Branding the Writing Initiative

We have increased our “branding” campaign to let the college community know about the Initiative.

This past summer, PCCC hired a full time publications person, Page Saunders, who we are working with to develop additional promotional materials. Besides our branded folders and flyers that all students receive when they first visit the Center, we have pending orders for bookmarks, appointment cards, and flashdrives. We collaboratively created a logo with Page that features the WI for the Writing Initiative and for the Writing Intensive courses to use on new promo items and online.

This past year we also created a YouTube site youtube.com/pcccwritingcenter and Facebook page facebook.com/pages/Passaic-County-Community-College-Writing-Center. These are not only places to post resources and updates where our students (and a surprising number of our WI faculty) see them, but we hope to use it in 2011 to connect with writing programs at other colleges.

This blog has replaced the Initiative Newsletter which was used in the first two years of the grant. The blog is a far more dynamic way of updating the community on a weekly basis rather than once a semester. It also allows us to provide links to resources online both on our own web pages and on other sites. All previous newsletter articles are now archived on this blog.

We are getting increasing traffic all year. Besides the expected U.S. visitors, during the month of September 2010 alone we had visitors from Brazil, India, South Korea, Ukraine, Russia, China, Mexico, Malta and Malaysia. Our blog stats show that people are finding us primarily via links on our Initiative websites, links on our Facebook page and on other blogs, and from Google searches.