A Strategic Communication Model for Sustainable Initiatives in Higher Education Institutions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Communicating sustainable initiatives in higher education institutions presents a challenge, given that few to no universities possess or maintain a strategic communication plan that addresses the need to share this information effectively to stakeholders (students, faculty, staff, administrators, and community advocates). Drawing on secondary and primary research across universities in three countries, each representing distinct regional and national orientations -Canada, Ecuador, and Ukrainethe authors explain a sustainability/environmental communication model designed to be flexible enough for universal application, while providing strategic guidelines tailored to higher education institutions in each of its four described steps. The strategic communication model is informed by the critical synthesis of secondary research into two main areas of literature: (1) strategic communication theory and best practice; and (2) the organizational dissemination of sustainability initiatives, particularly within post-secondary institutions. Such secondary literature informs, and is in turn contributed to by, the authors' primary research that was conducted, which consists of three parts: (1) discourse analysis of relevant institutional documents and promotional materials; (2) interviews about current practices in sustainability-related communication, conducted with higher education sustainability administrators; and, (3) focus groups with students, examining participant awareness and assessment of their institution's sustainability communications. Based on such study, the authors advance a strategic communication model for sustainable initiatives, which comprises a four-step process based on a series of eight questions, with the first step providing comprehensive explication of a seven-component strategic planning framework that scales downward from the most abstract considerations to concrete tactics. In summary, the primary-and secondary-research data suggests that most universities, even if they implement sustainability initiatives or officially incorporate environmentalism into their institutional identity statements (mission, vision, etc.), fail to communicate these actions informatively and persuasively, thereby establishing widespread need for this paper's offered strategic guidance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".