Development and External Relations Update

The Development and External Relations office UPDATE is a monthly summary of activities in the section and is published for your general information. If you have questions, please contact Jim Goit or call at (902) 893-7950

• External Relations
  •  Jim and Bernie met with Justice on moving contracts forward for affinity marketing program. It is getting closer to reality.
  • Jim attended conference and meeting of NSIA renewing contacts with alumni and agricultural professionals.
  • The position of Director of AgriTECH park was created and advertised. This role has been capably filled by Laurie Sandeson for the past three years but recent growth at the part required the arrangement to be formalized.
  • Jim met with the Make Way for Youth committee of CORDA. This initiative sets up opportunity for youth to find employment in the Colchester region and tries so get those that have left to come back.
  • Jim and David Fullerton attended the NovaKnowledge summit in Halifax. They presented their annual report card, this year highlighting labour needs in the future. NSAC will have both significant challenges and opportunities in the future.
• Marketing
  • Online and TV advertising started running as part of the 06-07 marketing campaign.
  • A recording crew visited campus to gather footage that will be added to askVIC.ca.
  • Posters, bookmarks and a banner were produced to help support the recruitment efforts for the Bachelor of Technology in Applied Science program.
  • A photo shoot was held to gather images for use in promotional material for the Diploma in Enterprise Management program.
  • A first year student survey was conducted. The results of this survey will be used to guide the 07-08 marketing campaign.
  • Discussions around marketing efforts specific to graduate programs have begun.
  • Stephanie Rogers and Lucy Uberoi met with a supplier to explore new promotional merchandise options.
• Communications and Alumni
  • Jim worked with David Fullerton and Rob Gordon to interview a research communications specialist. This position will help communicate the good work that is going on in research at NSAC.
• 61 alumni records were Found/changed this month
• This is the second month for the Alumni profiles on the web site in support of the Embrace your World campaign. Alumni are responding and interested in participating
• Two alumni receptions were held - one in Newfoundland and one in Charlottetown
• Work is ongoing on the Winter edition of the Agricola News
• Media relations around Glen Sampson, Steve Clark, B. Tech Open House,
• Stephanie organized promotional photos for several upcoming profiles on Research and Discovery and NS Open to the World.
• Stephanie participated as a new member on the Departments Wellness Committee
• Development and Fund Raising
  • The final steps were taken to complete agreements for the Canadian Dairy Commission Scholarship and the new Chartwell's graduate student Scholarships. These will be available for Phd students when they arrive.
  • We got a first look at the inside of the new poultry building and began the process of designing the donor recognition display. Effort was put into collecting outstanding pledges.
  • Arrangements were made for the semi annual meeting of the Foundation in December. It is necessary to complete a lot of background work in preparation for the meeting.
  • Jim worked with Bruce Rathgaber and Derek Anderson as well as industry representatives to complete pledges to the poultry building.
  • The Annual Appeal letter was delayed by over a month getting into the mail due to problems at the Queens Printer. As a result the numbers of donations are down for this time of the year. Hopefully we can catch up at least in part in the next few months.

• Website
  • Mike met with Sharon at the AgriTech park to refresh her knowledge of webediting. Content should be added to the new AgriTech site on a regular basis and relaunch should be within the next few weeks.
  • A new webbased CMS solution is being tested by Mike. This could possibly replace the inside.nsac.ca website, or even help us create a new database driven news&information site. Learning the new open-source software has taken up a lot of Mike's time this month.
  • Webstats are still not functioning correctly. Ever since upgrading to the newest version of the software the NSAC stats have not been reporting. Mike has submitted a problem report to the company and hopefully it will be back on track soon. **UPDATE** On Nov.29th the problem was found and fixed. Unfortunately this means that November 2006 stats will have to be estimated as well.
  • Mike has been investigating ways to increase our website visibility on various search engines to get our page-ranking up.
  • The Alumni e-News template has been changed to a more columnar format with slightly smaller fonts and links to the articles instead of writing the entire article in the newsletter.
  • Mike has also integrated ColdFusion into our Alumni e-News. It is now technically possible to email out our monthly newsletter with a click of a button instead of the ~10 steps we used before. We should be able to use this with our next e-News.