Communications and Public Affairs

By enhancing appreciation for Johns Hopkins, we strengthen the university’s relationships with important internal and external constituencies and the general public. We accomplish this by helping to distill the university’s story (its brand foundation), by being good stewards of the brand and by telling the story to important audiences, powerfully and consistently. We tell that story through multiple channels of traditional and non-traditional media. We also provide counsel to the senior leadership of the university on issues relating to communications, public affairs and crisis management.

Background

This may be the most exciting time ever to be a part of Communications and Public Affairs at The Johns Hopkins University. For the first time ever, senior leadership has recognized that the brand of the university as a whole, the master brand – as opposed to the brands of individual divisions – is a strategic institutional asset that has been undervalued, is underperforming and is in need of systematic shepherding and stewardship.

This recognition led to the recruitment just over a year ago of a director of marketing, the first person ever hired at Johns Hopkins to bring marketing principles to the management of the university’s overall brand and reputation.

In just the past few weeks, we have been allowed for the first time to hire an expert in Web strategy, reporting to the marketing director, to provide leadership for what is clearly now the most important point of contact between the university and the world. The marketing director also has recruited a director of video strategy and is now combining the web, video and design teams to create a new unified Office of Creative Services. This office will have a dual mission. It will bring strategy and focus to the creation and management of the university’s top-level Web presence. It also will serve the communications needs – Web, print, video and otherwise – of internal clients, bringing to that task not only creativity and tactical know-how but also the big-picture imperatives derived from the university’s overall brand strategy.

That strategy is being devised now in a branding exercise that is soliciting input from trustees; the senior leadership of the university and of the divisions; faculty, students, staff and alumni; and other important audiences. The deliverables from this process will be a proposed brand story and visual identity scheme for the consideration of the administration and the Council of Deans, to be followed by the university’s first detailed graphics standards manual.

The most important of these deliverables is the brand story. For the first time, it will give us all – in Creative Services, in our traditionally excellent other branches of C&PA, in the administration, in the schools, in admissions, in development, everywhere in the university – a common language and vocabulary for describing what Johns Hopkins is, why it is unique and why it is important and worthy of support.

Johns Hopkins has survived – indeed, of course, it has thrived – for nearly 133 years without such a unifying message about itself. We sense, however, in our discussions with deans, fellow communicators in the divisions, and colleagues throughout the university, a general recognition that the time has come to make Johns Hopkins even stronger and a hunger for central leadership in this area. We suffer under no illusions that the task ahead will be an easy one; 133 years of inertia is a lot to overcome. But we believe that a strong strategy, a collegial effort to obtain and reward buy-in, and strong support from the top can carry the day.

Staff Biographies