classes at this great a scale. With that said, there's a plethora of technology at your fingertips to formulate different strategies to keep students engaged from afar. 

In short, there isn’t a playbook for these circumstances. Now is the time to try different methods for reaching, communicating, and meeting with students. All of this will be preferably virtual or at a safe distance, of course. In this way, creativity through your use of these online tools will be key amidst successful mindsets for college communications. 

2. Be comfortable with flexibility

COVID has given school administrators a challenging and ever-changing environment to create new strategies for. It’s important to remember that while you–the school administrator who just wants the strategy to work–can’t change the landscape, you can create the strategy so that it can be applicable to new changes. 

In short, a strategy you might have implemented might not have given you the positive results you were hoping for. If this happens, the only thing you can do–if you still need those specific results–is to revise and move forward. This comfort with revision is another way to think about flexibility in mindsets for college communications.  

3. Maintain patience

When COVID hit, it threw previous processes and mindsets for college communications out of the window. What is more, creating and revising the new processes might be tedious. You might also be struggling to receive the positive responses you were hoping to get from the new communications strategies.

If you can approach obstacles with the willingness to apply creativity and flexibility, there is a good chance your patience will pay off. Stay the course and move forward with the strategy. That is until you see results that are sufficient to see if this communications strategy is working. 

4. Communicate with students consistently

You might be stationed on-campus wearing your mask and practicing social distancing. You could also be hunkered down at home in an office. Either way, you might feel slightly disconnected from the students you used to engage with on a daily basis. 

No matter what degree of connectedness you may feel to campus, it’s important to remember that communication is key. This makes effective mindsets for college communications even more important. 

Thus, we have one thing to tell you, which is that: there may be a very anxious student on the receiving end of your communications that needs to know what you know. For instance, you may know when the FAFSA spring application is due, but a first-year student may not. 

Thus, now is the time to open that conversation to this theoretical student by saying something to the effect of: “Hi Jake! Just wanted to check up and ask if you have any questions about the spring FAFSA?” 

By communicating with students, you’re able to meet them where they are, and they are, in turn, informed. In today’s case, students are in the mid-finals season.

Anxiety and burnout are building up. Thus, students need to know that they have resources to help them get to the next step past this stressful point in their education. They won’t know that, however, until you reach out to them. 

Learn more

Times are challenging for school administrators, as well as students. This makes effective mindsets for college communications even more important. This is because effective communications strategies can take students from point A to point B. 

For more input on how texting college students can improve a college students’ journey, read more here. If you’re interested in a more thorough overview that we’ve created on how to best reach out to students during COVID-19, download our ebook here.