California Community Colleges
California Community Colleges
Three years into launching California Community College’s Vision for Success, and with substantial progress made toward the ambitious goals it set forth, leaders in the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office recognized a need to update its communications approach to celebrate wins and map out the road ahead. Spitfire partnered with the college system to develop a strategy, messaging, and tools to help Chancellor’s Office staff communicate effectively about the Vision in a way that helps foster culture change, shifting away from a compliance mindset toward one of strategic risk-taking.
To begin our engagement, Spitfire created a comprehensive message platform and campaign plan to introduce the new messaging and communications approach inspired by the Vision’s commitment to continuous improvement and strategic risk-taking. We created a rich toolkit of materials, including refreshed messaging, outreach materials, an infographic, and the Confronting Crisis and Advancing Equity video.
To help staff in the Chancellors' Office utilize the toolkit and apply strategic communications to advance student success programs across 116 colleges, we created a training curriculum that combined best practices for strategic communications with an introduction to the specific framework we developed for the California Community Colleges. This communications academy strengthened the communications capacity of the Chancellor’s Office staff, allowing them to serve as even better messengers for the Vision and other major initiatives.
The partnership between Spitfire and the California Community Colleges has since deepened and we have collaborated to develop strategy, training, and multimedia support on multiple major initiatives, including the DEI Task Force and the Guided Pathways framework for student-centered practices. For the DEI work, we created a communication plan and tools, including the system’s DEI Awareness Month video. We are now in the process of rolling out messaging through a similar training process that builds on our work in support of the Vision.