Our team transformed communications at Florida State University’s College of Social Sciences and Public Policy (COSSPP) between 2022 and 2026.
Background
COSSPP is FSU's third-largest college, home to 12 departments and interdisciplinary programs and 12 centers and institutes, serving more than 5,000 students and 57,500+ alumni. When I arrived, social media activity was minimal, the college's research and alumni storytelling ran through a separate blog outside the main website, and there was no strategic internship program or dedicated design system. I saw an opportunity to consolidate all of it into one coherent operation and spent the next four years building the infrastructure to do that.
Unifying the College's Storytelling
Before I arrived, COSSPP's story was being told in two disconnected places: general news through the college website, and student, alumni, and research spotlights produced separately by another team for an outside blog. I made the call to consolidate both into one editorial structure, COSSPP News, reasoning that a fragmented narrative undercut both the college's SEO and its case to prospective students and donors. That decision meant absorbing a second team's full output into my own, made possible by building the communications internship program alongside it. Total production has grown to nearly 900 stories since 2022, without any increase in full-time communications staff.
Building a Design System, Not Just Designs
Rather than treating graphic design as one-off requests, I led the migration of COSSPP's visual assets into FSU's Canva Enterprise environment and built a governed system underneath it: folder structures for every department and lab, naming conventions, export standards, and a template library open to 200+ faculty and staff. That system now produces roughly 2,900 branded graphics a year and gave me the infrastructure to take Engage Magazine's design fully in-house, something previously outsourced.
Designing a Program, Not Just Managing Interns
The Communications Internship Program is the piece of this work I'm proudest of. I designed it from a supervisory afterthought into a structured, two-tier service model: every COSSPP unit receives baseline support (news coverage, event promotion, brand templates, professional headshots), while 8 academic units receive dedicated, enhanced support, including management for their unit's social media presence, through the program itself. Since its creation, the program has trained 25 students, all trained and coordinated by me as the single full-time staff member assigned to communications for our college. It's a model built to scale college-wide capacity without scaling headcount, and it now functions as a core service line
Growing an Audience Strategically
I rebuilt COSSPP's social strategy from near-zero activity into a coordinated presence across the college. I directly manage 37 accounts, spanning the college's own platforms and 8 partner units, and provide resources, training, and support to the remaining accounts across the college's roughly 66 total. Last year alone, my directly-managed accounts posted 2,161 times, generating over 2 million impressions and 61,250 engagements, about 77% of all social activity college-wide. Since December 2021, the college's combined audience has grown 118%, with LinkedIn up 567% and Instagram up 195%.
Engaging Students, Alumni, Faculty and Staff Through Targeted Newsletters
I led COSSPP's migration to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, replacing a patchwork of manual Outlook sends capped at roughly 400 recipients. Beyond running our own newsletters, the migration let me hand Academic Affairs the ability to run their own mass communications to students directly, something they'd never had before, along with real analytics on opens and engagement they'd never had access to. I built three newsletters targeting distinct audiences: a monthly update for students, faculty, and staff (5,000+ recipients, 27.58% average open rate), an Alumni and Friends Newsletter (26,000+ recipients, 52.50% average open rate), and a twice-yearly Research Roll Call for faculty (200+ recipients, 60% average open rate), all comfortably above typical higher-ed benchmarks.
Creating a Narrative Framework: COSSPP in Action
In 2025, I partnered with Associate Dean Deana Rohlinger to design COSSPP in Action, an evergreen storytelling framework organizing all college content around four impact areas: Careers with Impact, Research That Works, Education with Impact, and Communities First. Rather than adding new reporting burden, the framework gives existing work a shared narrative structure, now live as a dedicated landing page, physical displays across Bellamy Hall, and a spread in Engage Magazine.
Outcome
What started as news generation and magazine production is now a full communications operation: an internship program that's become a college-wide service model, a governed design system supporting 200+ staff, analytics-driven decisions about where to invest and where to pull back, and a narrative framework the college now builds its recruitment and advancement story around.