The past October members’ meeting saw the election of our new edcom President, Gilles Nakhle. Professor and International Academic Projects Manager at Sup de Pub, Paris, Gilles has developed an exciting programme for his 2-year tenure.
Challenge. Collect. Collaborate. Connect.
These are the 4 C’s that sum up the programme presented during the last Board meeting on 17 February to grow and improve the EDCOM network. These points are based on the main challenges EDCOM is currently facing, the first and main of which is a lack of image and awareness. While this would be the first objective, others would include recruiting new members as well as encouraging existing members to be more involved and become EDCOM advocates.
Each with its own dedicated Task Force, these are the 4 C’s proposed as the line to be used for all future EDCOM communications:
- Challenge: to introduce new competitions for current members. As Ad Venture Student Competition continues to be a huge success, the Challenge Task Force would have the goal to come up with new ideas for competitions. Challenges could also extend to academics talents and students talents by creating initiatives such as TEDx talks. Other initiatives such as The Talent Academy could be the new community.
- Collect: to develop a European research around the Gen Z, conducted by students and sponsored by clients or research agencies. Some of the members have manifested their interest to this action and could contribute to form the Collect Task Force. Furthermore, this could help recruiting members that are well-known for research, all the while keeping new information centralised with very frequent collaborations.
- Collaborate: to reinforce and expand the current network, encouraging mobility through collaborations between universities around topics on a monthly basis, as well as strengthening existing collaborations with partners (EACA, D&AD, Cannes Festival of Creativity, WARC) and extending new ideas of partnerships in other areas such as European institutions, charity entities and NGOs. A Collaborate Task Force is a necessity!
- Connect: to communicate more efficiently and consistently internally and externally and most importantly using new digital marcomms. The Connect Task Force would be the most important one, aiming to decide the most efficient platform to communicate both internally and with stakeholders, such as students (through the use of socials like Tik Tok and Instagram). Having a platform where information about all members’ and partners’ projects to never miss out on chances to collaborate.
With this new programme and task forces, the new President hopes to make EDCOM the reference in communication education and beyond on a European level, develop a positive inspiring image and encourage new members and partnerships and strengthen pre-existing relationships between member universities ensuring the creation of communities and EDCOM advocates. What an exciting 2-years ahead!