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Communications Team

Membership of the Communication Service Team :

Emily Ranken, CST Leader

Claudia Mickelson, CST

Niamh Kelly

Abigail Hine

Justin Adams

Steven Lanou

Hao Nguyen

Paula Duffy

Hans Richter

Marilyn Hallock

Communication Service Team Meeting
2/18/09

1.  Earth Day – Earth day at MIT is April 23.  The theme this year is still being determined, but will be something like “Sustainability in Action” or “Greening MIT”.  There are going to have a somewhat different set up this year, organizing around 5 major themes which are Recycling, Transporation, Energy Conservation, Green Purchasing, and Green Food Service.  Probably, the EHS table will go with the Energy Conservation area.

2.  Newsletter distribution.  The winter newsletter was distributed yesterday.  There are copies next to the reception area in a box.  If you are going to campus, grab a bunch and leave them somewhere.  However, there are not that many extra copies, so let Emily know when the supply is running low.

3.  April Newsletter – Articles are due to Paula (pkduffy@mit.edu) by March 6.  We would like the newsletter to be available the week of Earth Week, or the week before.)
            Article on unknowns (Already writing by Heidi)
            Sustainability Article (Niamh)
            Building 66 Steam Leak (Susan Leite(Edited version of submittal to Faculty Newsletter))
            Nanomaterial update (Marlilyn)
            Vernal pools and amphibians-written with a green twist (Tim and Emily)
            Earth Day articles – Paula with something from the National Earth Day Scene
            Best Practices – Niamh to inquire and investigate practices related to Sustainability.  Abby to write-up practice in Student Life around Universal Waste Management.
            Update on Green Ambassador Program- if there is something of interest.
            Article on SOP updates, mentioning any new SOPs and/or significant changes to SOPs.
            Inspection system update – Gerry.
            An article on the OSHA Log for MIT, with summary of injury statistics/categories for the year.  (Bret Dyer).
            Puzzle with a little survey – Abby and Emily
           
4.  Budget.  Members of CST have participated in budget discussion, and said the process involved providing ideas and recommendations that went to Lou and Bill V for consideration.  There were a couple of ground rules.  The proposals could not result in a reduction of services the office provides, and they could not involve cost shifting. 

The budget discussion resulted in some cost cutting proposals that impact the CST.  The first involved printed newsletters.  The second involved giveaways.  And finally, the third involved consulting support, since the office is reducing/eliminating consulting services provided to us. This means the newsletter editor, Paula, will not have a contract with us as of July 1.  However, the editor will be provided some extra work this year to help offset this loss for us and for her, writing articles in advance for next years newsletters.  Also, it does not preclude the possibility of special arrangements for her support if things improve, or we have a special need.   It has been proposed to eliminate the printed copies of the newsletter.  The total cost of FY 08 newsletters(four newsletters) was $27,281.15, with $7,724.55 of that being printing.  Other costs are what we pay to Flanders and Associates for Layout, and what we pay for editing. 

We will not have a budget for giveaways.  Consequently, we did order a number of giveaways in the fall.  Currently we have a supply of reuseable shopping bags, pens, mechanical pencils, stapleless staplers, and computer screen and keyboard cleaners.  If you want to see them, stop by Emily’s office.

At the CST meeting we did discuss some options regarding newsletter, such as reducing number of issues with printed copies, instead of eliminating them altogether.  Printed copies are useful for distributing at events fair, earth day, etc.

A survey to determine if people are reading our newsletter was suggested.  Also, a counter on the newsletter website was suggested.

5.  Newsletter website – some improvements have been made to the newsletter website.  Now the newsletters are listed with a list of topics covered.  Also, more links to the newsletter have been added to some of the web pages from the EHS Office, and to the topic index page, where the newsletter is now an item in the permanent list of topics that you always see.  There is a hope to add it to the EHS-MS web page as well.  These changes were made to improve visibility of the newsletter, and in anticipation that we may be eliminating the printed copies.

At the meeting, it was suggested a counter be added to the newsletter web page.  Emily said she asked Hao about that, and he said he thought there already was a counter on the page.
It was also suggested a link to the newsletter be put in the gray area on the Training page.

To view the newsletter web page, go to:  http://web.mit.edu/environment/ehs/newsletter.html

If you have other ideas for enhancing this page, please let Emily know.

6.  Communication Plan.  Emily asked if anyone had input for the communication plan, which she plans to finalize by the end of the month.  No one had anything specific.  There was a discussion regarding communication of incidents to the EHS office staff.  People did express a concern that we do not have a good mechanism for alerting members of EHS if there has been a major incident in a timely way, and for providing a summary of incidents and lessons learned.  Incident reports are to be filed on the M:drive in the Emergency Response folder, and people can review those if they remember that. 

Use of EHSNet for this purpose was discussed, and team members thought that would be a good idea as a start.  Still, there needs to be a mechanism for someone putting together the information and putting it up on the web page, and then for alerting the office something of interest is posted there.  Bret was going to talk with Peter about some possibilities.

7.  Other communication tools-should we explore some other possibilities?
            Short videos
            Email Announcements
            Brief messages on electronic bulletin boards
            Social media

There is a project in the works to update the EHS Office web page using a new software program called DRUPAL.  This program will make it easier to update web pages.  It also has some nice feature for incorporating short videos, pictures, etc. on the website. 

There was a brief discussion of making more use of other communication tools available at MIT, though some do have a cost.  We should think about short, simple videos. 

We also talked about having a Facebook page, but the group was not too sure about that, and a blog, but there was a concern that it could become a negative thing if people use it to write negative posts about the office.

8.  Go Around.  Abby presented information that in light of the recent flu death, there is a communication action in the works about flu, handwashing, getting adequate sleep, etc., in the Department for Student Life.  This effort is in conjunction with MIT Medical.  Niamh suggested that it would be good if the Day Care Center was provided information.  It was noted that MIT Medical is out of the flu vaccine, in part because they had a very successful effort this fall in delivering flu shots.

No other items were presented at the go around.

 

 
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