Marketing Personnel at Member Institutions

Archive of Listserv Discussions

Marketing Resources
on the Web

Professional
Development Opportunities

Award of Excellence/
Critique and Award Winners

SIG Reports/
Newsletters

Sample Marketing Position Descriptions

E-Mail Marketing SIG Members

Marketing SIG Leaders

Chair: Lynette James, Texas A&M University
Vice Chair: Ami Neiberger, University of Florida

Goals, Successes, Barriers

Our primary goal for the Marketing SIG was to generate enthusiasm and increased communication and participation among SIG members. Our second goal was to educate members, many whom come from non-marketing/PR backgrounds, about the basics of integrated communication programs.

• Plan 2002 national marketing communications conference. We are delighted that this is finally taking off after much talking over the years! We sent an e-mail requesting volunteers to serve on the planning committee and received positive responses from nearly 20 people. We're thinking the conference will be in February 2002 in the central part of the country. The conference will be the sole topic of our SIG meeting in Toronto.
• Write and e-mail a periodic newsletter to members that summarizes articles from PR/marketing journals. This was meant to be a monthly communication tool, but because of work overload, we wrote and distributed two issues. The newsletter contains book reviews, summaries of PR/marketing related articles, and upcoming professional development opportunities. SIG members replied that they thought the newsletter very useful. The newsletter was implemented based on comments at the 2000 SIG meeting that many members didn't have a PR/marketing background that they needed professional development.
• Implement changes for the marketing C&A category. We worked with the Media Relations SIG to revamp this category. We changed the name from "Information Campaigns" to "Integrated Communication Programs" to better reflect what we do. We reformed the three classes into two classes: "External Communication Programs" and "Media Relations Programs." Because judging these lengthy entries can be overwhelming for one person, we recruited two PR professionals to judge the entries together. From the judges' comments, the SIG leadership needs to educate members on how to put together these comprehensive entries to clearly show the planning, implementation, and evaluation that went into these programs. There were seven entries in communication programs and four in media relations. This number will increase as we educate our members on what types of communication projects fall into these categories and to reassure them that compiling their entry is not as hard to do as they think. Unlike last year, gold, silver, and bronze awards were given for each class, as well as an outstanding skill award. We have not received any feedback from members about these changes or the judging.
• Maintain past communication methods with members. As in the past, we sent welcome e-mails to new SIG members, and members sent questions over the listserv, covering topics such as marketing plans, evaluation, and impact statements. We distributed one SIG business newsletter and other business-type e-mails as needed.
• Update and maintain Web site. Our Web site, currently at http://agprogram.tamu.edu/ace/marketing, was updated to include more links to PR/marketing professional development conferences and resources and redesigned to navigate more easily. We would like to transfer the site to the ACE Web server, which would have search capabilities and a database of ACE member information.
• Select a SIG Award of Excellence recipient. We did not have a recipient last year. This year, we received two nominations. We assembled a selection committee comprised of the past three Marketing SIG award winners to select this year's winner.
• Elect a vice chair and vice chair-elect. Elizabeth Gregory, Texas A&M University will be the vice chair next year and Kathy Reiser, University of Illinois, will be vice chair-elect.

Overall, we are pleased with the outcome of our activities this year. We saw more participation and feedback from members than we ever had before. Integrated marketing involves not only marketing communication specialists, but media specialists, publication editors, electronic media specialists, designers and communication heads. We hope to continue to get the word out about who and what integrated communications involves and to recruit more ACE members to this SIG.