The Week that Was - 1/26 to 1/30
Once again a large chunk of my week consisted of planning for the Symposium. The thing to mention here is that time spent on planning doesn't necessarily equate to time spent in actual production work. I met with Jeff and Cole regarding where we are with the marketing campaign and what our thoughts are going forward as well as into next year. Cole always has lots of input, and I found it satisfying that many of the ideas and concepts he was thinking of were things that Jeff and I had discussed in one form or another. We're chugging along with the videos, and I can't give enough credit to Justin Miller, Matt Frank, and Hannah Inzko on their hard work on these. A rough cut of the Christian Brady video has been put together and sent to Jeff for his review. I can't wait to see it. Next, we are scheduling to travel to Schuyklill on February 9 to interview and film Elinore Madigan and her students.
We've also sent out the general registration announcement for the Symposium, and Jeff and I have already received several phone calls and emails from faculty inquiring about the event. The announcement will hit the all-campus Faculty/Staff newswire on Penn State Live this Thursday, so I expect a surge in registration soon after. As of 1/30, I believe we had about 160 people registered. That doesn't include the 4 or 5 of us who are listed as "instructors" and can't register on SemReg. We had a record number of proposal submissions this year, and I wouldn't be surprised in the least if we also have a record number of registrants.
The Symposium print campaign is trying something new. Last year we made posters of our "faculty profiles" photos. These were mounted and laminated on foam board and then hung out in the hallway between the 210 and 202 side of Rider Building. The tools at my disposal for hanging the posters was very low-tech... thumb tacks. I tried to use clear ones so that they wouldn't show up as easily, but when I ran out of clear ones I had to resort to white ones (the wall was white so I figured they would blend in). Suffice it to say that while it didn't look horrible, it didn't quite pull off that professional look I was going for. So as we start to make posters for the print portion of this year's marketing campaign, we are running into the same issue. Dave made 4 very sharp posters that he had mounted on board and laminated, but he was struggling with how to hang them on the wall. If there is one thing I have learned about Dave is that he is incredibly resourceful. He found something on the internet called Wallhogs. Wallhogs are large posters than can be printed on vinyl and attached to a wall using something called Photo-Tex that, in the words of Wallhogs themselves, is a "reusable adhesive backing that can be used indoor or outdoor on nearly any surface." These are very similar to Fatheads, which I have seen advertised on TV. So we ordered one to try it out, and it should be here tomorrow or Wednesday.
The other big news of this past week was that the first TLT internal newsletter was published on the TLT web site. This new format for the newsletter is made up of the daily content that the Communications Group posts to the TLT site. This content is aggregated to a page on the TLT site that automatically publishes on the last Friday of each month. Users can subscribe to the newsletters RSS feed, so it will show up in their readers when it publishes. It worked very well, and it seems as though everyone was very pleased with it. A big thank you goes out to Audrey Romano for doing such a stellar job in putting all of this in place and making it work. Jamie Oberdick, Mary Janzen, and Tara Caimi also deserve a ton of credit in crafting how this all came together and for submitting daily content to the web site. This will continue to evolve as we move forward, but I think we are off to a great start.
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