John Zhu

The two core goals for the Duke Graduate School's communications strategy are 1) to help the Duke community understand the important contributions of our graduate students (and hence the need to support them); and 2) to help our graduate students understand the ways in which The Graduate School supports them. A key component of our content strategy to achieve those goals is the annual highlights of recipients of the school's fellowships (like scholarships, but for graduate students rather than undergraduates).

Each year, The Graduate School awards about $10 million in fellowships to hundreds of its students. These provide important financial support that allows students to pursue their academic and research endeavors. When I began building the school's communications operation from scratch in 2014, this was an obvious content gold mine, so I devised a strategy that produced a bountiful harvest each year.

Each fall, I reached out to the hundreds of students who received a fellowship from the school for that summer or academic year. I asked them to share a couple paragraphs and photos about their research or academic pursuits that were supported by the fellowships. This information was collected via a survey. The student submissions then formed the basis for a variety of content throughout the year:

• In the fall, we produced two large roundups of fellowship recipients, one for summer fellowships and the other for academic-year fellowships. These used the students' own submissions (with light edits) and were designed to showcase both the large scale of support that The Graduate School provided and the wide variety of student research funded by that support.
• In the spring, we launched a weekly social media series. Each Friday, we shared a post on our social channels, highlighting a specific student and linking to their entry in the roundups. This enabled us to get more value out of the roundups and to engage individual students, many of whom then shared the posts with their social networks.
• Throughout the year, we chose students with particularly interesting research from the roundups and produced more in-depth profiles about them. In addition to being highlighted on The Graduate School's own channels (newsletters, social media, etc.), these stories also consistently earned placement in Duke's highly visible campus newsletter, which went to all students, faculty, and staff. This was a great way to increase The Graduate School's visibility on campus.
• The roundups also served as a fertile ground for our development team to find stories that could be turned into various content to support their fundraising and alumni-engagement work by illustrating the importance of supporting graduate education.

Through this strategy, we produced years of rich content about our fellowship recipients, giving us a valuable repository for highlighting a key aspect of the school's support for its graduate students.