Friday, November 6, 2009

Tarrant County College lets blog double as a public forum


Yesterday, the Tarrant County College (TCC) Office of Public Relations & Marketing shared a blog post requesting public feedback on a new chancellor. The post* read in part:
The TCC Board of Trustees has begun the search process for a new chancellor, the chief executive officer of the College. Later this month, board members will conduct a workshop to draw up and approve a job description, and they would very much like your input.

What qualifications, experience, characteristics, and attributes do you think the next TCC chancellor should have? Please give us your comments, and/or react to the comments of others.

Why this works
I can tell you from experience that sometimes it's difficult to get feedback from your community if you work for a public educational institution (unless you've angered them in some way) on important matters. Just look at voter turn-out and you can see how (dis)engaged people are when they get distracted.

What TCC has done here for their community is provided another channel for voices to be heard. They could still hold public meetings in addition to the board meetings as ways to get thoughts, but using the blog post is a smart and efficient way for TCC to collect the thoughts on the "qualifications, experience, characteristics, and attributes" for a new chancellor. Here's hoping their community steps up to the plate and delivers views that will help shape a profile to fit their leadership needs.

*As an added bonus for education PR folks, TCC provides a link to their social media regulations in the post.