Koch Hall visit with StratCom
For a month, students in COMM 494, Entrepreneurship & Public Relations, have learned the various components of Old Dominion University’s Office of Strategic Communication and Marketing in their class—which is a semester-long partnership with the University’s PR and marketing office.
On Tuesday, Oct. 2, the students of COMM 494 saw how all those components fit together.
Class was held in the StratCom offices in Koch Hall, the University’s central administration building. Students gathered at 4:20 in the main floor office where the University’s marketers and public relations specialists do their job every day. Employees of each department of Strategic Communication and Marketing explained what they do on a daily basis to advance the University’s mission. Students also heard how interconnected the various roles are in the office. A story can be used on social media, turned into a video, made into marketing materials—all by the modest staff that work in StratCom.
Giovanna Genard, ODU’s assistant vice president for marketing and communications; and Brian Payne, vice provost for academic affairs, welcomed the students to Koch Hall.
After the introductions were done (and donuts consumed) students were led upstairs to the Koch Hall Boardroom—where the University’s senior administrative team led by President John R. Broderick gathers for weekly meetings.
Sitting around the long wooden table in the boardroom, the students discussed two major events of the past few weeks that have kept StratCom very busy—the near-weeklong closure of ODU as Hurricane Florence approached the East Coast and Old Dominion’s stunning win over Virginia Tech in football the previous Saturday.
Caitlin Chandler, who is executive director for marketing and communications in StratCom as well as co-instructor of COMM 494, gave students an inside peek at how both events were tackled by the staff in Koch Hall. She showed a video of head football coach Bobby Wilder being interviewed by ESPN, as the University tries to make the most of its sudden national exposure.
The class also had done a writing assignment surmising what steps StratCom would have taken to arrive at the decision to close for Hurricane Florence. Caitlin took students through the experience step-by-step, providing a rare glimpse of the key strategic decisions of an organization like StratCom when dealing with a major event.
Now the students are working feverishly on their PR assignments for the first module of the course. We are all eager to see this knowledge take form.
