Epigram

As President of Epigram's business team, I ran the business team for the University of Bristol’s independent student newspaper. Although I became quite familiar with the paper's operations in my prior two years on the business team, everything was subject to change during my final year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fortunately, my experience and interest in User Experience work provided me with a useful toolkit to navigate the uncertainty of the year. Design thinking principles helped guide my leadership decisions and encourage our team to opt for shorter timescale sprints of activity.

Early in the year, core areas of our operations as a paper have already been impacted by the virus. Namely in our print and distribution, which has knock-on effects for our ads and sales capabilities. Identifying and monitoring the constraints and problems that we face this year is the first step for every function of our team. Once everyone understands the constraints and our goals, we innovate our practices and systems together to ensure we achieve our objectives as responsibly as possible. One major strategic objective for us this year is to continue to bolster our digital offerings for both our readership and advertisers to ensure that we remain relevant even when students are unable to be on campus.

During the pandemic, we've also noticed our role as a student paper becoming more important for our readership, not only as a trusted source of information for students and staff but for our vital role to maintain the dialogue between all stakeholders of the University, especially students.

Pandemic aside, I've also found it useful to incorporate some of the UX processes I'm familiar with into our workflow. For our marketing team, who in the past managed social media competitions and events, we're introducing a new important responsibility: to survey our readership, identify experience gaps, and work with our other functions to ensure that our readership are receiving the experience they expect.

This is also being applied to our advertisers. For the first time this year, we're collecting feedback from our clients and using that feedback to adapt our offerings and hopefully build a relationship that promotes repeat business. Developing sustainable relationships with local clients is particularly useful, in my eyes, as there are many mutually beneficial opportunities between ourselves and them.

There's a lot to still develop as the year goes ahead, but so far I've already learned the values of clear and inclusive communication, diversity of perspectives for innovation, and how data-driven decision-making can be efficient in an ever-changing environment.