City College of San Francisco - California Competes

THEME VI
The College’s weekly newsletter, City Currents, produced and distributed by the Office of Information
and Marketing, keeps the College community informed of departmental activities and opportunities, as
well as employee accomplishments. Official announcements and essential District information are also
disseminated through City Currents. Seventeen issues of the newsletter are produced per semester and disseminated
to our nearly 3,000 College employees, and made available online. The award-winning student
newspaper, The Guardsman, the primary means of student-to-student communication, is produced weekly
by students in the Journalism Department.
Special targeted communications. The College is ever cognizant of its responsibility to keep the surrounding
communities informed of important changes or opportunities that will have an impact on its current
and future students. An example of such a communication effort was the mailing of 60,000 postcards to
residents surrounding the Mission Campus informing them, in English and in Spanish, of the relocation
of the campus to a temporary site. A successful large-scale communication campaign which exemplified
the College’s commitment to student access was a media blitz, “Shake the Financial Aid Tree,” promoting
the availability of financial aid to offset recent tuition increases that had been imposed on the California
community college system by the Governor’s Office. Anticipating that the increase in tuition and fees to
$26 per unit would deter enrollment of new and continuing students already reeling from another fairly
recent tuition hike from $11 to $18 per unit, the Office of Public Information and Marketing collaborated
with the Financial Aid Office to develop a media campaign of print, radio, and television ads. The TV
spots featured CCSF student financial award recipients, against the backdrop of the Diego Rivera mural,
delivering the message that “Financial aid is available to help you to achieve your education goals” in
English, Spanish, Russian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Tagalog. The TV spots aired 1,200 times
over a six-month period on cable and Asian and Hispanic television stations broadcasting to the entire
Bay Area. In addition, postcards announcing financial aid availability and featuring celebrated graduates
of CCSF were mailed to 380,000 households in San Francisco, South San Francisco, and Daly City. The
advertising campaign appears to have been successful, as the Director of Financial Aid reports that the
number of financial aid awards in the 2004-05 academic year has increased by 20.5 percent thus far.
Web communications. The CCSF website has become the primary gateway to communications among
the constituencies within our College and with the public, local and world-wide. In addition to serving as
an informational resource regarding educational programs, student services, course outlines, etc., the website
provides the College community with access to specific reports generated by the Office of Research,
Planning and Grants, such as results of student and employee surveys, College Performance Indicators,
and the Decision Support-System (DSS). The DSS provides regularly updated information regarding
demand for courses (course section enrollment), productivity data such as weekly student contact hours,
student FTES (on which state funding is based), characteristics of enrollees (age, educational goal, GPA),
and success rates in sections. 1 Some departments and offices have come to rely on this data in their
programmatic decision making. This evidence now allows all departments to evaluate the viability of
their offerings realistically; in addition, and, perhaps inadvertently, the availability of such candid data
has helped to foster an environment of trust in open sharing of information.
The CCSF website has sparked a creativity which had only been glimpsed previously through the proliferation
of brochures, posters, and flyers overflowing racks and covering walls. This creativity shows itself in
individual program and department websites. Some of the multi-program departments have skillfully
designed their websites to guide current and potential students to program descriptions that are sometimes
difficult to locate in the Catalog. The Business Department website, for example, presents its array of credit
and noncredit programs, such as Accounting, Legal Assisting, Real Estate, Small Business, International
1 Not all data are updated with the same frequency.
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