Campus Event Promotion

For some time, individual emails have been the primary means of publicizing events at Union. On a campus as active as ours, this means our community receives a large number of event-related emails each week, while employees authorized to forward information to the campus community receive numerous requests to do so. It also means that many of Union’s noteworthy events do not appear in our online Campus Calendar because they are publicized only via email, so external audiences do not get a complete picture of everything going on at Union.

Starting on April 10, 2012, the following policy will apply to promoting campus events. This policy has been developed with two main principles in mind:

Principles:

1. Union’s online Campus Calendar should be as complete as possible in order to reflect the dynamic nature of our campus.
2. Event organizers and others should not be prohibited from sending individual emails about events if they choose. By the same token, recipients who do not wish to receive all these individual emails should have some way of “opting out.”

Policy:

• Event organizers should always submit their events to the Campus Calendar as a first step. (The calendar can be found on Union’s homepage under the “News and Events” header, as well as within the “student” and “faculty/staff” links on the upper right of the homepage.) It is important for the information that is submitted, especially the event description, to be complete, since this content is viewed by many and is used in other areas of the website. For any questions about using the calendar, contact calendar@union.edu.
• Members of the Union community are also welcome to send out individual emails and reminders about events using the "campus-events@union.edu" Google Group administered by ITS. Everyone on campus will be automatically subscribed to this Group at the outset, but will be able to un-subscribe at any time. Anyone on the Group can send out his/her own emails and reminders. Un-subscribers will not receive these, of course, but will still receive the two messages a week from the calendar in order to stay informed of campus happenings. Documentation on using the Google Group.

Thank you in advance for your help in managing event-related communications more effectively at Union. We hope this will help minimize campus-wide email and make it easier for our community to get the information it needs.