The University Relations team of strategists, designers, developers, writers, and analysts is responsible for managing the Queen’s University brand and developing high-level digital-first marketing and communication strategies grounded in audience research and insights.
The Marketing and Brand team collaborates with campus partners to support and build the university’s global profile and reputation. We offer strategic marketing, creative asset development and review, brand resources, guidelines, tools, paid media and marketing insights, and training.
The Marketing and Brand team also serves as a central of digital expertise. With a mission is to raise the standard of digital communications and marketing across the institution, we promote a collaborative environment that engages all departments and disciplines. In partnership with campus stakeholders, we create digital guidelines, establish best practices, and lead cross-university committees, initiatives, and projects.
Our responsibilities extend to creating educational materials, exploring emerging technologies, and delivering insightful trend analyses, ensuring an end-to-end digital-first brand strategy that is both innovative and effective.
Brand Guidelines and Visual Identity
The Queen’s University Visual Identity Guide provides a flexible and consistent framework to express the many facets of the university. These guidelines help us to articulate our story, to tell it with greater consistency, and to share it more effectively through an accessible, digital-first approach. The Visual Identity Guide and other brand resources can be found on our Brand Central website
Web Publishing
UR and IT Services have a longstanding partnership in developing a centrally-supported content management system (CMS) for websites that we call "WebPublish." Broad adoption of this CMS across university faculties, departments, and services ensures an accessible, aligned, and branded user experience across ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥ online presence.
The latest version of this CMS, WebPublish3, offers many options for formatting web content across several tiers of service – Basic, Custom, Advanced, and Academia – to units, departments, research groups and individual faculty members at no cost.
If you are you unsure of how to get started on a new website project or are looking to improve an existing WebPublish site, the Marketing and Brand team can help.
Digital Asset Management
University Relations adopted a digital asset management (DAM) solution that is now available through IT Services as an enterprise-wide tool for marketing and communication teams across campus to store, tag, manage, and share digital assets all in one place.
Using this tool, University Relations shares a collection of ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥ photography called "." Employees (faculty, staff and student-staff) can login with their NetID and search through a variety of campus images to use in ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥ marketing materials. Other teams are enables to curate and share collections representing their specific areas.
Website Governance
The ÷ÈÓ°Ö±²¥ Website Governance Committee is co-chaired by members from the UR team and the ITS Service Development group and its members represent all areas of the university that manage public-facing websites.
The Committee aims to:
- encourage a unified, consistent approach and compliance with policies and best practices for publishing online
- clarify and processes, roles, and responsibilities in all aspects of Queen’s digital presence
- facilitate and encourage greater collaboration between portfolios on digital projects
- align user experience across Queen’s websites and strengthen Queen’s brand online
Best Practices for User Experience
There is a lot to think about when trying to create great web content: how to use semantic html, how to write and format text for reading online, how to ensure accessibility, how to optimize images, how to structure URLs, how to managing links and redirects, and how to customize your metadata.
We can help you better understand these concepts so you can optimize your WebPublish for better search engine results and improve your site's user experience (UX) overall.
Analytics and Insights Initiatives
The University Relations uses quantitative and qualitative methods to measure and analyze Queen’s main digital properties, such as websites, social media profiles, newsletters, and campaigns.
We leverage our insights to inform decision making in marketing, communication, design, user experience, and content development.
UR enables faculty and staff to become digital-communication-savvy through clinics and cross-organization collaboration opportunities, such as:
- the Digital Analytics Initiative
- the Data Quality Working Group, and
- the SEO Working Group.
Digital Skills Training
UR also offers workshops for staff and faculty who are new to working on websites or want to enhance their current digital communication skills. These are geared to people already publishing information on websites built on a content management system, but no prior experience is necessary to participate. Refer to the for current offerings of the following digital skills workshops:
- Digital Skills: HTML for Beginners
- Writing for the Web: Crafting engaging, searchable, and inclusive content
