Internal Communications Committee (ICC) Report to the 2017 AGM
Membership
Gabriel Icho (McGill '18) – Chair, Kerri-Lyn Chong (UBC '18), Huei Cheung (Manitoba '19), Laurie St-Pierre (Laval '18), Monique Bouchard (Secretariat) – staff support
Activities
Since the last AGM, the ICC has completed the following tasks:
- Create FCDSA promotional video
- Update and distribute the FCDSA PowerPoint presentation
- Explored options to organize a Facebook contest
Results
The Facebook page continues to gain an audience and has 833 “likes” as of June 4, 2017 (compared to 576 in June 2016), and the number of people engaged has significantly increased. The majority of posts between June 1, 2016 and June 4, 2017 reached an audience of 500 members, with the most popular post gaining 10,470 reaches in May 2017. Posts with the highest reaches seem to be about individual students and their accomplishments.
All new students in the member associations have been given the FCDSA PowerPoint presentation in the beginning of the year. The FCDSA promotional video has a total of 2,034 views; of the total 1:02 minute length, the average watch time was 10 seconds, with 16% of viewers playing the entirety of the video.
Summary and Reflection
We have been shown in the past two years that opening the website development and content creation to schools has a great impact on increasing the number of people who visit our website. Continuing to involve dental students in the creation process is vital to increasing our visibility and shows students that we value their input and ideas as an organization.
The inter-committee work between the ICC and ECC is also a great addition to our website with many more opportunities for partnerships together that are possible.
Developing the website content and the process of adding this content to the website is a time-consuming process. As of right now, the Secretariat is the only person trained to edit the website itself even though one of the ECC members was given editing privileges. As this is a large amount of work for the Secretariat, it would be extremely beneficial to train several members of the ECC to use Squarespace to alleviate some of the work of the Secretariat as the updating and upkeep of the website is far too much work for one person!
While there continues to be a significant amount of work to do regarding the development of the website, a lot of progress has been made and the ECC looks forward to feedback, suggestions and new ideas regarding the website!
The ECC would like to thank the FCDSA Secretariat for her incredible insight and hard work!
Next Steps
- Increase student participation in posting to the Facebook page by setting up a system for identifying external sources for postings and post submission by students.
- Reinstate posts featuring committee members and student leaders on the Facebook page to increase visibility.
- Regularly acknowledge committee members who have contributed outstanding work to the FCDSA.
- Work with the finance committee to organize contests on the Facebook page to increase its visibility.
- Conduct survey among member associations to identify issues that FCDSA can potentially tackle.
Proposed Resolutions
There are no proposed resolutions to be brought forward to Council.