Specialized Courses
Corporate Communication is a diverse practice with many specialties often divided based on the stakeholders involved: employees that are internal publics and key to an organization’s success, investors that often invest in for-profit corporations or donors to not-for-profit organizations. The specialized courses are designed to expose students to the variety of work handled by corporate communication practitioners.
Employees are an organization’s primary reputation managers and brand ambassadors in their social and business networks. An organization must therefore strategically manage communication and relationships with this critical internal public. This course highlights the importance of internal communication in building a strong organizational culture, developing an internal communication strategy that aligns with the overall public relations strategy, and the vehicles (traditional, digital and social) available to practitioners to implement two-way internal communication, etc.
With the onslaught of social media, business conduct is under more public scrutiny than ever before. Simultaneously, organizations are increasingly aware of their part in influencing the public policy and legislation conversation. As policies create both threats and opportunities for corporations, it is critical to incorporate this into the company’s communication strategy. In this course, students define an issue and learn various strategies (environmental scanning, organizational positioning, platform building, assessing periodic pulse checks, etc.) to identify and plan for emerging issues and manage them ethically through their life cycle.
This course helps students perceive the components of risk and understand the prevalent principles of crisis management such as risk/benefit analysis, managing fear and uncertainty, and responding to crises. Using case studies and practical applications, students investigate the media and channels available to conduct two-way symmetrical communication with an organization's publics in a crisis.
This course introduces students to communication in the digital and social landscape. It distinguishes between digital and traditional/analog media and demonstrates how a strong strategic communication plan must include elements of both to be effective. It helps students identify the advantages, shortcomings and risks of digital communication and the significance of evaluating and reporting the impact of digital communication. Students are also introduced to standard digital vehicles used in organizational communication.
This course supplements the strategic approach of the core courses by introducing the techniques practitioners can use to implement strategy. This ground-level, hands-on course has students examine persuasive communication in written, verbal and digital formats including white papers, position statements, opinion pieces, senior executive speeches and emails, newsletters, magazines, blogs, news releases (traditional and social), media conferences, issues advertising, etc. It explores the evolving nature of the tools and platforms available to communication practitioners, as well as the converging of techniques across communication, advertising and marketing.
