ResEdChat Ep 106: Leveraging Newsletter Campaigns to Foster and Assess Student Learning with Crys Arellano-Fryer

Dustin Ramsdell:
Welcome back, everyone, to another wonderful episode of Roompact’s ResEdChat podcast. If you’re new to the show, every episode, we feature a variety of topics of interest to higher education professionals who work in and with university housing, Residence Life, Residential Education, whatever you might call it.
But if you’re following along with this year’s episode so far, we’ve brought on a lot of folks that are kind of looking at assessing the curricular approach, how we’re sort of implementing it, and how we’re tangibly living it out every day in Residence Life departments all across the country.
So this episode is in that vein, a little bit of a different angle. But we’re really excited to be able to bring very tactical episodes about the ways that folks are implementing the curricular approach at their institution. So we will get right to it. Crys, if you want to introduce yourself and give a brief introduction to your background and how you got to be where you are today.

Crys Arellano-Fryer:
Excellent. Thank you for having me on. It’s a pleasure to be here. My name is Crys Arellano-Fryer. My pronouns are they/them. I’m the assistant director for Residential Education at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. As the assistant director, I am tasked with overseeing the implementation and assessment of our curricular approach, which we call the Compass. I also work with our special interest housing, so food co-op, substance-free, non-traditional age students and affinity housing, and I supervise two amazing area directors.
I also went to Smith. I’m class of 2009, where I studied Art History and African Studies and was a house community advisor. That’s what we call resident advisors. And I actually come out of religious life, not Residence Life. After graduating from Smith, I worked as… with the Christian Fellowship on campus under the Center for Religious and Spiritual Life before I pursued a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary, where I concentrated in women theology and gender.
Post-Princeton, I was a high school, college, and hospital chaplain, and in the fall of 2019, so just before 2020, I returned to Smith as an area director with Residence Life. Then approximately one year ago, so I’m coming up on my year month… on my year marker, I was given the promotion to assistant director. So my… Even through religious life into Residence Life, my passion has always been college students, their development, kind of their holistic well-being, and then planning curriculum for them has always been sort of an outreach of that.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Amazing and such an interesting background. I’m tempted to be like, “Oh, I would’ve ask [inaudible 00:02:44].” Yeah, yeah, that’s great stuff. Yeah, and I think just that you sort of acknowledge that common thread between these very unique and different roles that you’ve had.
But I think that’s, I know, something that we’ve started to explore a little bit on this show is the idea, like a curricular approach, sort of segueing from that, is a very… it is and can be depending on where institutions are at a very multidisciplinary, cross-functional kind of thing.
I think it did have a lot of deep roots in residential life, obviously, which is a very big part of the student experience at any institution, but seeing how it’s expanded and evolved and whether that’s in very nuanced ways within how it shows up in Residence Life or the other aspects and areas of student affairs and student support and student engagement and all that kind of stuff.
So what we’re going to be talking about today, though, just to give kind of a quick plug too, this is something that I believe you presented on about at the recent ICA Conference, the Institute for Curricular Approach. So, obviously, we’ve talked about that event a lot on this show.
We’ll continue to because I think it is just a great opportunity for folks to be talking about things like about what we’re talking about on this show of how folks are coming at the curricular approach, living it out, testing hypotheses of how best to create really supportive learning environments for their students and their residents, and also how they’re assessing that learning, all that good stuff.
So I know what we’re going to be talking about here today, though, specifically, is a newsletter campaign. So I will not get too ahead of myself, presuming or assuming anything. Can you explain a bit about this newsletter campaign and how it came to be?

Crys Arellano-Fryer:
Sure. So, our curricular approach, we started in January 2020, obviously not knowing how much the world and college was going to change in the coming months. We met with Keith Edwards and developed our learning goals and outcomes, and then identified some strategies that we wanted to use on campus. One of the proposed strategies was a newsletter. Other departments had them. Particularly once we went remote, we were looking for more ways to engage students, and any kind of self-directed learning or remote avenues were what we were looking at.
We also, as a department, wanted to be more sustainable. As the department that proliferates a lot of information, we would often receive posters that would go up in the houses, and it’s sort of an effort to get away from more print advertising. We wanted to be able to give more digital as a sustainability effort. My predecessor, Dana Olivo, who’s amazing, started the newsletter campaign and did what we still use for the formatting, and introduced some of the initial components. Our components of the newsletter, so what we kind of work with for each, it’s a weekly campaign.
It comes out on Mondays. We have a feature every week, so a different kind of main column. Those are roughly some sort of skill or capacity building. We do interdepartmental partnerships, so highlighting other offices on campus or highlighting a process that the department is doing, so like Room Draw or student staff selection. Our features, in particular, are what connects to our learning goals. So that’s where they really start to flesh out some of the curriculum that we’re doing on campus. So we do a health and wellness resources newsletter, which connects to our goal of integrating wellness into regular practice.
We do a newsletter on roommate conflict, which connects to our engagement and wanting students to be able to demonstrate multiple methods to address conflict. So that’s sort of the main body. And then, some other sections that I have introduced this year are an engagement question. So this is where we’re starting to do some assessment with the newsletter. So it’s a question that has to do with the theme of the feature. So campus resources, for example, we would ask them, “What resources do you access or hope to access on campus?” That becomes useful information I think, for other departments on campus to see, okay, students really access academic services.
They really want access to the Schacht Center. And so I think it helps us and be good partners and good stewards with information that we are gaining and to be able to partner with other departments in that way. We have what’s called Compass Corner, which is what else is going on in the Compass that week. So it’s sort of an advertising avenue to let students know what meetings are happening and conversations that are going on in bulletin boards and that sort of thing. We include our social media content, so cross-promoting social media with the newsletter.
Information sharing. So one of the interesting… As the newsletter has grown in recognition, other departments have been sending us more content that they want shared out. So we always have a section of flyers and different what’s going on campus, different programs or events, and then a chance to partner with us on social media. So that’s sort of how the campaign itself is set up and then what I work on every week.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. I really appreciate that sort of full explanation. So I’m hoping and imagining folks are sort of seeing this in their mind’s eye of obviously just such a robust resource there that’s coming out on a consistent basis. People can kind of rely on and expect it and that it is one of those things where I feel like email is having its renaissance and stuff.
I’ve seen a lot of folks offering workshops and just really acknowledging that obviously it’s such a ubiquitous utility in the digital age. Obviously, we all need email to be able to do everything else that we do. We choose whatever social media platforms we might prefer and how we show up in those spaces. But email is so fundamental, and if you’re kind of wholeheartedly embracing it and really optimizing what you’re sending, what you’re putting in it, and stuff like that, it’s like you can get some pretty good results.
And so I think that that sort of acknowledgment and just respecting the media. You’re really trying to put something together that is full of a lot of relevant information and presented in a user-friendly way and everything. So I think that’s great because I think all the stuff you’re listing off, it’s like, yeah, there’s usually things people are like, “Oh, I don’t know what’s going on campus. Oh, I don’t even know these things exist.”
And if you’re just sort of serving it up consistently, directly to them, because students, I think we’ve seen, they get just so much noise, so many emails just kind of haphazardly from a lot of random… It’s just not intentional. It’s not curated. It’s not thoughtfully done. It’s like, “Oh, I want you to know about this thing. It is not something that you may necessarily need to know, but I want to tell you.”
And that’s been a dichotomy I’ve seen, folks sort of be like, that’s the first of step of you try to rein in some emails is like, “Is this something I want to say or is this something students need to hear?” Because the idea of just if everybody has this sort of power to email everybody, it’s like we’ve seen that it often, I think, gets abused. So it’s like, all right, let’s try to… if you want to send something, let’s try to pull it together.
And from what you’re saying too, do it in a way where you’re bringing stuff together on relevant topics, outcomes, learning goals versus it being, I’m sure, other folks do… may do something similar, but they are just kind of cobbling things together ad hoc as it maybe comes to them or as they think about it versus it being like, “Okay, this week’s edition is about this topic, and here’s stuff that’s relevant to that.”
And maybe there are just more evergreen sections, by the sounds of it. But yeah, so I think it’s a really interesting approach. And I guess as sort of a follow-up, just from what you’re saying, seeming such a robust email, and just trying to imagine the design, are you using a particular tool to create and send and track the engagement with the emails that you’re sending out?

Crys Arellano-Fryer:
Yeah. So we currently use MailChimp. We have discussed moving towards a college platform, but that’s the platform we’re currently using. It’s, I find, very user-friendly, and it does let you track open data, click-throughs. Last year, I believe our open rate was around 88%, so pretty healthy. And so it let us track that as well and then keeps it all organized. I can go back and reference newsletters from years ago and see what content has been used.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. And I’ll say just my day job that I do in addition to this is in the marketing world. And it is kind of tragic because, again, just the noise that we all live with in our inboxes and everything, industry standards for open rates and click-throughs is pretty low. So the idea of most people, nearly all of the people who get this email on a regular basis open it at least.
And that’s obviously there’s so much good information that you can just get through scrolling. And it’s like, “Yes, we would hope that they click on something because that means, oh, they’re interested in a resource or interested in an event or whatever else.” But yeah, I mean, if you’re getting above 50% for something like that, I was like, that’s incredible.
So that’s really great to hear. And I think that idea of recognizing the possibilities of the potential of email as a medium and then utilizing a little bit more of a sophisticated tool. It’s like, I think that investment is really going to pay off just through the idea of you are more likely to get people to engage with what you’re sending, and also, you can verify that.
It’s going to look better and be better. And we can also know for sure like, yep, versus just being like, “I hope people read this mass email I’m just sending from Gmail or Outlook,” whatever. It’s like, “Oh yeah, we know more people read this one than last week’s, and we could probably discern why.” And “Oh, a lot of people clicked on.”

Crys Arellano-Fryer:
We know Room Draw will be the most popular newsletter because they want their rooms.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Right. Right. So I think that idea knowing, “Yeah, okay, there’s always going to be a popular email. What can you do? Maybe present some other good information there.” Or, “Oh my gosh, a lot of people clicked on information about tutoring during midterms.”
Or you can sort of verify some anecdotal presumptions and be like, “Yes, that sort of assumption we had is correct, or there’s other surprising stuff, and we can follow the lead because I think that’s something… Just made me think of another thing, kind of a mantra that I’ve sort of reflected on a lot is the idea that students will say a lot of things about what they want or don’t want or whatever else, but you can’t argue with behavior as a form of feedback or sort of that thing where it’s just like, “Okay, during this time more students were doing this or not doing something, they opened their emails, or they didn’t because, oh, this is sort of a busy time, whatever.”
And they might be like, “Oh, I want this information or whatever.” But that idea of the reality of people living out their day-to-day lives and the behavior that we see of what they choose to do or don’t do or whatever else, that’s such a powerful form of feedback in addition to obviously just formal channels of, “Hey, tell us about this or tell us what you’re thinking about things.” So I will not get too carried away though and stay focused here. This is great stuff. So I want to talk a bit more about what you’re doing and what has the impact been on your residents. What sort of feedback have you gotten just about this effort writ large?

Crys Arellano-Fryer:
As I said, the engagement questions have been… that’s been one of my favorite parts of the newsletter this year. Each… Almost every newsletter has either an informative question, so what did you learn from this newsletter? So asking them a targeted question. Like, “Do you know what office to go to for X?” Or asking a more broad question like, “What are you most looking forward to in your house community this year?” That one, the answers were beautiful, and it was encouraging.
And just for me, as someone who works to build house community, knowing what students are looking for and knowing what inspires them and what they respond to, I think is really helpful, not just for the newsletter but for our work in general. Like, “What is it that really sticks with you about house community?” So we have both the ongoing qualitative… or sorry, quantitative, which is open rate, click-through. And then sort of the qualitative are these surveys this year.
One thing we do, which I probably would recommend, is the survey winner gets a 30 dollar prize from the bookstore. So when in doubt, reward them. It goes a long way. And so, kind of selecting those winners and getting to know them has also been a very fun aspect of my job the last month or so. I also really enjoy… I work with a small student staff, and I really enjoy getting their feedback as well. So getting some focus group feedback on the features. The first time I did a feedback session, one of my students was like, “I’ve definitely read at least one.”
And I was like, “We love to hear it, love to hear it.” So getting their feedback. The two biggest pieces of feedback that I’m sort of have been toying with, one is a student mentioned that some of the features were really geared towards first years, so how to access campus resources, where are the health and wellness resources on campus? It was very much as if you didn’t know any of these offices. And so they wanted to know, “Can you give a 2.0 of this newsletter of like, ‘Juniors and seniors, this is what you should look for from this office.'”
And so that was really helpful feedback from them about thinking developmentally and how students… how upper-class students who may have seen some of the topics before, how are they going to then engage and what developmentally is the next step for them. And the other piece of feedback we got was actually having students write some newsletters. So we’re trying that out for the first time this semester. We have an amazing student who did work with End Rape on Campus and wanted to do a newsletter about healthy relationships.
And so working with her to develop a feature and then a resource for students to use to evaluate if they’re in healthy relationships. And if they’re not in healthy relationships, what are some resources for… that are available to them in those relationships and in those situations. So yeah, both kind of the quantitative and the qualitative is what we’ve been looking at.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. I think that I mean because it segues perfectly to my next question. It’s just sort of advice. That idea of certainly bringing students in, I think, is really great, and that just adjustments too. I think, if you were to really go all in on this approach, if you could just segment it and literally send even just adapted emails to different populations, different buildings even.
If you’re like, “Okay, we’re bring in some part-time student workers or other people.” If you’re really getting folks to fully embrace this approach, just even within the Residence Life context, you could really start to really target audiences in that way versus, “Okay, all residential students get the same email.” It’s like, yeah, but I guess, in a perfect world, you could sort of split it by underclassmen, upperclassmen, or whatever. You could try to start targeting things more specifically that way. But yeah, I think it’s really good stuff.
I mean, I think, I don’t know if there’s other pieces of advice that you’ve gotten based on feedback or other advice just generally on the journey, but because I think any of these things is definitely… I feel like for me it’s one of those things where you do have to start somewhere and start kind of iterating and that idea of like, “Well, we’re sending it every week. It can get better every week.” The idea we’re going to hopefully just bring feedback in. And I’ve seen, I mean, definitely a lot of emails embracing that sort of philosophy, I think, is presenting curated information about a targeted topic of, I know, one is just a general daily students access email.
Folks in the space know from inside higher ed they’ve been doing that within the past couple of years, and they always have a prompt or a question to really invite engagement. Otherwise, it is like, “Well, if you’re interested in the story, you’re going to click read more.” Versus, “We want an avenue, a channel to… We’re curious about something, maybe about a story we’re writing or whatever else.” There’s always just going to be this prompt of bring people in, answer a question, or to give them feedback. So I think it is just a smart way to be kind of building not just an audience necessarily, but building a community.
And that’s what you’re getting at too of just you want that environment where it feels like there can be a back and forth in a sense of, even if it’s just like, “Okay, this is a formal channel to give my feedback, but then I’m eventually very seeing that reflected in what is being served up here, just generally what these offices are doing because we’ve had some of these opportunities to get feedback and everything.” But yeah, I guess any other advice, whether it’s very technical or otherwise about just this effort because I think it’s just a great effort, I guess, and just a great impact that you’ve been able to achieve. So any other advice you might share with folks?

Crys Arellano-Fryer:
The overall composition to be strategic about when you’re working on the newsletter and when it’s sort of just flowing, so I work on an amazing team who help… who all write the features. So it’s not just my voice that’s getting out there. So every week, we’ll have a different either an area director or assistant director or our director writing the feature, and we do the actual composing either in December or May. So, at points where we’re having fewer student meetings, the students are in finals or reading period.
So trying to be strategic about those times that are having more downtime and having folks do deeper thinking at times of the semester that are less busy instead of asking them to do deep thinking in the middle of Room Draw about a newsletter, for example. That’s not being strategic. I set aside time every week to work on the newsletter. It’s a small thing, but as we all know, our time, it gets taken up with meetings and concerns and issues that come out of nowhere that we could not have predicted come across our desks.
So having that set aside time that I know is coming that I’m going to be working on this. So then, I also don’t feel like I’m working on it all the time. I know I have set aside time. Use the gifts of your departments. One of my gifts is editing, so I feel very comfortable editing the features and collecting the information and whatnot. One of my skills is not necessarily design. So again, shout out to Dana, who designed sort of the original template, which is beautiful. So I really appreciated somewhat like her, who has different gifts than I do, and being able to partner together.
Seek out input, especially from students. Having those small group discussions about, “Do you find this helpful? Is this something you would read? Is it something you would tell your residents about?” I think having those focus groups has also helped me know… it’s helped me know if this is being effective or not. And then some other, just as a self-directed strategy. It helps engage residents who may otherwise not be engaged, may not want to go to a community meeting, may not want to have an intentional conversation, but do want to read and do want to kind of engage otherwise.
We’ve also found, depending on what your strategic plan is and our strategic plan, two of the findings were students wanted more practical life skills and students wanted more access and support from professional staff. So actually, the newsletter has responded to both of those. In the practical life skills, we have newsletters on navigating microaggressions or creating healthy boundaries.
And so, giving folks more of those tangible, practical skills that they’re looking for, the newsletter is a way to assist with that. And then with wanting more connection to professional staff. Just getting the professional staff’s voice out there through the features I think has also been a great way to sort of connect the larger Smith community with our department.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. I think just to sort of bold and circle and underline something that you said that really resonates with me a lot is not overlooking the value of asynchronous digital engagement in any community really, but especially students where they could earnestly be like, “Well, I’d love to come out to community meetings or this, that, the other, but I’ve got a busy life. I work, and I’ve got a lot of stuff going on. But if I can stay updated on what’s going on and maybe I can pop into whatever events are going on, but just know what resources are available to me, just have this as a consistent opportunity to read when I have time and engage with.”
So there’s other manifestations of that sort of, I think, meaningful engagement that can happen on the student’s own time. If you had Slack or Discord or something, some people could be like, “Oh, I’m like a power user on there because it’s like I can choose when I show up and how I show up.” Versus being like, “Well, you got to be here at seven o’clock for the meeting or the event or whatever, and if not, then you miss it.” So I think, yeah, it is a great way to honor the folks… those folks in the community and everything and like [inaudible 00:27:29] said, I mean, just a great vehicle to bring in so many different voices, student, staff, faculty.
So I think not being too sort of restrictive or protective or precious about, “Well, it could only be me. I must do everything. It’s my thing. I have to have my fingerprints all over this.” It’s like you’ve sort of acknowledged, “I would love to have help because, yeah, I do not have gifts to do all the things, so let me certainly just give this space to others and also just utilize others’ gifts to make it the best that it can be.” So, as we wind down, I appreciate your sharing of all the great advice, but are there any resources that you’d like to share on this that have been helpful to you, like books, articles, otherwise, anything that you’d like to share as we wind down here?

Crys Arellano-Fryer:
Resources that I would recommend are really connecting with what’s on your campus, so connecting with campus partners, a newsletter is a great way to do that. We’ve also connected with our College Relations Department who will, when we have a new feature, will look over the feature, edit it for style, and content, and give us feedback in that way, which is really helpful. I’ve been doing some more reading and then working on accessibility in newsletters. So a resource would be connecting with whatever your accessibility office is.
So things like having descriptive links. So instead of saying, “Click here,” it tells you where you’re actually going if you’re… in case you’re using an E-reader. Using closed captioning, using color contrast. So looking at sort of making our newsletters as accessible as possible. And then another great… the best resources, your students, your actual audience. So, sharing with your student, staff, including it in your presentations, having students write features, any way to engage them further, I think they’re our best resource.

Dustin Ramsdell:
Yeah. I mean, that’s a great way to look at this is that you’ve got your neighbors and your colleagues and folks around you that are going to be very capable of helping with a lot of the different details. And I appreciate the acknowledgment of the accessibility piece there too, because I think that is a point where I would say that idea of starting somewhere, and I think tools like Mailchimp and everything else anymore are thankfully embedding a lot of this in its functionality. So what I was tempted to say, and I wanted to couch it in that first, is with starting somewhere, don’t be prohibited by a lot of those different details because it’s like anymore, the tools will take care of you.
And then even just that idea of it may be that you have to at least get the prototype built, and then you could send it over to your colleagues and be like, “Hey, is there any advice or recommendations you might make around color contrast and alt image texts or all these sort of things.” You can be very specific about checking over your shoulder to verify those things versus, and I can certainly empathize with this, it could feel very overwhelming to be like, “Well, how am I going to design it? Is it going to be accessible? What stuff am I going to be put in there?” And it’s like, ask your students, ask your colleagues, whatever. There’s going to be people.
I think if you have a clear vision for what you’re wanting to achieve, you can make it very clear and likely, but fairly low lift ask to just provide support, provide guidance, provide even just reassurance or affirmation of just like, “Well, this is what I’m thinking. This makes sense. Should I just go in this direction?” And hopefully, gives you a little wind in your sails to get moving forward because I think this is such a great [inaudible 00:31:23] to what we’ve been covering in [inaudible 00:31:26] the other episodes around doing great intentional conversations, the big picture, strategic approaches to living out curriculum in the halls every day.
So yeah, I think doing something like this, in addition to all those other efforts, I think is going to be really powerful, and appreciate you giving some time to highlight it and talk through all the details of how you’ve achieved it. And I’ve always certainly connect with everything that you talked about here in this episode. But yeah, just really appreciate your time.

Crys Arellano-Fryer:
Thank you so much.