Falstuff. Developing academic public relation strategies : a meta-design approach

Promoting the offered courses of study, cooperation opportunities and research achievements, as well as providing prospective students guidance for their academic choice, are a must for each University and high grade education Institution. Their communication strategies embrace traditional media channels, like printed press and events, and new ones, including websites and social networks profiles. The biggest challenges involved are to preserve and deliver a unique multi-faced message across all media channels and combine the effort of all the people involved in the process into a single synchronised workflow. The aim of this research is to provide knowledge and methods to be considered by design schools’ administrations while developing a communication and promotion strategy. It embraces participatory and meta-design theories, game design principles and public relations practices among multiple channels: institutional websites, social media profiles, on-site events and traditional public relations. In order to provide a concrete ground where to apply this knowledge, this research also includes a custom-designed toolkit to guide and support the whole process as well as each person’s tasks, which provide a recognisable hierarchy allowing the distributions of responsibility and duties across all participants. It permits professors to focus on the development of the core message – delegating the production of contents to selected students – and specifically decline it for each media, considering three target groups: current and prospective students, companies and research communities, parents and alumni.