2017-2018 Off Duty Pay Calendar

HR Policies PowerPoint Presentation

Brandi Gilbert-Hammett: 

Off Duty Pay (ODP) – 9 month vs 12. month faculty.

For 9 month faculty, August 15 or so to May 15 is considered the “on duty” period. May 16 to August 14 is the off duty period. There are other dates that are off duty, like winter and spring break during the on duty period. For those dates, you could compensate yourself to work on a grant of some sort.

Talk with HRor fiscal to start. The Board of Trustees approaches off-duty pay by days.

We have a calendar and calculator that’s online on our college HR website (https://hr.cfaes.ohio-state.edu or specifically, https://hr.cfaes.ohio-state.edu/hraservice-center/hra-resources/faqs). Your department Human Resources Professional (HRP) has access to this information as well.

Plan ahead so that you can make sure you’re compliant and processing ODP in a timely fashion.

Lori Kaser: If you are writing ODP into grants, the most you can do is 2.5 months in a year and 11% per month.

Brandi Gilbert-Hammett: Delay of tenure track — Your offer letter indicates a probationary period, your mandatory time frame for promotion. Always refer back to this. Print your APT and save an electronic and hard copy to reference.

The probationary period varies by rank and what track you’re in. Be mindful of this.

You have a choice to use the APT that you were brought in on or the most current. If it has changed it is helpful to have your original copy.

Things that are permitted for delaying tenure track: Care giving (pregnancy and adoption), personal illness or injury, less than full time during a particular period, having a child for example.

Appointment structures — 12/12 or 9/12. Nine month faculty (9/12.5) — this is what new faculty are hired on.

12 month faculty are working the calendar year, but you can take vacation, etc.

9/12 month faculty are working the academic year.

9/12.5 means you start mid-August. You need time to get prepared before classes actually start. You begin your appointment mid-August and you get a paycheck for half the month. You’re beginning work, getting courses set up, accessing Carmen, etc.

There’s a negotiated salary. When you think about your salary divide by 12.5 for your first year. The following year starting September 1 begins your monthly comp rate.

Nine month faculty cannot get vacation, but each structure gets sick leave. At the end of the retirement sick leave can be paid out. Nine month faculty don’t have vacation because of the OD period. More faculty are coming in as 9/12.

At the time of conversion from 12/12 to 9/12 you will lose your vacation. You can donate it to someone’s sick leave or you can try to spend it down.

The Board of Trustees has designated a period of what should be on duty time. The rest that’s left is off duty. May 16 – August 1.

Use the ODP tool!

Academic off duty are the days sprinkled throughout the year, then there is summer ODP. May is also an odd month.

If you’re going to pay yourself for any days in May, you can only do so at the beginning of the month or the end of the month. You can’t “double dip”

If you’re thinking of converting from 12/12, loop in your department chair and your HR professional.

Conversion from 12/12 to 9/12 in January… yes you can do this, but it’s a big manual job to do behind the scenes. You’re taking five months of pay and spreading it over eight months. Be prepared for a smaller paycheck.

August 15 is the start of on duty pay, the start of the academic year. August 1-14 are ODP eligible days.

There are more ODP eligible days than you’re allowed to pay yourself. There are three months in the summer, but you’re only allowed 2.5 months total. This allows nine month faculty to actually take personal time because they do not accrue vacation. You need personal time.

Elayne Siegfried: Faculty conflict of commitment (Office of Academic Affairs) — Applies to full-time faculty including administrators and staff with faculty appointments.

When external conflicts interfere with your main responsibility (teaching, research, service), your primary allegiance is to OSU. Ex: if you’re doing consulting work. Always disclose this process or your new consulting, etc.  with your Chair or Dean.

Examples of conflict of commitment: if you teach at another university, if you have a private business, conduct research as a private consultant to outside entities.

Ohio ethics law — Can’t authorize a contract with you, your family member or an associate. You can’t disclose confidential information. You can’t receive additional compensation for what Ohio state is already paying you for. Ex: you can’t be paid double for an outreach program.

Financial conflict of interest  — Look at your professional activities and make sure there are not COIs. If you can’t avoid the COI you must refrain. Ex: research funded by an entity in which you or your family is involved.

Ex: working with an industry partner and they want to pay for you to travel to speak at a conference OR you sit on a board and you get financial compensation.

We maintain transparency at the university. It’s in your best favor to put these down on your form! If a conflict is found we do a COI management plan with your Department Chair, Lori, and the Office of Research Compliance. It just keeps you and the university out of financial trouble.

Political Activity

If you are a Classified Civil Servants there are more restrictions … you can’t participate in a patrician way in an election.

Non-Classified Civil Servants (A&P), there are really no restrictions. You can run for part-time office as long as it’s not taking time away from your job…

The Office of Government Affairs at OSU has what you can and cannot do in terms of political opinions/information.

Self-disclosure of criminal convictions — applies to everyone! Check with your HR professional when you’ve had an interaction with law enforcement, and definitely let them know if you are required to go to court. Always be honest and report immediately.

Sally Miller: What kind of management style do you have? Are you a delegator or are you more hands on involved, micro-managing? If you’re not comfortable with mistakes being made, or you have to watch everything… that’s going to determine the size of your group. That’s not bad, you just need to have a small group if you want to be more hands on. On the other hand, if you don’t pay attention mistakes will be made.

Bigger labs feel okay with delegating and are willing to accept that mistakes may be made or things won’t be done exactly as you’d like.

Enrico Bonello: The key to being successful is to empower people. Give them the responsibilities and independence. Whether you will micromanage or delegate also depends on the individual. If they require more management, I would require that they give me a summary of what’s being done to make sure it’s happening.

I see myself as more of a facilitator.

Question: How do you keep people accountable?

Enrico: In our department, we have an evaluation for graduate students supervised by the grad studies committee. We have forms that need to be filled out every year. This adds a paper record of what the students are doing. The professor and the student both have to sign this.

In the short term, I have had to write letters to the Department Chair to say that the student’s behavior needs to change or I may have to let them go. These are extreme cases. Make it clear that they need to live up to their responsibilities or there will be consequences, including termination.

Sally: It’s good to have that department structure. I also encourage getting things in writing.

How do you motivate them to stay on time and get the work done? You have deadlines and objectives for grants. Sometimes it requires bringing in additional post docs or staff members to help meet the objectives.

Enrico: Always expect high product, and have high expectations. Most of the time people will rise to the occasion.

Question: If we terminate their employment can still stay in the department or what if they’ve already been terminated?

Enrico: They have protections, you can’t just dismiss them without cause, you need a paper trail. If it’s justified, the graduate school will support you. Maybe it’s just a bad combination. You work with the student and maybe other faculty in your department or in another department can take them in their lab.

Involve the student advisory committee. You can always say you don’t have funding.

Sally: Once they have a letter that promises them department support, it is always contingent on performance.

It’s important to communicate with the faculty member and the student because the student may try to gain sympathy and make the faculty member look bad. Communicate with the current advisor.

Enrico: Use a mentor in your department, use the graduate studies committee in your department.

Question: How do you attract or recognize talent? How do you recruit stellar students?

Sally: You can’t always. What I usually do is have a video interview if they can’t come personally because a lot of time the international students can’t. That is critical. It’s best when you have a personal reference or it comes from someone you know.

When people are looking for something specific they want to work on, they’ve read your papers and know your lab, etc. I got more interest when I was involved with a professional society and that gave me a lot of visibility.

Enrico: When a student contacts me via email for example, look to see if they’re detail oriented by the way they write. I ask them why they are interested in working with me. If they lead their email with “dear sir” I don’t respond to them.

I look carefully at what comes in though the graduate studies committee, or I have people contact me directly and look to see if they make a strong opening and know how their experience fits into the program. I almost always will have a Skype conversation first to get a sense of how interested they are.

In students I really want, I pick them up at the airport, I take them around Columbus, show them how nice Columbus is. The personal touch is important.

Sally: Get back to students right away if there’s a student you’re interested in. Arrange those Skype interviews right away. If they’re really good, they’re going to be pursued by other places as well. The better students are going to have lots of opportunities.

Millennials / students want communication and motivation.

Question: How do you deal with students who personally don’t feel like they measure up?

Enrico: We try to talk to them a lot about imposter syndrome. I like to clear expectations up front. I created a list of expectations for my incoming students. I will not sign your dissertation if you don’t have two papers submitted when you graduate, etc. It’s very direct, but it’s an opportunity to engage with students initially. This is a high quality program and I have high expectations. Here it is. They have to sign it and understand that they will need to work hard.

Sally: You can’t compare students to yourself because we’re where we’re at because we’ve been through it already. Not everyone will live up to your expectations so you have to find where they will fit in and do a good job or let them loose. It’s rare it will go that far though.

Have an experienced post doc and/or staff member that can also help students. You will get very busy. They are going to have to do a lot of it on their own. It’s important they can network within the department or lab.

Enrico: Don’t treat graduate students as technicians. You should empower them, respect them and give them independence. They need to learn how to do science on their own and be independent speakers.

Questions: How do you structure your time between meeting with post docs vs. grads, etc.?

Enrico: I have an open door policy so people can always come in and talk to me. We also have bi-weekly lab meetings as brainstorming sessions. We talk about our own research and what the issues are and we come up with solutions for each other. It creates a bit of community.

Right now because of funding I only have one post-doc and one grad. I also encourage the grad and post-docs to meet together too.

Sally: My schedule is so tight and I did a lot of international traveling so it was hard to have scheduled lab meetings.

I also have an open door policy… it would be better if we met as a group more often. When we call a meeting there’s usually just some issue to deal with as a group. For research, it’s just small groups. We meet if they’re working on similar things.

I encourage students to read the research papers, not only to learn what’s in them, but so they know how to write a research paper and structure it.

Question: How do you handle too much editing as a student voice vs. too much editing in the voice you want?

Enrico: Resist the temptation to write it in your own words. They need to learn how to write.

When you recruit new students you need to be selective. It’s okay to wait for a better student because it will be easier for you and better for them.

You can ask for a writing sample. I have even asked for a synthesis paper to see if they understand the work going on in my lab.

Question: How do you manage students that are not well-aligned with your interests and that are not interested in a core of what you want your program to be?

Sally: I encourage students to pick up side projects, but emphasize that your first role is to get this done.

Question: Where do students go when the soft funding runs out?

Enrico: Somehow we managed to support the student with departmental funding, university fellowships, etc. We can never really project beyond three years, so you have to trust that somehow you’ll get more grant funding or through the department or some other way.

Question: Collaboration … how do you initiate a collaboration? What makes a good collaboration or makes them easier?

Sally: I prefer to be a sub-awardee rather than the lead.

It’s helpful to know people ahead of time or to network etc. the best thing is to get on someone’s grant proposal because you have some specific skill they need.

Elizabeth Drotleff: OSU’s Industry Liaison Office is the office you can come to for help in outreach, industry and initiating and cultivating relationships with companies to enter into research collaborations. We help to smooth the process so faculty can concentrate on the science.

I work very closely with Mike Adkins from OSU Office of Sponsored Programs and Jay Dahlman from OSU Technology and Commercialization Office. Each one of our offices is responsible for a different stage of the collaboration process.

Mike Adkins: When we need to talk about a research agreement we work with Elizabeth’s office. I take care of negotiating the research agreement. This could be a service intensive agreement, etc. I work to make sure we’re setting up the appropriate agreement.

Timelines are tough to nail down. It could be a week to a year of negotiating with the companies, it just depends on the complexity.

We work with intellectual property agreements. We sometimes pull Jay into this. You should get Jay’s office involved at the beginning of this process. We also help with the submission of a proposal. We can review your internal budgets, especially. If we get outside of what I’ve been allowed to approve then we go to TCO.

Jay Dahlman: Our office handles intellectual property (IP), licensing, industry sponsored research, etc.

We can be creative with the language as long as we are within the state of Ohio law. The question we need to ask is should we be doing this, what’s the best interest of the faculty member, what’s beneficial for the university?

The purpose of the office is to identify assets. We try to engage frequently with faculty to see what people are working on. We try keep up with faculty grants, etc. Faculty are the life blood for us. You invent things and we support you.

It’s a cradle to grave office, we can look at the value, the idea, the marketability, etc. We can start developing an intellectual property strategy. We help get the industry interested enough to want to license or collaborate.

If sponsored work needs to be done and a company will fund it, then we bring Mike in. We transfer our assets at OSU to industry to generate revenue, etc.

OSU copyright policy means you can have revenue from these agreements.

Mike: If a company asks for confidentiality or a non-disclosure agreement (NDA), these funnel through Jay’s office. I can catch all questions and direct you to the right person though, so feel free to reach out to me.

These arrangements are usually established before entering into a research agreement when the company has some confidential information and wants to protect the information.

Jay: Material Transfer Agreements: for profit entities requesting access to different materials with the end goal of commercialization. We can leverage value, etc. if an industry contact is looking to get a hold of some materials — get my office involved! We need to get the proper agreement in place. They will benefit monetarily through those materials, you should too.

Elizabeth: There are typically no costs associated with a NDA. There’s no monetary value

Mike: Our federally negotiated rates do not cover all costs, our current rate is 56%. This covers building space, lab space, janitorial and admin services, etc. You should try to get 56% F&A because it still won’t recoup the entire amount needed.

If you get push back from an industry partner on the rate, we can have discussions about lowering the amount, but it will only come with college and department approval. This is done through the ePA-005.

Once you submit the ePA-005, it is automatically routed for approval to the college and department. I also get an email notification. Once it’s approved, then it takes my approval to move forward with lower rate negotiation if you need it.

Elizabeth: In general, our offices are here to have business and legal discussions that you don’t need to be having with the company contact. We want you to preserve your positive relationship with the company. We can have the difficult conversations. Take advantage of the services we provide.

When it comes to the overhead rate, a 56% rate is incredibly inexpensive. The companies sometimes have a misconception that this is profit for us, but that’s why you want to pull us into the conversation so we can help explain its purpose. Just pass it on to Mike or myself and we can have the conversation.

While your department and college can agree to a lower overhead rate, university policy is if the company is paying less than the government rate, they do not have a choice between IP access models.

It is strongly not recommended to lower this rate.

Mike: Examples of different kinds of contracts OSP does with industry include: Service and Testing with industry, for example you may get some seeds that the company wants you to test in our plots. We’re testing and giving the data back to them. We’re not analyzing, we’re just giving test results. There is no expectation of IP.

If the company wants to see an IP agreement, we wonder if they want us to do actual research and do more than just service and testing. In that case, we would use a standard research agreement, IP included. We’re looking to protect your right to publish, we don’t want the sponsor to direct your publishing, we protect students working on the project. Let us know ASAP if you have a student, we can protect final dissertation or thesis. If the company restricts right to publish, it may impact the student’s ability to finish their work and graduate.

Master Agreement: there is a large volume of work, all forms taken care of upfront.

ILO Master Agreement: The company may not be in one specific area / department. They would have a master agreement upfront. Elizabeth’s office might think it’s a good idea and contact me.

Master agreements are great, it takes a little bit longer if you’re the first project on it. Any subsequent projects under a master agreement in place are done quickly.

Services and testing agreement goes through OSP if it’s faculty driven.

Any agreement that’s signed by a PI is invalid. Only OSP is authorized to sign off on these things.

If you aren’t sure if it’s a standard contract, just contact me and we can figure something out. We just want you to worry about the scientific research that needs to be done.

Policies and procedures change often.

Lori Kaser: You also want this documented in the PI portal so you can refer to this when you go up for tenure. The ePA-005 gives you credit for this, as well as if you are trying to get a research agreement.

Mike: Put the ePA-005 in as early on in the process as possible.

Jay: If you have money coming in as a gift, make sure you have a contract.

Mike: When my office signs the paperwork it takes all the legal repercussions off of you, the agreement is with OSU not you as an individual. If the company sues, they sue the university not you.

Jay: This is super important with CDA / NDA when PIs sign off and make themselves personally responsible.

We enter into extension or academic use agreements if someone wants to take copy written materials and produce them. We can grant commercial rights, but still allow it to go to non-profits, etc. You need to set the parameters on how you will license out for extension and for broader commercial use.

Elizabeth: If you want to engage with a company and ensure the conversations are thorough, contact the ILO. It’s my job to help you have those conversations. What are their expectations, timelines, budgetary cycles, vision of the deliverables? We will have those conversations with you.

Once we get an idea of the company’s expectations, then I better understand what the company needs from a standpoint of agreement. Then we may decide on a master agreement, or a one-off research agreement, etc. in the process of talking to them about the business aspects, we start to talk about the IP access models, i.e. how they acquire rights.

When I’m clear about the direction of the relationship, Mike and I work together to talk to the company about the nuts and bolts of the agreement.

Mike works with the statement of work, puts the appropriate budget together, etc. communicates with the company to get approval.

Then, if in the process IP is developed by the terms of the agreement and the company is going to license, you go to the TCO and Jay gets involved. If there is any background IP that generates new IP then the company may need to license that as well.

Jay: We need to make them aware that we have background IP.

Mike: If you’ve had a conversation with a company put it in the ePA-005. Then I will reach out to the company with the larger terms and conditions, but we won’t move forward with a budget, etc. until we have the internal approval.

We cannot sign an agreement until an ePA-005 is approved. Put the ePA-005s in ASAP!

Elizabeth: If you all ask us questions, it helps us. It’s okay if this is an entirely new world for you. We want to help you understand.

Jay: PI includes: Patents — a piece of paper that allows the right to exclude others from making, including or selling the right in the patent. If I have a patent to something, someone else can’t manufacture or sell the item, etc.

Copyright material — mainly in software… we are starting to see this in the extension area in content that’s valuable for other extension units or commercially.

Tangible property as intellectual property, germ plasm, novel material, chemistry, etc.

Trademarks are run through office of general council. We don’t do a lot of those.

Know How is a catch-all in a licensing agreement. Anything not explicitly described in a patent application, etc.

Elizabeth: With multiple companies on an agreement, reassure companies that we have the right firewalls in place to ensure confidentiality with each company. If the companies can each benefit from the project, we can do a research agreement with multiple companies.

With regards to the budget, we don’t expect a certain cost point. However, you all are the experts, do not sell yourself short.

Mike: Especially if the initial research project has great findings and the company wants to do more and now they have a precedent of no salary.

Jay: There is value in the know-how that you posess. It’s okay to charge for it.

Question: Generally how long does this process take?

Elizabeth: It’s hard to define this. The company might not have buy-in from the management, etc. Another delay may be because of needing to find the right person to talk to. Some companies are experienced with working with universities… some companies see this as a top priority others don’t. You can’t predict. The more conversations you have in the beginning, the more it helps when you get to the actual agreements.

Mike: It depends on who we work with. Typically it’s about a month to a month and a half. Our office gets busy during different times of the year, specifically in the summer, any extended holiday break, etc. when faculty are stepping away from their teaching responsibilities. It also coincides with the fiscal years of the companies we deal with.

Talk to faculty that have other collaborations with the companies.

Kay Wolf: Promotion and tenure at the University-level is under me. I look at Vita and P&T from the highest level, while allowing the tenure initiating units to take the lead because success looks different for each department.

Everyone starts from a different place and that’s okay. The idea is to note where you need to go. Read your promotion and tenure document closely. If you have questions, ask the chair of your department and the chair of your college’s promotion and tenure committee.

It is a qualitative review. We look for high quality. Four high quality publications may be better than many more that aren’t as good.

I read every dossier that comes through this university. I look to make sure that we are consistently looking at who we are and what we are as a university. Even if everyone on the committed have said yes, I still look at them and they can be pulled.

Instruction is important to President Drake, so promotion should honor that. It should show we respect our students at all levels. Mentoring, teaching, student instruction — it is all expected to be at a high level.

Question: What is accomplishment vs. activity?

Kay Wolf: Activity is checking something off… for example, on a committee you may attend meetings but never provide input. Therefore, you didn’t really impact the committee.

What is your impact? How could the research you’re working on not be done without you? Explain the contribution and make your case.

What have you done? Have you taken courses? How are you showing dedication? Who did you mentor and where did they go? Show action over a period of time to get to impact. Take stock at the end of every year. Find a mentor who is honest with you.

When you respond to a review, make sure you read it even if the review is great. Sometimes things may be missing. Review for facts. The Chair will give you ten calendar days to respond. If you don’t agree with what was said you can respond with facts. Provide evidence that was missed. There is no form, this is your response, but do not rewrite your dossier.

It then goes to the college-level committee. They check to make sure the processed was followed correctly. The college looks at things more holistically. This provides one more level of recommendation to the Dean. The college committee is advisory to the Dean.

If the process isn’t followed it needs to go back and start again where the procedure wasn’t followed. This happens rarely, but it does happen.

Then it goes to the Dean who makes a review and writes a letter. You then get another ten calendar days to respond to the Dean and college committee.

When it gets to my office, the Office of Academic Affairs, we look to see if there were mixed reviews (where one group voted no, but everyone else was positive). If so, it goes to the university committee to review. If there were three nos for recommendation it will also go to the university committee for review. This committee writes a letter to the provost and the provost will make the final decision.

A faculty member is the only one who can pull their document and stop the process. It can only be stopped early if you’re going from assistant to associate. However, if it is a mandatory review, you can’t stop it.

The decision is final when the Board of Trustees votes on it, usually in June. Don’t use your title until this day.

It is not required to use Vita in 2018-2019. It is mandatory to use the OAA handbook format though. Make sure what you turn in is correct. This should take some time! However, don’t stop putting your data in Vita because eventually this will work and your TIU Chair may ask for the information from Vita.

Be sure to describe your responsibilities on a team, market yourself, discuss any mentoring you have done, identify your appointments and provide information on each area.

Do not repeat items in your dossier, think about what you’re trying to convey.

Narratives should demonstrate growth. Describe changes in teaching evaluations, changes in philosophy, noteworthy accomplishments for graduate or undergraduate students, curriculum development, etc.

PowerPoint Presentation: “Getting Started with Vita” from Cricket Nardacci (OSU ODEE)

Cricket: My team is in the office during university business hours to help answer questions about Vita. There are only seven of us for the entire university. The OSU IT Help Desk has no training on Vita.

We moved from Research in View to Vita/Elements because the vendor for RIV decided to kill the program. We have an entire team dedicated to the data migration effort to move things from RIV to Vita; however, you will need to manage the final settings and clean up because you are the expert on your information.

Vita and Elements are two different programs. Because we have such a large institution and we have a diverse array of work, there is no system that can deliver everything for us. Our team wrote a new code that we call Vita that works with Elements. Vita is still glitchy right now.

On vita.osu.edu, there are dedicated sections with resources to help you use these systems.

The top three resources for you are:

• “Getting Started with Vita” help article
• “RIV to Vita Elements Conversion Chart” — this shows where things were managed in RIV and where it will be managed going forward in Vita Elements.
• “Vita Dossier Display Map”

Debby: There will be OSUE training sessions coming in November.

Tracy Turner: I’ve been at OSU for about five years now, and I was at the Columbus Dispatch for 11 years. Reporters typically don’t come in with a specialty… you go where the assignments are. The reporter can cover K-12 one day, and something completely different the next. They come to you as the experts.

Why work with the media? What is the advantage?

It can raise your status and make your department and college look really good.

One of the first things to understand is where the reporters are coming from. We maintain a faculty experts list at the college level. We would love to get you on there. What this is saying is that you are comfortable talking to the media and will respond to them when they call.

What does the media want?

It may be important to your sponsors or your organization, but that doesn’t make it newsworthy. If you want coverage or want to pitch a story, look at the significance of the story and what else is happening.

There have been more opportunities for posting things that aren’t necessarily true with the internet lately, so it is important that we provide people with accurate information.

The #1 goal of any journalist is accuracy.

Reporters have to have context for what they’re reporting. It’s about balance and getting different viewpoints.

Think about human interest… personal stories are more interesting. They ask why should I care? Who is this impacting?

Brevity … when you’re talking to a reporter, get to the point. Most news stories are short.

Before the internet, deadlines meant the end of the day. They had all day to research, report, talk to people, write. Now with the internet, you have one minute. As soon as something happens… reporters are concerned with getting it first not getting it right.

It’s always important to respond quickly, even if it’s just saying to them that you will call them back.

Working with the Media

Understand where the reporter is coming from so you know what to expect.

Ask them what they are looking for… you don’t have to respond immediately with an answer if you’re more comfortable waiting 15-20 minutes and gathering your answers.

Another question you can ask the reporter is to understand what kind of deadlines they’re under. You can also ask them what the format of the interview is, where will it take place, over the phone? Will it be recorded? Etc.

Know your key messages before the interview even starts.

Redirect questions when necessary to respond with your talking points.

Do not say yes or no or add an opinion, go on to your point that you want to understand.

Know your reporters and what their scope is.

Reporters don’t have your expertise.

NEVER say “no comment” … it makes it seem like there is a bigger story there.

You can say “I cant really address that, but you can talk to ….” etc. We have redirected reporters to the university level communications, keeping a separation from negative attention in the media. The university is luckily happy to handle that for us.

Don’t ask to review the story, most news organizations have policies that don’t allow this.

Be cautious… reporters can be friendly but they are not your friends. They are not out to get you, but they are out to do their job. Watch what you say, do not rely on “off the record” … if you don’t want it reported, don’t say it.

Don’t fall for the silent treatment. Reporters are allowing you to tell them what they don’t know. Stick with your key points. Don’t feel the need to bridge the silence with your thoughts.

Respond with grace to abrasive questions, its a reporters job to ask hard questions. They’re not talking to you as an individual, they’re talking to you as a representative of the research or the school, etc. they’re not coming after you as an individual, they’re looking at the bigger picture. You can change the tone with how you respond.

They may disarm you with kindness first, it’s not personal, but it’s a way to get you to open up a bit more.

The interview is not over until it’s over, especially when someone has a camera or recording on you.

Reiterate your main points at the end of the interview when they ask if there is anything else you’d like to add at the end.

Reporters have direct access to our researchers.

Resources for Marketing and Communications: communications.cfaes.ohio-state.edu

Crisis Communications

We have a plan here and how you react makes all the difference. Please come to us if you have a crisis so that we can craft a message with you. We want to be accurate.

It helps to look at the plan, which is on our website. Be responsive, be calm and protect our reputation.

Media Coaching

We can help you, give you sample questions, talking points, draft answers, and help build your comfort level talking to the media. We want to make sure that you are prepared. Know that you are not out there alone. We are there to support you and help you.

We do write news releases and do proactive media. If you are working on research, or have something new coming out, we can work with you to promote it. We can do news releases, pitch stories to reporters. We can look at the human interest side of what you are doing… the research you are doing does impact Ohioans so there are always opportunities to work with you to show impact or tell a story.

We’re getting ready to go into a budget year… the more positive press we can get about what we’re doing, it reinforces that.

You can subscribe to our news releases, we do social media campaigns… adding people to our faculty experts list, we don’t always know who everyone is and what their area of expertise is.

It doesn’t have to be a news release, we can send out social media, photos, etc. it doesn’t have to be a traditional “story.”

We have a few mechanisms to do work with us:

We have a project request form for a larger project or for news releases.

You can also reach out directly to our writers in different subject areas. We will be sharing that soon.

We can promote your research if you have something coming out in an academic journal, etc.

An advantage of working with us is that you do get to review the story that we write. We do not want to get you out of context or misquote you. If you are comfortable with the story and we get the right focus.

Question: I would like to be more proactive instead of being called out of the blue…

We have a person on our team that is focused on proactive media relations. To work with people in the college to pitch stories. She will help get the root of what it is, what are the best ways to get the information out, specialty publications, etc.

We serve the entire college, so we cant do everything for everyone. A lot of departments will do outreach to alumni, their department social media pages, they can let us know about different research that your department is doing.

We are such a large college, so we rely on our department and extension communicators to help educate us and keep us connected to what’s happening on the ground level.