Contributed by Christopher Spencer
Assistant Director for Marketing and Strategic Communications
Administrative Services

Three University Housing staff attended the recent ACUHO-I Business Operations Conference last month in Scottsdale, Ariz. The event was held from Oct. 4-6.

In attendance were Billy Blount, director of Administrative Services; Paul Soulsby, director for Business and Information Technology; and Christopher Spencer, assistant director for marketing and strategic communications.

Billy and Christopher presented a talk called “Leveraging Success: Mapping and Measuring Your Message” during the last day of the conference.

The presentation had the following description:

“How well is your messaging strategy working? Learn how the University of Arkansas struggled and met the challenge of 3,000 new off-campus beds in the past three years. We managed to maintain full capacity despite this challenge! This presentation focuses on determining your messaging strategy, investigating all communication channels and measuring your success. Translate this success into leverage for your team when next year’s budget is decided.”

The event was well attended for being the last session of the conference with about 20 attendees.

“We got some good feedback about it,” Christopher said. “Folks seemed engaged in it and we got a lot of positive written evaluations afterward. The only negative we got was that they wanted to see more of our creative work. Next year, we’ll bring more of that to the show.”