Folio: A case study in brand journalism

In the never-ending quest to tell the University of Alberta’s story to as wide an audience as possible and further enhance its reputation, the current authors developed and created a brand journalism site, folio.ca, that is independent yet connected to the University of Alberta. The objectives were simple: increase the number of people who read stories about University of Alberta and obtain increased media coverage from legacy and new media outlets. This paper explains the rationale for the move in what is an everchanging media landscape in which consumers get their news from an ever-increasing number of media outlets and discusses the steps taken to develop the website and obtain buy-in from all corners of the academy. The paper provides details of the implementation plan, which included four foundational pillars — inverted pyramid structure to tell our news stories, change management plan, designing the news site and developing an editorial mandate. The paper describes how the results far exceeded the current authors’ expectations. Every key performance indicator identified — including most notably, page views and media mentions — grew dramatically. In Folio’s first year, page views increased 86.6 per cent while external media mentions rose by 24.5 per cent. Furthermore, insights gained from the Folio audience, compared to the audience who visit the university’s institutional website, suggested a broadening of the audience who read stories about the University of Alberta. The results demonstrate that if a university builds a communication tool that uses the traditional techniques of journalism to tell stories that draw on the expertise of the institution and is carefully targeted to an external audience, it can develop an audience and increase the pickup of its stories by external media outlets, resulting in a broadening of its ability to tell its story to the public.