Whilst many of us have been taking holiday over the summer break, our FMS EDI Student Interns have been working hard to make sure that we can improve our communications about the equality, diversity and inclusion work going on in the Faculty.
Feedback form various surveys and focus groups have told us that we need to do more to let our staff know what we are doing, and why. For example, staff in the EDI Focus Groups that we ran in January, scored us only 4.6 out of 10 on our comms, which has an impact on their ability to engage with what we’re doing. People wanted to know more about what we are actually doing, and why, and have access to more information about the support that is offered and the benefits that it brings.
We hear you!
Over the summer, we recruited two student interns, Georgia and Joe, to help us out. We first set up an EDI Comms Team, committed to ensuring that key messages are communicated effectively, through a variety of different routes. We’ve taken advantage of the new intranet pages to develop our own Faculty EDI site: you can find a wealth of information on it for staff and for students, including an events calendar, and we’ll continue to build resources over the coming months. Let us know if you think we’ve missed something!
Our blog has also been revamped so that we can use it more this year to tell you about who our EDI team are, about the activities and events we will be running, and about projects we are working on and that you can get involved with. Some of the blog series we have planned for the next few months will showcase some of the projects are staff are running with support from the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Fund, give you some insights into what it is like to be in the senior management and leadership team, and how some of our staff manage working part-time. We are always looking for ideas for blogs or why not write something for us?
Finally, we continue to develop our twitter feed @FMSDiversityNCL. We see this as an important way to keep up to date with what’s happening around the University and across the sector, and to bring in ideas to stimulate our thinking. We also use it to advertise events and keep followers up-to-date with what we’re working on. We have nearly 1000 dedicated followers, so why not follow us?
We are also going to try out some new routes of communication – hopefully, you’ll see some of our new posters in our public spaces – these will be regularly updated. We’ll also be making more use of the screens to help advertise our events and activities. You can also follow our FMS EDI intranet site to make sure that you are first to know about the latest developments, and sign up to training and networking events.
If you want to contact the new EDI Comms Team to tell us some good news, an idea for a blog, an event you’d like us to promote for you, or just give us some feedback on how we’re doing, do get in touch: FMS.EDIPlanning@ncl.ac.uk