Telling Your Story
ALVSCE Communications and Marketing professionals are here to help you share your work with diverse audiences, helping it gain visibility with students, faculty & staff, news media, the public, and important stakeholders.
Bigger Picture Storytelling
One of the primary roles of the ALVSCE Communications and Marketing team is to help bridge the gap between our division and the world at large. Media coverage, web features, direct email campaigns and social media have the power to not only build our institutional reputation and awareness, but bolster program enrollment, support funding initiatives, educate the public, combat misinformation, and further the global scholarly conversation.
Submit Your Story Ideas
As a large division composed of many people, programs and projects, ALVSCE has no shortage of stories to tell. Fortunately, we have many ways to communicate, including news releases, working directly with journalists, web features, newsletters, CALES Life magazine, direct email campaigns, and social media.
We can’t promise we’ll share the news immediately or write a feature-length story, but we can promise that every idea helps. Please send us your story ideas. We consider every suggestion carefully, and each one helps us better tell the world who we are, what we do, and the impact we deliver more fully and authentically.
Have an item to share with our internal community of faculty and staff?
Consider contributing to ALVSCE’s Weekly Bulletin, Arizona Cooperative Extension System’s TEN (Tuesday Extension Notes), or the university’s Lo Que Pasa.
Have a resource, event, or news to share with CALES students?
Consider contributing to CALES Connect.
How We Tell Your Story
Stories may be reused within marketing and brand campaign materials, including external-facing newsletters, magazines, and brochures.
News Release
(roughly 300-500 words)
Distribution: Emailed to media, blurb with link and image posted to social media, and posted to UA News and related ALVSCE websites under News.
Web Feature
(roughly 500-800 words)
Distribution: Appropriate ALVSCE websites. *Potential to be shared in marketing collateral, social media, with external and internal communities, and directly with our network of media contacts.
Social Media Post
(roughly 100-150 words)
Distribution: Social media channels.
Where We Need Your Help
We will chat with you for about 20-30 minutes to get a better understanding of the project and its potential applications. We will ask you to describe your news or research in non-technical, lay terms that a high school student, or your non-expert neighbor could understand. We use Zoom to record video interviews.
Visuals help to tell a story. We will ask you to send us or schedule a session to collect photos and videos that we can use (of yourself, your team, your samples, the experiment, etc.) that can help us better tell our story.
After the interview, we will create a first draft and share it with you for approval. We will also reach out to your co-authors/co-PI institutions communications team to attempt to coordinate should we decide to proceed with a broader news release or in-depth web feature.
We will ask you to focus on factual (not stylistic) edits, and to keep in mind that our audience will not have all the background necessary to understand expert language. We aim to convey the importance and relevance of the work to as broad an audience as possible, without getting the facts wrong, which can be a difficult balance to strike.
After the story is published, reporters may wish to do follow-up interviews with you. ALVSCE Strategic Communications will help to arrange any interviews and, if necessary, help you prepare.
Media are sent the materials and will edit and use the stories, images, and videos (in part or in full). We have no control of how media will interpret/tell the story, we can only control what we send them. In the case of a significant error in reporting (which happens very rarely) we can reach out and ask for a correction.