How We Work With You
Whether it be overhauling a website, creating new promotional materials, preparing you for a news media interview, or a range of other services provided by the Division of Marketing & Communications, our process is designed to deliver the best results in the shortest amount of time.
The success of any marketing/communications effort depends on key factors including:
- Knowing the audience and speaking to it on their terms
- Understanding primary, secondary and tertiary goals
- The ability to define and measure success
- Ensuring the availability of needed resources
The Marketing & Communications staff members are your partners in every project we undertake. Our style is highly collaborative: we work closely together as a team and with our WPI clients. We have high expectations for ourselves and our processes are designed to steer us toward an end result that works for you, your audiences, and the larger WPI community. No two projects are the same, and we are flexible in our approach, but you can expect your project to be structured along these lines.
Steps in a Typical Project
Initial Meeting: Here our team will meet with a primary contact, or contacts, from your team. We will discuss the audience(s), the key messages, and generally get to know you and your needs, as well as explain what to expect from us going forward.
Prioritizing and Scheduling: Depending on the scope and nature of the project you may be asked to develop a list of features you’d like to have in your project. For a website, for example, we’d want to know exactly how much new content is needed and whether existing technologies will work for you. From this work, we will be able to develop a schedule and accurate estimate of resources required.
Budget Approval: For projects that require additional funding (usually these are print-based publications, but not always), we will let you know early in the process the costs you will incur for writing, editing, design, printing, and so on. We will need to get your signoff on your budget before we proceed.
Content Creation and Design: Working from the previously approved schedule, we work with you in creating the content and design for your project. In some cases we may be doing the bulk of the work at this stage, in other cases we will be relying on your work.
Reviews and Approvals: In all cases, we will ensure that communication and approvals remain open and on schedule.
Printing/Publishing/Shipping/Go-Live: And you’re done. Maybe. In many cases, especially with web projects, we will break your project into a series of clearly defined steps, or “sprints.” For print projects, we will bid out the projects to our in-house and external printers, and will work with you to ensure your materials are printed and delivered on time and within your budget.
See the right column of this page for more on the Web Ops. process.
