The truism for every communications manager in higher ed is that there is never enough staff to do what needs doing. The bar keeps getting higher: Communications teams are now charged with sustaining social network communities and keeping website(s) fresh and engaging, while still giving each school, division, and department thoughtful marketing advice, PR counsel, and responsive creative production services.

A huge share of staff resources is required to keep up with all of the routine publications and materials that are constantly being requested by every office and department on campus. Yet many of these generate little in the way of bottom-line impact. The result is the communications shop is forced to focus on squeaky wheels and what is most immediate rather than what is most important. Precious little time remains to address high-impact projects.

Adding more staff members is not usually feasible, given the tough economic climate. Most colleges are reducing staff levels, not expanding them, which makes resource issues even more acute.

Staff shortages cause all sorts of problems, including chronic bottlenecks in the creative services shop. Internal clients always seem to need materials right away. When that isn’t possible, they do without, or create inferior materials on their own, or pay extra to have them done by an external vendor.

The second major challenge is brand consistency, owing in large part to the fact that many units create marketing materials independently because of the lack of central production capacity. In this environment, maintaining a uniform graphic identity is hard enough, much less maintaining a consistent design style, color palette, and typography scheme.

The lag-time in rolling out communications across a decentralized organization is a contributing factor, too. It can take a year or more from the time the creative team introduces a campaign in a signature piece like the viewbook to when all departmental brochures are sync’d up. By that time, the process has to start again. There is no time for the campaign to gain traction.

But a new set of online brand management tools solves these thorny issues, and a number of others, besides. These tools constitute a new generation brand toolkit. But they do more than just define the brand guidelines – they instantly deploy the entire array of brand specifications through the actual printed materials. They also increase staff productivity many times over by streamlining day-to-day tasks that eat up so many communications resources.  They make effective brand management truly possible.

These new online brand management tools – dubbed BRANDsprokits – make real-time brand management and brand uniformity feasible for the very first time, across an entire organization, regardless of size and number of locations.

The web-based tools were developed by EMG in consultation with front-line higher ed communications and marketing practitioners. The inaugural applications include PRINTsprokit and SOCIALsprokit, with more applications under development.

PRINTsprokit automates and streamlines the creation of routine departmental publications and allows the communications team to achieve brand uniformity in real time across all of the institution’s print materials.

SOCIALsprokit allows the new-media communications team to integrate, coordinate, and manage all of the institution’s distributed social media sites and online conversations via an interactive mash-up page on the main website.

Find out more about how these tools work in the Web Development and Creative Minds articles in this same edition of Brand Bounce.

Join us for a FREE webinar to learn how BRANDsprokits can make your life as a higher education communicator easier and more effective. Click on the time below that best fits your schedule. We will be giving away two free one-year subscriptions to PRINTsprokit and two free installations of SOCIALsprokit to registered attendees (we will draw one winner for each tool from the four webinars listed below) – you must be present in the webinar to win.

• Tuesday, June 7, 2011; 12:00 – 1:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time; Intro to both PRINTsprokit and SOCIALsprokit.
• Wednesday, June 15, 2011; 11:00 – 11:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time; Intro to PRINTsprokit only.
• Thursday, June 16, 2011; 4:00 – 4:30 PM Eastern Daylight Time; Intro to SOCIALsprokit only.
• Monday, June 27, 2011; 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time; Intro to both PRINTsprokit and SOCIALsprokit.