I’ve written before about how so many projects that communicators typically work on tend to measure their impact in squishy metrics — views, clicks, shares, retweets — that are unsatisfying proxies for the projects’ actual contribution to the organization’s mission. During the past three-plus years, though, I have had the pleasure of working on a project where the impact is measured in much more tangible and meaningful ways, and that has deeply influenced the way I view the role of a communicator within an organization.
In 2017, the Duke Graduate School put together a proposal for a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to launch the Duke Center of Exemplary Mentoring (UCEM) — a program aimed at increasing the number of PhD graduates from underrepresented minorities in the physical sciences and engineering. A team of about a dozen Graduate School staff members, including me, worked on the proposal. As the school’s director of communications, I took the lead in writing and editing the grant proposal, which ended up being about 120 pages.
I had never written a grant proposal before, but my experience as a journalist and communicator proved invaluable. An undertaking like this required input and expertise from many team members, and it was my job to meld all those insights, ideas, and data into a cohesive, succinct, and convincing narrative about where we are, where we want to be, and how we envision getting there — and to do it in 19 pages (the other 101 pages were all appendices). Nineteen pages might be plenty of space for other contexts, but not when you have to lay out a comprehensive vision for how you will help address a daunting, complex challenge. The ability to convey as much as possible, as clearly as possible, in as interesting a way as possible, and with as few words as possible was crucial in this undertaking.
A Rare Opportunity
To our excitement, the Sloan Foundation approved our proposal for funding, resulting in a three-year, $1 million grant. In 2020-2021, as that initial funding period wound down, we successfully applied for a renewal for another three years (the renewal proposal, which I also wrote and edited, was only 100 pages). It’s rare enough for a communicator to get to write a successful million-dollar grant proposal, much less two.
In between writing those two proposals, I got to do something else that communicators don’t often get to do — serve as a full member of the team that oversaw the day-to-day operation of the program funded by the grant. As such, I got to participate in the discussions and implementation for launching the program, engaging myriad campus partners, developing a strategy for recruiting students, creating infrastructures and resources to support those students, reporting our progress to the foundation, and publicizing the work we are doing (arguably the only part of my work on this program that would fall within the typical domain of a communicator).
That experience has been time- and labor-intensive, but also incredibly educational. I have learned a ton about building something in a higher ed setting and about the challenges, realities, and opportunities of diversity, equity, and inclusion work.
The experience has also been extremely gratifying. I will always remember the satisfaction and excitement I felt as we welcomed the first cohort of students recruited through the program. This was not a report of website traffic or social media analytics. These were individuals who were pursuing their professional dreams at Duke because of the words I helped write. It’s hard to get a more tangible and meaningful measurement of the impact of one’s work.
How We See Ourselves
Reflecting on the past three-plus years, I think it is no exaggeration to say that this experience, and the satisfaction I derived from it, helped transform the way I think about a communicator’s role within an organization.
Often, communicators are at least a step removed from the actual work of the organization. We write about the work, take pictures and videos of others doing the work, create campaigns to make audiences aware of the work, but we ourselves don’t typically do the actual work. In light of my experience with the Duke UCEM, that feels like a missed opportunity, both for the communicator and for the organization.
Even before my work on the Duke UCEM, I believed that communication skills and perspectives can be valuable to organizations in ways beyond communicators’ typical responsibility — writing stories, managing websites and social media, creating visuals, developing communication strategies, etc. My experience with the Duke UCEM not only reinforced that idea, but also gave me a deep conviction that communicators should view their roles within their organizations through a more expansive lens, one that extends far beyond the confining boundaries of the typical notion of what communicators do.
Instead of communicators, we should view ourselves as equal contributors to the organization’s mission who bring communication skills and perspectives to every aspect of the organization’s work, not just news releases and Twitter accounts. If all we are doing is pumping more stuff through the content firehose, we are selling ourselves short and not getting the most out of our skill set.
The typical work of a communicator will no doubt always be a key part of what I do going forward, but my experience on the Duke UCEM has shown me that communicators have much more to contribute to an organization, and I will definitely be looking for those opportunities as I move forward in my career.