Professionals in a registrar's office must always keep an eye on the ball: managing the dates, deadlines and policies that keep the school on track. Often, getting that information to all of the populations that need it can be quite the juggling act.
One solution? Put all the balls in one court--that is, post everything on a common web site for people to find. But that's not always the most efficient way to communicate. In order not to drop the ball, one school is taking advantage of social media in an innovative way.
A whole new ball game
The registrar's office at Duke University (photo above) turned to Facebook and Twitter to notify the campus of upcoming deadlines and answer general questions. They are not alone “ many of Duke's programs and offices created their own Facebook and Twitter accounts to connect with their students online. Offices and departments retweet and share each other's statuses to ensure that students receive interdepartmental announcements.
In a recent interview, Sarah Kibler, Assistant University Registrar at Duke University, spoke with AACRAO about her office's Twitter strategy.
AACRAO: Tell me a little about Duke's registrar's office's Twitter feed.
Kibler: In August 2011, the registrar's office created a Twitter account with the intent of creating an engaged online presence. We're just trying to reach out to students, faculty and departments to remind them of upcoming deadlines and new policies. We're not trying to flood them with information or overwhelm their Twitter feed so much that they stop folloiwing us. We want to be interactive with students and receive student questions through social media to see what they're interested in learning about our office. Our goal is to create a more efficient outlet in reaching students with reminders on policies and deadlines.
Currently, it hasn't cut down on any time that we've spent interacting with students. It probably has taken us more time to get the information out there, but I do think it's been effective. We hope that we're being helpful by providing more information.
Duke's Office of the University Registrar website also features most recent registrar tweets.
AACRAO: Are many other departments in Duke also creating their own Twitter profiles?
Kibler: We have a lot of different departments and organizations on campus following us. We're focusing on connecting with departments in hopes that they share our announcements to their followers.
For example, if we have reminders about deadlines for transfer credit, we could tag the Global Education Office (@DukeGlobalEd). If we have reminders for freshmen students, we can use #duke2017. That way, we can interact with specific groups of people, and hopefully they're retweeting and favoriting to get the information out to people who need it. Once, we had a veterans affair deadline, so we tagged the VA office (@DukeVeterans). They retweeted the announcement to about 400 other followers who need to receive this information.
AACRAO: I heard that Duke Registrar has a popular hashatag called #TranscriptTuesday.
Kibler: Most of our questions in our email inbox are about transcripts. We also noticed popular weekly hashtags such as #ThrowbackThursday and #FollowFridays, so we came up with Transcript Tuesday as a way to give students more information about transcripts. We established the hashtag, and think of at least two or three things every week to share information about transcripts. There were even registrars from other universities who retweeted some of our Transcript Tuesday tweets. We do hope that other schools will hop on board with that. Maybe it'll start trending worldwide!
We've also been using #ThrowbackThursday to share old archived photos. We'll post a photo from our bulletin archives on Throwback Thursdays and we'll get a lot of interaction. Duke University (@DukeU) retweeted our photos and we immediately saw that we gained more followers. It's fun, but it's also about getting our name out there to more students.
AACRAO: Do you have any advice to registrar's offices creating their own Twitter account?
Kibler: It's all about interaction. Follow other departments in your school and share what they have to say. Stay updated with what's trending with students, departments and other offices.
Starting out, we were bribing our work-study students to follow our Twitter just to gain followers. Now, we are getting more followers on a daily and weekly basis since we are interacting with other Twitter feeds at Duke.
” How does your registrar's office use Twitter? Let us know @AACRAO!
For more in-depth conversations on innovative developments in the registrar's office, join us for Registrar 101 & Registrar 201 at this year's SEM Conference in November.