CAMPUS

News for NMU Employees

CAMPUS, Email Lists Phasing Out; New 'Campus Connect' Intranet in the Works

Effective this fall, internal communication that typically would be transmitted by individuals via campus-wide emails to employee group lists will be consolidated into a new intranet communication vehicle distributed more frequently. Campus Connect will include the type of content found regularly in the CAMPUS faculty-staff newsletter: news and feature stories, achievements, employee profiles and personnel changes. It also will highlight upcoming events and deadlines, announcements, questions and answers about the university, classified ads, scholarly activity and more. The goals are to decrease the number of emails received each day, while still providing a way to share information.

The idea of a  faculty-staff intranet site came out of the AQIP action project titled "Developing Feedback Mechanisms and Enhancing Campus Leadership Communication." The project reviewed the university's various opportunities for student and employee feedback to campus issues, discussions and decision-making. One of the recommendations was to create “an employee email announcement system” to address the fact that, based on a communication audit done as part of review, faculty and staff strongly indicated they felt they received too much email, but simultaneously chose email as the top preference for how they wish to receive university communication. The audit also revealed that employees had a difficult time weighting the importance of individual emails due to the daily volume. 

Campus Connect will include categories that can help employees identify messages with time-sensitive and/or response-needed elements. A secondary goal is to streamline the input of event information in a way that serves the intranet site, the university master calendar and, in some instances, the daily student announcement email. This will eliminate the need to submit identical information separately to multiple systems.