Coronavirus has changed a lot of things for a lot of people, not least the world’s perception of cleanliness. We are now more laidback about things that used to seem like the most important thing in the world; more conscious of other people’s whereabouts and well-being; more aware of how important our relationships with other people are than ever before. We’re also changing how we work.
For us, that has primarily been a restriction on face–to–face networking. Our events have either been postponed or moved online, removing the opportunity of shaking the hands of our members and collectively discussing life in the realm of Higher Education.
But that hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing. Yes, we’d like to have facilitated our well–loved networking events, but the COVID pandemic has helped us learn and grow as a company. It’s helped us establish new ways of networking online with our members and facilitate ways for members to network with each other. It’s forced us to look at our resources, primarily our online tools, and re–evaluate how we use them.
We’ve hosted a series of webinars that not only allowed us to share information with our members but also to reach new people that we haven’t been able to engage with in the past. We’ve written more blog posts and generated more thought leadership pieces; created a new COVID themed newsletter for our members; kept a closer eye on the communications of our network universities, sharing their successes with the wider higher education community, and spent more time on Zoom than we thought was humanly possible. We’re also very excited about hosting our first online annual conference this year, which will look at Reimagining Universities.
Basically, the world, and the World 100 are networking in different ways and we wanted to share a few tips with you to help you make the most of it. Obviously, many of these tips aren’t revolutionary, but with things changing at a million miles per hour, every hour, sometimes the most obvious things can be overlooked. So, here’s our infographic of tools to help you stay connected when you can’t attend events:
Networking Infographic
If you would like to find out more about our in-person networking opportunities visit our events and training page, or you can find our social media links via our contact page to help you network online.