Publicizing Your Graduate Interest Group
The Simpson Center is eager to help spread the word about your funded project’s activities! Read on to discover how the Simpson Center can help publicize your project through a variety of communications channels.
Webpage
Online Events Calendar & Weekly Emails
Social Media
Webpage
We will create a singular “project page” for your project on the Simpson Center website (www.simpsoncenter.org). This page may include a summary/description, an image, and other project details that you provide. It can also link to a larger website, if you currently have or plan to build one. You can review a sample project page to get a sense of what your page might look like and what kind of information may be featured.
To create your project webpage, we will need the following:
- Project Title (if different than the title on your proposal)
- Brief summary or description of your project (suggested length: 150-350 words)
When preparing a summary of your project, keep in mind that this page will function as the online presence or “face” for your project, so create a description that is concise, scannable, and inviting. This description should be less of a rationale for support and more of an overview of what your project seeks to investigate.In other words, think of it more as an open invitation for others to collaborate with you and your project, rather than a packaged proposal description that is submitted for review. Some questions that might help: What’s your project’s area of inquiry? What questions do you hope to address? What critical trajectory do you envision developing over the course of the year? What types of activities will take place through your project in 2012/13? For example, will you host visiting lecturers, reading groups, workshops, discussions, colloquia, or symposia? And, lastly, what forms of collaboration are you interested in—do you plan to collaborate with other campus working groups or community partners?
- An image
Images aren’t required, but they do make a difference. Feel free to send 2-3 and we can see which one fits best in the space. Preferred size is at least 456 x 245 pixels.
- Project Year
Please specify if this is your project’s first, second, or third year of Simpson Center funding. Please also list the year and name of previous Simpson Center-funded projects that led to you current project so that we can be sure to sync archived webpages with your current work.
- Primary contacts
Please send the names and departmental affiliations of all project collaborators. Also, let us know which of them may be contacted by email through the website should visitors want to get in touch with them—and at which email address they’d prefer to be contacted.
- Five keywords
What keywords anchor your project and allow you to both articulate your work to a field of scholarship and bridge your work to other, more crossdisciplinary contexts? See our list of keywords we’ve provided, but don’t hesitate to suggest your own if you feel they better reflect your project.
- If you would like a Url shortcut that could be used to quickly refer others to your project page (i.e., simpsoncenter.org/women-who-rock)
- Other communications platforms that visitors can use to engage with your project, if you have them.
Does your project have a pre-existing website that you’d like us to link to? A blog? A Facebook page or Twitter account? A listserv? Let us know and we can include links to these on your project page!
To request updates to your project webpage once it has launched, please email your edits to Chelsea Schlievert, the Simpson Center’s Communications and External Affairs Specialist, at cschliev@uw.edu. Please allow for a two-week turnaround time.
Online Events Calendar & Weekly Emails
The Simpson Center hosts an events calendar on our website. If your project plans to hold events that are free and open to a wider audience (a guest speaker, a film screening, a keynote lecture, a workshop, etc.), we would be happy to highlight these on our web calendar. To add to our calendar:
- Go to www.simpsoncenter.org
- Click “Submit an Event” at the top of the page
- Fill out the form – you will be asked to provide the event’s date, time, place, title, speaker (if there is one), event type, a brief description, and your name and email (in case we have questions).
- When you’ve entered your information, hit “submit.”
Online calendar entries will feed directly to related project pages – this way, your project page will contain up-to-date information regarding events your group has scheduled. Just make sure that the name of your project (as it appears on your project page – see 1 above) is included in the calendar description and the Simpson Center website will automatically pick up and promote your event on your project page.
We also distribute a weekly events email, and the events that are included on it are pulled directly from our online calendar. Please note that—for events to be included in our weekly email—our deadline for calendar submission is 10 days before the event.
Social Media
Did you know that the Simpson Center uses social media to circulate information about opportunities and events taking place through the Center? If you are active in social media and don’t already, be sure to “like” or “follow” the Simpson Center. And “share” and “tag” us with news about your project so that we can repost, retweet, and share!]
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