Heather Bloomer, Senior Digital Communications Officer at the Open University Students Association, sits down with us to take a deep dive into the importance of accessible content, digital upskilling and why you should act on feedback but never take it personally.
Why did you choose to pursue a role in communications? For example, has it always been your passion or was it pure happenstance?
I’ve always leaned towards creative pursuits, learning to edit videos for fun and constantly scribbling away at short stories. Working in film and television, putting my editing or writing skills to use in that field was the ultimate goal… until I graduated from university and started looking for work. I spotted an internship opportunity in the Open University Students Association’s communications team and was excited by the prospect of such a creative role that could make an impact on a huge student community. I jumped at the chance and I’m still there six years on. I’ve held multiple roles in the communications team and now I can't imagine working in any other field.
What personal skills or attributes do you think are most important in the communications sphere? Why these skills/attributes in particular?
Listening and empathy. You have to be able to actively listen and engage with your audience - to understand what’s important to them, what makes them tick. Being able to see things from other perspectives is an undervalued skill, I think, but one that is so crucial to positioning your messaging.
In my team, we talk to students every day on social media. They might need some study motivation, encouragement or signposting to more serious support. It’s crucial to be able to switch gears quickly and have the empathy and emotional intelligence required to respond appropriately.
Understanding accessibility is such an important skill - one that I hope is becoming more valued. The Open University has a larger proportion of students with declared disabilities than most brick universities, so a good understanding of accessibility in terms of digital and design is very much championed in the Association’s communications team. We do our best to ensure all students can access our opportunities, events and activities regardless of ability or device. I’m of the mind that inaccessible content is usually just bad content. We’ve all seen those graphics on Twitter with paragraphs of tiny text, or posters with low-contrast colours making the message difficult to read… Thinking of accessibility when approaching content creation will always positively inform your choices - everyone wins!
What sort of challenges do you face in your role? Is there a particular challenge that you experienced in the past that stood out?
Communications people have an ever-increasing number of hats to wear. In an ever-changing digital landscape, solid communication is key and yet is often under-resourced. Being a bit of a jack of all trades helps with this but there is only so much that you can do in a day. A low team capacity combined with the commonly held belief that ‘anyone can do comms’ has, in the past, led to some interesting situations. Something that has helped hugely with this is upskilling colleagues and encouraging a more collaborative workflow - this allows for more hands-on deck, a greater understanding of communications processes and more lead time for final checks before publication.
How is the role of communications perceived in your organisation?
Communication has a huge part to play in the awareness of, and engagement with the Association, and is definitely treated as such. That being said, I’m fairly certain anyone in any communications role will have experienced the stereotypical ‘can you just put a tweet out?’, ‘work your comms magic on this,’ ‘can you make a quick video about this?’ and so on. I’ve found it beneficial to have members of the wider team who both value and champion the work and skills that their communications staff provide. It makes a big impact on the perception of the team.
As with all team roles, we don’t always understand the intricacies of everyone’s work, or how closely that work fits together. Having a consistent usage of branding, tone of voice, writing style (and so on) can be thought of as a ‘nice to have’ rather than essential, especially if you’re short on time. Something that really helps with this is to remind colleagues of the perspective of our audience: you never know when one activity or opportunity or web page could be the very first interaction with the Association - that person won’t know which staff and/or student team put something together, it will just be their first impression of the Association overall. I find this point of view is generally received positively.
At React & Share, we’re obsessed with measuring our efforts to prove our worth to internal stakeholders - what measurements do you think comms teams should be presenting to their board?
At the Association we collect and analyse data from all our platforms on a monthly basis, which then gets shared with the wider team. We also track KPIs which are used to measure progress against our strategic objectives.
I think, rather than one specific measurement, it’s how the measurement is analysed and explained that is the key thing. For example, a large number of visitors to a page is great but by showing how the visitors found the page, if they’re a repeat visitor to the site or what type of content they interacted with next, we can provide evidence-based recommendations to the team which will result in an even better experience for our audience.
What advice would you give to those at the start of their career?
Listen and learn! Listen to the feedback you receive from your audience and your team, and learn from both positive and negative situations. No one is perfect and you will make mistakes. You will also create meaningful connections with your audience that have the potential, depending on your field, to make a real difference. It’s a journey.
It’s important to learn how to remove your ego from the content creation process too. Remember that you’re creating content for a brand - it’s not for you! Creative work can be such a personal thing, but it’s key to be able to take feedback and act on it without taking the feedback personally, or as commentary on your creative skills.
Finally, I’d say to learn to look after your work/life balance. The very nature of communications work means that you can feel pressure to be always on and available, or always immediately up to speed on the latest trend or platform. You don’t. Look after yourself.
What do you think the secret of success is when working in communications?
A steady source of caffeine, mostly…
For me, authenticity is definitely a key to success - both in how you conduct yourself professionally and also in your approach to communicating with your audience. To aim for perfection isn’t often productive or particularly meaningful, but authenticity is a realistic and powerful goal.
