Steel yourselves, Residence Life colleagues near and far. When asked to think about a practice or tradition that residence life departments need to let go of, it didn’t take me long to determine my hottest of takes. What’s something that takes an inordinate amount of time, asks staff to employ skills that we don’t hire for, and is incredibly difficult to assess?
RA bulletin boards.
This blog series features different writers responding to the prompt, “What is one practice ResLife departments need to let go of?”
Now, I know there are some staff out there who are reading this and thinking, “But I love getting creative and making a beautiful bulletin board!” When you see a bulletin board that has been lovingly and thoughtfully designed, crafted, and assembled, I admit it can stop you in your tracks. But I believe these results are the exception rather than the rule. You also might object, “How else are we going to get information in front of all of our students? They don’t read emails or flyers!” Honestly, I’m not convinced they read bulletin boards either.
There are two major components of a successful bulletin board: strong aesthetic design and quality content with a call to action. The skills needed to produce high quality design and content are not part of most RA job descriptions. And please don’t think I’m ragging on our student staff! We don’t hire them to be artists or graphic designers. Certainly there are some students with incredible creativity and craftsmanship, but this is always just a happy fortuity. We also don’t hire them to be content experts at this stage in their burgeoning careers. But we frequently ask them to deliver on these skillsets and then feel frustrated when the final result is less than stellar.
Even in programs using a residential curriculum model where the content is provided by professional staff and might be more reliable or thorough, bulletin boards still have a low ceiling for impact. In this era of micro-information drops and fast-paced media, what student is really going to stand in front of a bulletin board and engage thoughtfully with the posted material? And how would we know if they did? Adding a QR code and tracking scans doesn’t tell us anything about whether our learning outcomes are being accomplished. Sure, you can point the student to a survey or quiz, but I’m skeptical we’ll ever see enough data here to feel confident in this strategy.
So, what’s the solution? Rip down the cork and leave our hallways and vestibules sterile, gray, and boring? Don’t hear what I’m not saying! There are still ways to activate these spaces without asking student staff to sink dozens of hours into a scrapbooking project that they may not have any interest in in the first place.
At the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I work, we have shifted to a “billboard” approach for our in-hall bulletin boards. We worked with our Student Life marketing team to produce four designs highlighting key campus resources: student orgs, academic tutoring centers, career services, and university police. The messages are short, succinct, and include a call to action with a QR code linking to the resource. The design scheme is brightly colored and consistent (but not identical) across each of the four designs. We printed them in a 30” x 40” format on a heavy-duty styrene material that will hold up over time but can still be easily pinned to a cork board. Now, instead of asking RAs to build their own
boards, we’ve created a library of “billboards” for each hall where posters can be rotated among the floors on a monthly basis. Since our initial set of four designs, we’ve added five more designs highlighting our divisional curriculum learning goals. This means that we have enough unique designs to change the board on any given floor once a month without repeating in an academic year.
If you ask me about how we assess these, I’ll be honest with you and say: we don’t, really. We might check in on the number of times the QR codes have been scanned, but at the end of the day, we’re directing our energy toward higher impact strategies. We want the information posted in our halls to be accurate, eye-catching, and relevant. I think we’ve accomplished that.
Once upon a time, our RAs might spend up to ten hours painstakingly assembling a bulletin board. Now they get those ten hours back to do the stuff we really care about: meeting with residents and building community. I haven’t heard one student say they wish they had that task back in their portfolio. In my book, “practices to let go of” include anything that stands in the way between us and creating the most engaging and relationship-oriented environment for our residents.
