<p>So, I’m trying to figure out ways to advertise. I work within the sociology department at my school as a student worker/research assistant, and I have been meaning to find ways to draw in potential majors, inflate interest to the department, and provide a medium for maintaining that interest. So…I talked with the Chair, whom I work with, about creating a newsletter. Being that the college is a small liberal arts school and that we only have five professors in our department (one is on sabbatical, two work in administrative positions on campus and are thus divided from the department, and the other two kind of do their own thing), I felt that a newsletter would be a nice way to provide some solidarity or get people engaged. </p>
<p>Thing is…how do college departments advertise themselves, particularly a small sociology department? What types of things could I talk about? Who would I target? (e.g. prospective students, other majors, etc.). Any and all suggestions would be much appreciated. This is just a little project that I would like to get up and running, possibly a one newsletter per month commitment (frequency would be impractical considering how busy our professors are). </p>
<p>The best time to get students interested in an unfamiliar subject is right when they enter college. Our computer science department has been hugely successful with the following marketing strategies:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>They give flyers to incoming students right after they arrive on campus (the very first mailbox stuffer that incoming students receive - how exciting!). They address the following questions: What is computer science? Why study computer science? (don’t forget gen ed requirements) What courses are available to first-semester students? What SPECIAL and EXCITING opportunities are available to upper-level students? And why the computer science department is a FUN place to hang out!</p></li>
<li><p>The professors and majors are very visible during orientation week (the week before the beginning of classes). For example, they might demonstrate robots in the hallways, get students involved in a conversation and then tell them that they will get to play with these robots in the intro classes.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Our computer science department has really figured out how to recruit students, but they need to work on their retention rate. (The number of students in intro classes has increased from ~10 to ~80 after aggressive marketing, but the number of majors stayed constant at ~5 students per year.) Our math department has a hard time getting students into math courses, but they have figured out how to keep students in the department. (About 10% of our student body majors in math, which is quite phenomenal for a liberal arts college emphasizing the humanities.) </p>
<p>The most noticeable difference between our math and computer science departments is that the math department sponsors many more activities and the math professors interact much more with students. For example, the math department sponsors:
a biweekly colloquium
a biweekly department tea (where students mingle with professors)
a weekly math club (with talks by majors, games and snacks)
several more elaborate teas/parties each semester (e.g. a welcome-back tea, a Halloween tea, a holiday party; last time we played DDR with our professors)
a few informative events (a summer opportunities panel with presentations from math majors who did math-related work the previous summer; a career panel that brings math major alumni to campus; a how-to-prepare-for-and-apply-to-graduate-school forum, etc)</p>
<p>In contrast, the CS department might have one colloquium talk each semester; one department tea; no student clubs; and outside of office hours the professors are nowhere to be found.</p>
<p>When the work and responsibilities get split up over enough people, it’s not actually all that bad. To take our math department:</p>
<ul>
<li>The professors recruit speakers for the colloquium and organize the panels.</li>
<li>Students run the math club and set up special teas (with departmental funding).</li>
<li>The secretary sets up the regular teas and sends out weekly emails about the events that week.</li>
</ul>
<p>^ This is of course more work than a newsletter, but it’s also way more effective for getting students committed to the major and the department. Back to newsletters:</p>
<p>If you are trying to target (current & prospective) sociology majors, I would start each newsletter with a “cover story” about some topic of interest (e.g. a sociologist’s perspective on something that made national news that month) followed by an article about a person or event in the department (e.g. the work of a professor, a student’s summer experience, etc). Everybody would learn a bit more about the other people in the department, and younger students in particular might get a better sense of why sociology is interesting and relevant, and how they might get involved. </p>
<p>If your target audience is incoming students who are not yet engaged in the sociology department, I would stick with the mailbox stuffer idea. Either they’ll take a sociology class or they won’t. I wouldn’t go out of my way to make regular newsletters for students with no demonstrated interest in sociology.</p>
<p>Sorry that I haven’t been able to respond. I have been off CC for quite a long time. Thank you so much for your response! It helps a great deal. =]</p>
<p>I just need to get some experience in making newsletters. It would certainly help. I’m sure there are programs out there (I have no prior knowledge of Photoshop or anything).</p>