Founded in 1889 in New York City, Barnard College is a private liberal arts college that provides future-ready education to students who want to adapt and shift with a changing world.
Laura Downs-Buma, Digital Communications Director at Barnard College, sat down to talk with us about how the college gets the word out about news and events using social media, and why it’s so important to bring their social content to the homepage of their website.
“Curator has helped us achieve our goal of adding social media content to our website. It adds a lot of appeal and we’re happy that the trend has caught on with our other departments.”
- Laura Downs-Buma, Digital Communications Director at Barnard College
Barnard’s goals for an interesting social presence
“Our initial goal was just to have a more interesting social presence on our website than the traditional follow links, just a way to keep it a little bit more dynamic and interesting,” explains Laura, who says that the college’s website development agency recommended that they use Curator to add their social media posts to their website.
The digital team wanted a simple way to add fresh imagery to the website that portrayed their values of diversity and curiosity. When their website developer mentioned that Curator uses images posted to their social media accounts to pull content, the digital team was excited about the prospect of making better use of pre-approved posts.
How Barnard uses Curator to bring their social media posts into their website
Laura set up the Curator account, and logs in once in a while to adjust the mix of posts. The Curator account is set to automatically approve all posts from their main social media accounts. “We’re selective with what we post to social media, so anything that goes to our accounts is safe for our website” says Laura. That’s why we chose to let everything be sent straight to our site with no required action on our part.”
Why other departments utilize Curator too
After Barnard’s digital communications team added Curator to the college’s homepage, other departments noticed it on the site, and wanted something similar for their main pages too. Laura says, “Many other departments loved it and wanted a way to spread the word about their news and updates too, so now we have several departments that each have their own Curator accounts that pull content from their separate social media pages and add it to the department’s website page.”
While some departments wanted to use Curator to add more personality and visual content to their pages, others were more concerned with getting their updates viewed by more members of their community.
Let’s take a look at how some of the other departments are making use of Curator to add lively, on-brand content to their most important website pages.
Admissions
The Admissions department features alumni and current students to show off their successes and inspiring work to prospective students. The university itself is also among the best MBA admissions consulting lists.
Student Life
Student Life posts updates about upcoming virtual events and special interest clubs.
Residential Life
The Residential Life department, which helps match students with the perfect housing option, showcases students, events, and housing resources.
“Curator has helped us achieve our goal of adding social media content to our website,” says Laura. “It adds a lot of appeal and we’re happy that the trend has caught on with our other departments.”