ETH Zurich, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ranks amongst the most prestigious science, technology, engineering, and mathematics universities in the world. In addition to being a national centre of excellence, it also has an important role as a meeting point bridging the scientific community, the public, and the world of industry. This means the quality of its communications and publishing has to be top-notch, necessitating an effective content planning tool for corporate communications teams

Managing Complex Communications with a Content Planning Tool

Simon Zogg, head of Communication Channels at ETH Zurich, explains how ETH’s team stays on top of their communications, and the role played by Kordiam in their publishing.

"Our main task is to show the Swiss public what they are getting for their tax money, and to secure support from both the public and the politicians. In addition, we want to inform companies about what’s going on here, which is crucial for partnerships and for financing. We want to show that there are concrete business benefits to what we are doing. Thirdly, we exist to give scientists a platform for their work and a showcase for their results."

The sheer number of scientists and educators working at ETH brings with it issues of scale: “We have more than 500 professors researching in different areas and of course they have a lot to say, so where some other companies have a job finding content for publishing, one of our main challenges is having too much of it.”

That wealth of content means that the communications team has an important role as a filter, selecting what content for what platforms: "We are gatekeepers, and in our editorial meetings we decide if a story is relevant for a larger public, or for example only for the scientific community. We use Kordiam to handle all this and facilitate the discussion of what and where to publish."

Coordinating Across Multiple Channels with Kordiam

Where to publish is another element of the decision-making process - not least because of the number of communication channels ETH manages.

“We have our own website and news channel. This is the base camp from which we feed most of our other channels with about one long and detailed news item on the website every day, which then feeds, for example, social media including Facebook, two Twitter accounts [one English, one German], or LinkedIn."

"In print, we have a quarterly magazine going out to an audience of 66,000, as well as a quarterly internal magazine for 16,000 readers. We also have several events for which we plan content, and we handle media relations ourselves, including placing stories in newspapers, so we have a broad variety of work.”

In total, the comms team amounts to about thirty people who use Kordiam as a way of organizing all the topics coming in on a daily basis. A daily editorial meeting at 9 am is used to discuss what should be published and on which channel(s), and the rule is simply that everyone has to enter their proposed topics in Kordiam for it to be discussed.

"Without Kordiam we wouldn’t be able to handle the number of topics, the number of channels, and the number of people working on them. If it’s not in Kordiam it doesn’t make it to the editorial meeting."

This rule is particularly important since many workers are part-time, so they may not be personally present at the editorial meeting. Hence the insistence that topics be entered into Kordiam so they are considered and can be actioned later through side meetings.

“We use Kordiam to define the tasks and assign names but we don’t actually put the content into it - just the meta-information about the topic.” Kordiam is used as part of a suite of tools including Adobe Experience Manager for the website and the social media tool Falcon.

“We have been using Kordiam for about two and a half years now. We began using it as part of a reorganization including our own newsroom and we quickly realised that in order to be able to work in a newsroom setting we needed this tool.”

Managing Change with Kordiam 

“In the beginning, there was a lot of change and we realised we needed clear guidelines and a common understanding of what, when, and how to fill in Kordiam so we set those rules. In fact, we created two pages of guidelines that have to be updated when we have new channels or formats, but one and a half years on from that we now have a good working process that has remained largely unchanged.”

Ideas Pipeline

The result is what Zogg calls a constant ‘ideas pipeline’ for our communication channels. “Using a planning and decision tool as we do, I think Kordiam is great.” Which, coming from one of the great idea production facilities in Europe, is a pretty neat description.