Marguerite Darlington

When I arrived at the Wisconsin School of Business, one of my tasks was to improve the visibility and profile of faculty research at the School. In the 18 months that I’ve been at the Integrated Marketing Communications department at the Wisconsin School of Business, we’ve managed to improve traffic to the Forward Thinking blogs by 5,000 percent, and we’re trying to build on that growth this year.

Here are just a few of the tactics that we’ve used:

1. Research Round-Up Articles in Alumni Magazine and Newsroom—Promoting one research paper is good, promoting four at the same time is great. In an effort to get full value from our news placements and generate interest in as much faculty research as possible, we started doing round-up articles that offer readers a taste of several different research projects coming from faculty at the School around a similiar theme, like “Four Ways to Improve Your Retail Bottom Line on Black Friday” and “The Truth About Taxes.”
2. Faculty Feature Stories and Faculty Blogs—We took two primary tactics when writing content about faculty research initiatives: first, we wrote feature stories that took a very human look at classroom exercises, like the story “A Recipe for Success;” and second, we helped the faculty blog, acting as ghost writers for consumer-facing explanations of their research, like “How Quickly Do You See an ER Doctor? It Might Depend on Your Injury.”
3. Faculty Research Videos—Video content is outpacing written across social networks, and more publications are adding videos to their news cycles to attract readers. To showcase our faculty and the impact that they’ve had on their academic disciplines, we created a series of explainer videos that captured one proof point from a research paper that then encourage interested parties to learn more. This format both promotes and extends the reach of our research content, but also provides prospective students an important consideration tool. Here’s one example, and here’s the full playlist on YouTube.
   
4. Faculty Research Tumblr—We wanted to make out faculty research and news more visual and more accessible, so we created a faculty research Tumblr page to showcase our most compelling faculty news and research.
5. Faculty-Focused Twitter Feed–In 2014, we created @WSBResearch, a platform to promote faculty reserach and improve the visibility of the great work coming out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Wisconsin School of Business.
6. Media Outreach on ProfNet—This initiative was taken on by our department’s public relations manager, and, in combination with two other platforms, provided incredible visibility to faculty.