Case study - Recognition & Rewards “Unmute” Campaign

Client: Maastricht University (UM)

Audience: Academic staff, a diverse group in age and background, highly engaged but always occupied and overwhelmed by internal communication. To reach them, your message has to stand out and show clearly why it matters.

Challenge: The communication campaign for the Recognition & Rewards programme aimed to do two things:

1. Raise awareness about the programme across all faculties.

2. Give academic staff a voice in shaping it by gathering feedback on how they’d like to be recognised and rewarded in their careers.

If this message was going to land, it had to cut through the noise and make them care.

Tone: Informative, urgent, inspiring, sincere, inviting

Strategy: To succeed, the campaign needed to:

1. Become impossible to miss

2. Carry authority

3. Be rooted in personal benefit

We took a multi-channel approach to reach academics wherever they were, and to keep the conversation alive over time:

• An internal website where staff could stay informed and submit feedback

• Bulletin updates from the Executive Board and the College of Deans as well as regular newsletter features

• Community “ambassadors” to keep the discussion going locally

• Video interviews with key community ambassadors to humanize the message  based on narratives developed by the community

Importantly, every faculty organized live feedback sessions for academic staff, with personal sign-off and support from their deans. This visible leadership buy-in gave the campaign credibility and reach.

But reaching people wasn’t enough. They had to see why it mattered to them

That’s where the framing came in:

“This is your chance to shape how your work is recognised and rewarded”; “To create your own career path"; “To define success at UM.”

To reinforce that call, we introduced the slogan:

“Unmute!”: a prompt to speak up and share whatever mattered to them.

Even though the campaign was initiated top-down, we positioned it as a bottom-up process. It was being co-created with the community, not for it. That inspired engagement.

The results:

• High attendance across all faculty sessions

• A large volume of feedback—so much it extended the policy drafting timeline (in a good way)

• A flexible new model that allowed academics to shape their own careers

• And perhaps most importantly, the conversation didn’t stop at rollout. Even after implementation, academics continued to shape how the system worked.

Note: As a project lead and policy advisor, I executed and co-coordinated the outreach campaign in 2020-2021.