Revamping Marketing Communications at the ALCF
Building strategy, brand, approach, and processes through teamwork and user engagement at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF).
Yearly reports targeting DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research
BACKGROUND
In 2013, The ALCF was preparing to launch the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world and needed to scale up operations and support. I joined the ALCF to lead communications. Prior to my transition, ALCF communications was primarily driven by “fires” and needs of staff instead of driven by strategy and plans.
APPROACH
Building a team of storytellers and UX writers. Identifying our audience. Understanding ours users. Establishing strategic messages. Creating channels. Developing brand recognition.
Building a team. Everyone on our team has a unique skill set that we leverage and interlace through every project we do. We work collaboratively, fostering an environment that encourages all members to take pride in the outcome. Because of this shared ethos, we maintain consistently high-quality deliverables despite competing deadlines and quick turnarounds. Our writers craft narratives that resonate with our stakeholders, and have learned to guide our users through onboarding.
Identifying our audience. Our key stakeholders are ASCR Program Managers (DOE’s Office of Science), senior Argonne Leadership, staff experts, current and prospective facility users, and the general public.
Understanding our users. Understanding our users is sometimes challenging for us since we aren’t supercomputer users. However, through asking a lot of questions and listening intently, we’ve learned to anticipate their needs and advocate on their behalf.
Establishing strategic messages. We’ve refined our messaging over the years to reflect the initiatives and goals of the ALCF.
Creating channels. We’ve created several electronic communication channels to funnel information to our current and potential users and our stakeholders, including direct e-mails, custom-tailored e-mail messages via scripts, social media postings, and ALCF website postings.
Developing brand recognition. Working alongside a Chicago design firm, we have built a distinct brand that still lives within Argonne’s visual identity.
RESULTS
CORE Messaging
Our messages were developed to align with the goals of the DOE’s Office of the Advanced Scientific Computing Research, our funding agency, as well as our home base at Argonne National Laboratory. Our strategic areas of focus are:
enabling science breakthroughs in science and engineering,
co-developing and operating leadership-class supercomputers,
our in house-expertise of computational and computer scientists,
being a leader in the HPC community, and,
contributing to outreach activities aimed at growing the HPC user community and workforce of tomorrow.
STORYTELLING
The ALCF communications team is responsible for communicating the value of our computing facility to the scientific community and capturing the scientific results of our HPC users and staff.
Our stories are published on our website through social media and in our monthly newsletter. Last year, we published 40+ articles which resulted in 132 media hits. Each media hit reached an average of 492,274 viewers.
YearLy REPORTS and Marketing COllateral
We produce two yearly reports as a public archive of our high-impact science results and our facility success stories within the given year. The reports are distributed to key constituents in ASCR, the DOE Site Office, Argonne OTD, the Computing, Environment and Life Science Directorate, ALCF Management, select users, and staff.
This project requires us to understand the future direction of the facility and build new narratives to reflect the path forward. We deliver key points within the documents that provide our audience with easily digestible takeaway messages.
campaigns and Communications PLANS
A large part of what we do is to promote ALCF’s open calls for proposals, training opportunities, and new computing resources that come online. Once our calls close and training workshops are over, we follow-up with award announcements and workshop recaps to share with our community of users and our stakeholders.
We also plan and provide all communications for the rollout of our new supercomputers, services, and user applications.