Communication Plan of the Higher Technical School of Engineering

1. Background of the Plan

The Higher Technical School of Engineering (hereinafter ETSi or "the School") of the University of Seville is one of the largest higher engineering centers in Spain, with over 6,000 students, 20 degree programs including undergraduate degrees, double degrees (PARS), master's degrees, and doctoral programs, and a university community exceeding 6,500 people. This size, combined with the diverse audiences that ETSi must reach—students, faculty, PTGAS staff, alumni, companies, prospective students, and society in general—makes the Center's communication both a strategic element and a task of considerable complexity.

A distinguishing feature of the School compared to other centers within the University of Seville is that a significant portion of its communication tools—the Notice Board manager, the applications supporting the Administration, the management system for the information screens distributed throughout the building, and the monitoring systems for the underlying infrastructure—have been developed in-house by the ETSI's Computing Center (CdC). This in-house technical capability is a rare strength within the University and should be a cornerstone of this Plan.

This comprehensive Communication Plan for the ETSi has a dual objective: firstly, to organize and document the set of communication tools available to the Center; secondly, to establish a set of objectives, lines of action, responsible parties and deadlines that will allow the progressive improvement of the ETSi's communication with all its audiences, within the limitations of personnel and budget available to the Center. 

2. ETSi communication tools

2.1. Institutional website (etsi.us.es)

The ETSi website is the main access point to information about the Center, both for the university community and for the wider public. The current site is the result of a complete redesign project, finished in the summer of 2023, developed by an external company based on the previous version of the site; it is built on Drupal and organizes its content into nine main sections (The School, Studies, R&D&I, Services, Announcements and News, Students, Prospective Students, Companies/Internships, and International/Mobility).

This content serves a wide range of audiences: students can find timetables, exam schedules, regulations, and administrative procedures; prospective students and their families can find information on degree programs and open house events; companies can access information on academic chairs and job and internship opportunities; the research community can find information on research groups, projects, and scientific output; and governing bodies and external evaluators can access committee documentation, minutes, and the Quality Assurance System required for degree accreditation. The website also includes several integrated applications for specific operational tasks, such as uploading exams or managing course information for each degree program.

A particularly noteworthy function of the website is fulfilling the public information obligations required by the Quality Assurance System (QAS) for official degrees at the University of Seville. In this regard, the website permanently publishes the ETSi Strategic Plan, the quality documentation for the Center and its degree programs, the composition of the various committees (including the Center and Degree Quality Assurance Committee), and the minutes of these committee meetings. This information, updated by the Deputy Director of Quality, allows external evaluators, accreditation agencies, and the university community itself to verify the Center's regulatory compliance and constitutes one of the cornerstones of transparency at the ETSi.

A notable improvement incorporated in 2024 is an online automatic translation plugin, which has worked very well and has appreciably increased the international visibility of the Centre, in an area —that of mobility and international students— that is especially sensitive to the availability of content in other languages.

Content updates are now naturally distributed among those with expertise in each subject. Unfortunately, there is currently no clear allocation of responsibility for all content, which leaves some material in limbo and obsolete. The Computing Center handles technical requests for publication and editing without evaluating the content itself. The Communications Office publishes news and occasionally edits content from other sections, although, lacking technical expertise, it relies on the Computing Center for support with more complex changes. The Academic Affairs Office maintains content related to degrees and programs. The Deputy Director of Institutional Quality uploads quality information and the minutes of various committee meetings directly through a small proprietary application. For the other sub-directorates, changes within their area of ​​responsibility (for example, a new endowed professorship) are typically communicated either directly to the Sub-Directorate of Communications, Services, and ICT Infrastructure or directly to the Computing Center. In practice this distribution works, although it is not recorded in any formal document; formalizing it is precisely the objective of the INV-1 Action Line of this Plan.

An internal diagnosis of the site's architecture and content management is necessary as a first step to assess possible specific improvements to the current design—mainly in the navigation of the most consulted information and in the management of content with an expiration date—without questioning the 2023 redesign project.

2.2. Official Notice Board

The Official Notice Board (etsi.us.es/tablones), along with the main website, is the most frequently used and active communication tool at the School of Engineering (ETSi): several hundred announcements are published each academic year, averaging several per week. Each announcement is tagged by target group (students, faculty, PTGAS) and by topic (scholarships, awards and competitions, doctoral theses, courses/training, international/Erasmus, and engineering disciplines such as civil, telecommunications, chemical, aerospace, and industrial, among others), allowing for reasonably precise filtering. Posting on the notice board is managed by the Communications Office (Pilar Velázquez) and the Director's Office (Juana Martínez).

The Notice Board incorporates two noteworthy features: each announcement has an associated automatic removal date, which prevents—at least on this channel—the accumulation of expired content; and there is a Telegram channel that anyone can subscribe to in order to receive announcements in real time, a push distribution method that complements the "pull" nature of the web notice board. In addition, an automated email is sent every Friday morning to the entire ETSi community with the weekly notice board updates.

The tool that powers the Notice Board is an application developed by the ETSi Computing Center itself, giving the Center total control over its evolution (new labels, integrations, usability improvements) without depending on third parties or the development cycles of central University services.

2.3. Company Internship Board and Job Offers Board

Alongside the general notice board, the ETSI maintains two specialized notice boards—Internships (etsi.us.es/noticias/practicas-en-empresas) and Job Offers (etsi.us.es/noticias/ofertas-de-empleo)—cross-linked from both the general notice board and the Companies/Internships section of the website. Both are populated with the same internally developed application, adapted to the nature of each type of content (offers with a specific company, desired profile, and deadline, as opposed to generic announcements). The publication of content on these notice boards falls under the purview of the Office of Corporate Relations.

These two notice boards are a valuable communication tool with a dual target audience that has been largely untapped from a communication standpoint: on the one hand, students and recent graduates seeking internships or their first job; on the other, companies in the Seville TechPark area and the wider Andalusian industrial sector, for whom these boards offer direct access to talent trained at the ETSI (School of Engineering). Their connection to the Corporate Chairs (18 currently active) and the Internship Program presents an opportunity for communication with the business sector, an opportunity reflected in the action lines of this Plan.

2.4. Information display system (digital signage)

The ETSI has a network of 30 television screens distributed throughout the two buildings of the Center, managed by software developed entirely by the Computing Center. The system displays a carousel of images that rotates automatically, allowing the scheduling and broadcasting of news, announcements, event calendars, and any other audiovisual content throughout the Center's physical spaces, reaching students, faculty, and PTGAS staff as they move through the building daily.

The content displayed on the screens is created by the Communications Office, with occasional collaboration from the Deputy Director of Communications. Faculty members who wish to publish something on the screens usually contact Pilar or the Deputy Director directly, without a formal procedure in place.

A recurring problem in practice is that much of the content requested for publication arrives in the form of a poster (designed for printing or social media) and doesn't display well in the carousel format, forcing adaptation or resulting in poor visual quality. This is one of the areas for improvement addressed by Action Line TV-2 of this Plan.

This is a channel with a very high potential reach—everyone who passes through the Center sees it, without needing their own internet connection or a subscription. However, as the SWOT analysis shows, its current use is only partial: there is still no formalized procedure for what content should be shown, how often, or a clear request channel for those who want to publish something, which is one of the main opportunities for short-term improvement in this Plan.

2.5. Corporate email

Institutional email remains the "official" channel for formal communications within the Center, supported by separate distribution lists for each group: students, faculty (PDI), and administrative and service staff (PTGAS). In practice, the use of these lists is divided: the Head of the Registrar's Office most frequently sends emails to the faculty and student lists; the Management Team typically uses the faculty list for its communications; and emails to the PTGAS list are authorized by the Center Administrator. There are also corporate email addresses specific to certain positions and roles—degree coordinators, members of the Management Team (see table in section 2.7)—which are used for direct communication within each area of ​​responsibility.

As in the rest of the University's departments, email is facing increasing limitations as an effective communication channel with students, due to inbox overload, incorrect spam filtering, and the declining use of email for personal communication among younger students. The ETSI must therefore maintain email for what remains irreplaceable—formal and traceable communication—and strengthen alternative channels (notice boards, screens, social media) for the general dissemination of information of interest.

2.6. Social Networks

The ETSI maintains active institutional accounts on Facebook (@ETSIngenieriaSevilla), Instagram (@etsingenieriasevilla), LinkedIn (Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingeniería de Sevilla), and its own YouTube channel. These five accounts are linked from the website footer.

What has not yet been documented is their level of activity, followers, reach, and interaction, nor an explicit protocol outlining who generates which content for each network. Content creation is primarily handled by the Communications Office, with one exception: the Facebook account was, until recently, managed by Library staff, and there is currently no clearly assigned person responsible. Overall, social media activity is not very intense. Completing the profile for each account with its metrics and the responsible person—including deciding who will manage Facebook going forward—following the social media monitoring appendix model used by other University centers, remains the primary action item for this unit (Social Media Line-1).

2.7. Personnel and communication structure

The ETSi has a Communications Office staffed by a part-time employee (5 hours/day) through AICIA, who handles all the office's tasks: photography and event coverage, interviews, media relations, liaison with other institutions, content creation, and management of the Center's social media. The Deputy Director of Communications oversees this work and participates in filtering and making decisions about content and priorities.

This, along with the Computing Center, is the other key element of the ETSi's communication structure: while the Computing Center provides the development and maintenance of the tools (notice board, specialized notice boards, screens, applications), the Communications Office provides the content and manages relationships with people and the media. Having a single person, working part-time, cover such a wide range of tasks—photography, press relations, social media, writing—is, as the SWOT analysis indicates, a significant structural limitation when setting the pace and scope of this Plan's action lines.

Beyond the Cabinet, each sub-directorate within the Management Team is responsible, by subject matter, for the communication content within its area (e.g., mobility opportunities, student information, relations with companies). This Plan assigns each line of action to the relevant sub-directorate according to this structure:

Source: ETSi Management Team (etsi.us.es/etsi/organizacion/direccion).

2.8. Public address system

The ETSI has a public address system in its buildings, managed by the Center's Reception, which differs from the other tools described in this section: it is not used to disseminate general information, but rather for immediate operational alerts and announcements, such as evacuation or closure of the Center. It is, therefore, an internal, oral, immediate, and exceptional channel, whose objective is the safety of the people present in the building at the time of the announcement, and not the dissemination of informational or educational content.

Although it falls outside the communicative scope (informing, disseminating, giving visibility) that guides the rest of this Plan, it is included here for consistency with the complete inventory of the Center's tools, and because its proper functioning —clear criteria of when and how it is used, and who is authorized to issue a warning— is a security issue that should be included, along with the other channels, in the inventory and the matrix of responsibilities of the INV-1 Action Line.