Outreach and Communications Cluster

*Weekly Meetings Thursdays 3pm via Zoom*

The Outreach Cluster focuses on recruitment of new STEM Routes participants, including graduate students, faculty, staff, and undergraduates. This involves emailing, advertising, and cultivating strong relationships with many different groups on campus. 

The Communications Cluster ensures that we keep members of the public informed about our efforts, programs, and mission. We have a variety of different channels through which we communicate. We care deeply about transparency in everything we do!

General Responsibilities:

• Outreach:
  • Advertising: develop clever and engagin adversitising materials, such as flyers, email campaigns, and speaking engagements. You'll disseminate these messages and welcome new participants. Different audiences require different messaging and also participate in varying capacities (for example, undergraduates may attend workshops while graduate students may want to serve as lab mentors).
  • Social Events: we recognize that a crucial aspect of our work is the community we cultivate. We want to host at least monthly social events to allow our members to mingle and get to know one another. In the past, we have hosted a Pi Day celebration with pizza and pies, a bookclub, art nights, happy hours, and our annual Summer Bine `n' Brew. We would love to see innovative new ways to engage the community!
  • Tabling: CU Boulder hosts many events to recruit participants for student organizations (such as the Involvement Fair, Engineering Immersion, or CU Unity Fest). In this role, you'll register STEM Routes for a booth, develop our recruitment materials or activities, and coordinate STEM Routes members to help table the booth.
• Communications:
  • Weekly Newsletter & E-mail Management: This cluster is in charge of sending out a weekly newsletter to our listserv of nearly 600 members of the campus community. In addition to this newsletter, you'll also be the face of the STEM Routes e-mail where we receive questions and request for support from people all over campus.
  • Graphic Design: STEM Routes has its own Adobe subscription for the Communications cluster to use in developing advertising materials, STEM Routes merch, and PowerPoints. Our current graphic designers can train you in this skill so you can learn how to generate engaging and informative STEM Routes graphics.
  • Website Management: Keep our website up to date and accessible. Share upcoming events, student promotions, our mission statement, and open research positions on campus. Get creative with ways to build our content into the website so students can receive support without having to attend all of our events.
  • Advertising: Work with other cluster to advertise our upcoming events. This also involves the management of a campus-wide network of listserves and newsletters to which we can submit our events.
  • Social Media: Develop a strong STEM Routes presence on Instagram and Twitter to engage with the larger CU campus and external programs that do similar work as us. Promote our students on Instagram, share tips for success in STEM and research, and celebrate holidays and identities.

UpLift Responsibilites:

• Outreach:
  • Recruit labs who are willing to take an undergraduate through the UpLift program. Work with departments and demartment chairs to encourage faculty participation as part of the tenure service requirements. 
  • Recruit undergraduate students who have no experience with research to apply for the UpLift program.
  • Coordinate application reading (everyone can get involved, regardless of their cluster!) and scoring to select our next UpLift cohort.
  • The final deliverable for the UpLift program is a project presentation in any format students prefer (oral presentation, poster podcast, YouTube video, art project, etc). This cluster is responsible for coordinating a showcase of these final projects as well as hosting a celebration for the UpLift cohort and their labs.
• Communications:
  • Though we did not use Canvas this year, we'd like to use Canvas to support our UpLift students throughout the year. This will contain information about previous workshops, deliverables, and program expectations.
  • Send lab mentors regular updates about how to support their students (with help from the Mentorship Cluster), reminders about deliverables, and follow up with recent faculty participants to secure future participation.
  • Promote UpLift students on the website and social media; celebrate the amazing work our students have done!