Film & TV Department, University of Greenwich

COVID shook up everything in 2020, and universities were no exception. So when the chance came up to support University of Greenwich tutors running the Film & Television degrees (Bachelor and Masters) and promoting the work of their talented students, as a Greenwich alumnus I didn't hesitate.

How do you keep students engaged during a pandemic?

The workload rested squarely on three areas: student engagement, communications, and marketing.

As the screens became our classrooms, I poured all my energy into learning how to navigate this new environment, whilst of course doing my job, which was keeping students engaged and informed. It's an open secret that lockdown felt like a Tagada ride, so keeping the spirit alive—for both current and prospective students—became key. I launched an online screening room to showcase student work, and relied on social media and internal channels to engage our community of students and alumni, share industry updates, and celebrate victories. It wasn't easy to stand firm, but we adapted: together with a colleague I trained, and guided by senior tutors, we found and shared stories of alumni and other industry professionals who had made it through their own challenges.

To our surprise, our social media following grew month on month without a single dip. How much genuine engagement and trust our efforts generated was hard to quantify, but I can say with 100% certainty that we encouraged all students to progress onto the next year or graduate, helping to prevent student dropout.

Outwardly, our PR efforts were instrumental in putting the Film & TV programmes on the map, and the overwhelmingly positive reception from educators pointed to the Greenwich FTV brand climbing as a leader in film education.

A new hub for students

In addition to the above, I created a dedicated hub on the students' e-learning platform, centralising all information on facilities, kit hire, and modules for each programme, covering both undergraduate and postgraduate. Students went from having to scour the platform to find what they needed, or pester their tutors after hours, to having a single place to go for 90% of their questions.

A core element of the hub was a pack of COVID-prevention resources that a colleague and I had spent months putting together, going so far as to distil national safety guidelines into student-friendly slides. The COVID production pack told students everything they needed to know about how to make films during the pandemic, how to do it safely, and where to find support. This and the hub were both massive undertakings, but the payoff was huge: educators loved them (it saved them time and prevented them from wrongly advising students on things they didn't know), and no student caught COVID while working on productions. I call that a success.

Other milestones

• Co-wrote PR articles and internal updates with the Greenwich Communications Team. We opted for the kind of steady, unglamorous storytelling that keeps a community engaged, and together these helped nudge the Film & TV brand into a stronger position in what is a genuinely brutal landscape for film education.
• Took the FTV programmes' Instagram—which had gone quiet for two years—and brought it back to life, then kept it growing +10% month-on-month for a full year.
• When our content started outgrowing our process, I built a publishing workspace from scratch to run the whole pipeline.
• Since I left, the university has appointed a dedicated staff member to look after the Greenwich accounts. Honestly, that might be the best reward I could've asked for. I built those comms efforts from zero resources and next to no budget, so seeing the work valued enough to warrant its own hire feels like proof that it mattered; and it's lovely to see the accounts now posting regularly, keeping it unpretentious, and having an audience that shows up excited.
• Championed student films at festivals, getting several productions in front of juries. Of these, we had a handful of nominations, and one win which made us all proud.
• Planned and co-hosted some fun (and some less fun but still interesting) events too, including an entire season of free film screenings (aptly titled Lockdown Cinema), as well as webinars, masterclasses, and panels.