Communications Services and Resources
The BPH Communications and Marketing team’s core mission is to elevate and reinforce the value of the UC Berkeley School of Public Health in the hearts and minds of key stakeholders by telling its stories; safeguarding its brand; and ensuring that BPH is part of the collective conversation around health, education, and research. Our main areas of ownership are news/announcements/PR, web/multimedia/social media, and school-level brand/identity.
We also consult the divisions, centers, and groups that make up our school, including admissions and the online/on-campus MPH program, on best practices in communications and marketing. Close clients include External Relations, the Dean’s Office, Student Services, and the Online MPH program. We can also offer a limited amount of support and consultation to faculty members, research centers, students, and other units like DREAM or CPHPL in the following areas:
- Design
- Event production and publicity
- Photography and video (very limited resources)
- Website consulting and design
- Social media consultation
- Writing/editing/PR
Before you submit a request for service, please take a few minutes to review the resources section of this page to see if you can complete your project without assistance from the Comms team. You will find the BPH Brand Guide; BPH logos and letterhead; and templates for flyers, slides, and labels.
Please be aware that we need lead time for any request and that we juggle many requests simultaneously. Suggested lead times are:
- Inclusion in twice-monthly newsletter: at least two weeks (newsletter content is closed one week before distribution; distribution dates are the first and third Thursday of the month except for November and December, when only one edition of the newsletter is distributed on the first Thursday of the month, and January, when only one edition is distributed on the third Thursday of the month, and July, when we do not send a newsletter).
- Basic research, grant, or award announcement: two weeks.
- More complex writing project involving multiple interviews: six weeks.
- Research news with public relations campaign (not always feasible): six weeks.
- Graphic design of brochure, booklet, or multi-page document: six weeks.
- Graphic design of postcard, social media tile: two weeks.
- Social media inclusion: one week.
- Text corrections to pre-existing web page: two weeks.
- Complex corrections to pre-existing web page: up to one month. Please submit new school-year changes more than six weeks before you would like to see changes reflected on the site. For changes to appear at the beginning of the fall semester, please submit requests by the end of June.
- New website consultation: two months or longer; the sooner the better.
- Video assistance: two months.
- Events to be posted to website: at least three weeks so we can include them in at least one newsletter.
- Event promotion: one month.
- Event production: three months.
- For faculty or researchers seeking publicity for a grant, paper, commentary, award, or other news, please refer to the news and media relations section of this page for guidance prior to submitting a request.
Brand, accessibility, and other communications resources
- Overall Communications Resources
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Brand and style guides
School of Public Health Brand Guide
If you are working on a communications-related projects on behalf of any part of the School of Public Health, please consult our BPH Brand Guide for guidance, inspiration, and to help ensure consistency in messaging and branding. The BPH Brand Guide contains information and direction on content, logo usage, typography, colors, and design.
Berkeley Brand Guidelines
For further brand support and training, please refer to the campus brand website.
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Downloads
This directory includes frequently used School of Public Health images and templates, including:
- Logos (print and web)
- letterhead
- Mailing labels
- Shipping labels
- BPH branded zoom backgrounds
- BPH google slides/PowerPoint presentations
Access the BPH Communications Downloads folder on Google Drive
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Email signatures
Standard email signature
Your Name (pronouns/optional) Job Title Program/Department (optional) University of California, Berkeley | School of Public Health 2121 Berkeley Way West, Berkeley, CA 94708 510-123-4567 (o) | 510-123-4567 (m) (optional) ab1234@berkeley.edu publichealth.berkeley.edu
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn
Sensitive data email signature
Your Name (pronouns/optional) Job Title Program/Department (optional) University of California, Berkeley | School of Public Health 2121 Berkeley Way West, Berkeley, CA 94708 510-123-4567 (o) | 510-123-4567 (m) (optional) ab1234@berkeley.edu publichealth.berkeley.edu
Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn
This electronic message is intended to be for the use only of the named recipient, and may contain information that is confidential or privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any disclosure, copying, distribution or use of the contents of this message is strictly prohibited. If you have received this message in error or are not the named recipient, please notify us immediately by contacting the sender at the electronic mail address noted above, and delete and destroy all copies of this message.
Suggested land acknowledgement
As members of the UC Berkeley community, it is vitally important that we not only recognize the history of the land on which we stand, but also that we recognize that the Muwekma Ohlone people are alive and flourishing members of the Berkeley and broader Bay Area communities today. We suggest adding the following acknowledgment to your email signature, presentations, and documents:
I acknowledge that UC Berkeley sits on the territory of xučyun (Huichin), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo speaking Ohlone people, the successors of the sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County.
Learn more about this statement’s purpose and importance at the Centers for Educational Justice and Community Engagement site.
- Accessibility resources
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Graphics, social media, & newsletters
Canva templates
Free account required – copy template to edit.
Newsletter Mailchimp templates
Free Mailchimp account required.
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Video conferencing backgrounds
- How to use a virtual background in Zoom – support.zoom.us
- Change your background in Google Meet – support.google.com
- Change your background for a Microsoft Teams meeting – support.microsoft.com
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Campus photographs
UC Berkeley Communications & Public Affairs provides an extensive campus photo gallery. You are required to log in with your CalNet ID.
News and media relations
The Communications and Marketing team at BPH serves both as a media outlet that disseminates stories to various audiences and as a media relations team to help get our stories published in other news outlets. We field media requests daily and occasionally are able to implement PR campaigns.
News stories
These are the general topics we would like to cover via writing a news story on the website:
- A grant award that is a significant amount of money or for an interesting or unique study.
- A recently published or soon-to-be published research paper (if the findings are particularly newsworthy, we will first pitch to campus Public Affairs if there is enough lead time).
- An award or honor you received or an appointment to a distinguished association or leadership position.
- Profiles of and Q&As with faculty, students, or alumni
- Student accomplishments or honors.
- A commentary in a journal on a hot topic in public health.
To write a story about a study, we need access to or a PDF of the draft or embargoed paper as well as access to the lead researcher to gather quotes.
Social media and the Berkeley Public Health News newsletter
These are examples of stories we would like to cover via sharing on social media and/or Berkeley Health Monthly:
- Event and field photos (please provide captions with your photos).
- An op-ed or article you wrote that was published in a media outlet (not a study).
- An appearance on radio or television.
- An event video where you’re giving a talk or on a panel.
- An article where you’re quoted as an expert.
- Faculty and student blog posts, on the Berkeley Blog or elsewhere.
- Networking, grants, trainings, webinars, contests and other opportunities for students or faculty.
Campus resources
The campus Public Affairs office will also help promote our stories externally. They have a lot of departments to cover and are quite selective with what they chose to write about; they also prefer several weeks of lead time before a study is published. If you have stories to share, please contact publichealthcommunications@berkeley.edu first to determine if your news is a fit for Public Affairs.
Please visit the campus News and Media Relations page to see what communications channels they manage.
BPH Events Calendar
Please submit any events that are aimed at existing and potential students, campus, and/or the general public—any that you are requiring sign up through a form—to the campus-wide UC Berkeley Events Calendar so they can be added to our calendar.
Please refer to this events calendar documentation for detailed instructions on how to enter your new event. However, please note that you will not see the yellow “+new” yellow button in the top menu unless you own your own group. You would “submit an event” button on the right instead. Please submit each of your events to the calendar separately. We also encourage you to submit an image in .jpg format for your event. The image should be simple with no text; if you have a speaker you should try to include a photo of the speaker whenever possible.
Please note that that you can’t edit the event details unless you have created your own calendar “group”. If your department hosts multiple events throughout the year, then we suggest that you create a new calendar group in order to manage your own event postings. To do this, you would contact LiveWhale at hello@livewhale.com or at (510) 808-4028 to create the group along with assigning admins to have post and edit access. This will make it much faster and more efficient to make edits.
BPH communications channels
The BPH Communications team manages the following publications and platforms:
- Berkeley Public Health News is a bimonthly newsletter with a circulation of 18,000. Submit newsworthy items or event listings at least eight days in advance of publication to include them. Sign up for the newsletter here!
- The UC Berkeley School of Public Health website is where we publish school news stories, research highlights, faculty honors, and media mentions on a rolling basis.
- BPH social media channels are where we share news, media mentions, event photos, and other items of interest. Frequent updates are made to the School’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn (school page and alumni group), and YouTube pages.
- While we don’t produce the ASPPH Friday Letter, we submit the latest news that has appeared on our website each Monday for inclusion.
Website consultation
If you are planning to build a website for your research center, please be aware of these important points:
- All websites that are affiliated with Berkeley are required to adhere to strict accessibility guidelines.
- All websites that are affiliated with Berkeley should adhere to strict brand guidelines.
- Guidelines for Berkeley.edu Websites must be followed in order to complete a *.berkeley.edu domain registration
We recommend you build your site with Open Berkeley, offered through UC Berkeley Web Platform Services. Open Berkeley is built with accessibility, branding, and security in mind and each of those facets are continuously improved without requiring end-user input. Open Berkeley sites come with CalNet authentication to log in and manage users. They take care of hosting and domain name management as well. Most centers would only use lowest hosting tier (“basic”). A chart string is required for billing. Visit Open Berkeley pricing information for rates and fees. More information can be found on the Open Berkeley FAQ page.
If you use a vendor to create a new site or using a “WYSIWIG” site builder (Wix, wordpress.com, SquareSpace), please understand that neither UC Berkeley nor the School of Public Health will be able to help you maintain the site or reach accessibility standards. You also will not be able to secure a berkeley.edu URL. While third-party vendor-built or sitebuilder sites may have lower up-front costs, these sites often end up being much more costly and time-consuming to maintain. Keeping this in mind, if you still want to use an outside vendor to create your site, you much reach out to Matt MacNeil (mattmacneil@berkeley.edu) on the communications team for consultation before completing a contract.
For non-berkeley.edu pages and those that don’t follow the guidelines outlined in the links above, you may not include the school of public health’s logo, UC Berkeley’s logo, and/or the name of our school.