Any member of the campus community wishing to share information with all students via Bates Today may submit an announcement via the submission form on the Quad. All submissions will be reviewed and, when approved, included as a link in an upcoming Bates Today.
An announcement is information that all students need to know, and which is not necessarily tied to a specific date or time. Here are a few examples:
Announcements must be submitted by noon today to be included in tomorrow’s Bates Today. Announcements are not approved during weekends; for announcements to be included in Monday’s mailing, they must be submitted by noon on Friday. Bates Today is not sent on Sunday.
When creating your announcement, remember that your subject line will be very important, as that will become the link that students see in Bates Today. If your announcement is not featured at the top of the mailing, the subject line will be the only text readers see. Please limit it to no more than 70 characters and make it as clear as possible to encourage interested readers to learn more.
Image Sizing
Images submitted with announcements should be formatted as a square, with recommended dimensions of 300 pixels by 300 pixels. Please do not include text in images.
Bates Today curators will evaluate announcements each day and identify those to mark as “Featured.” These decisions will be informed by a consideration of a range of factors, including whether the message:
In addition, a couple of other issues may be taken into consideration, including whether the message:
The vast majority of announcements selected to be featured are for those things occurring on the day of the mailing. Please note that there is a 2 feature maximum in each Bates Today mailing, per entity submitting (groups, departments, individuals, etc.). To ensure that specific announcements are chosen over other announcements, please be sure to indicate which announcements you would like featured in the “Note to Bates Today Manager” section.
The event listings in Bates Today will be drawn from the Event Management System (EMS) (events.bates.edu). When you reserve space, you will be asked, “Would you like this event included in Bates Today, on the Quad website, and in the Bates Engage app?“ Indicating “YES” will submit your event for review and publication. If your event is off-campus or not in a reservable space, you may use the Off-Campus/Non-Reservable form to create a listing for the event.
Events scheduled in these ways and set for inclusion in Bates Today will automatically appear in the email under “Today’s Events” on the day of the event.
If you’d like to promote the event in advance of the event date, you should submit an announcement (see above). When submitting an announcement, you can specify an event or deadline date in order for the announcement to appear in the “reminders” section, above general announcements.
When using Bates Today, be aware that information you share via this system could be publicly visible on the web. In most cases, things like Google docs should be restricted to Bates users to ensure that only the right people can access them.
If you would like to promote an event that includes a public screening of a movie or some other type of media, you must be in compliance with the college’s policy on Public Performance of Movies or Other Media. Please ensure you are in compliance before submitting an announcement to Bates Today about your event. Questions about the policy may be directed to the Copyright Officer.
If you are including photography or other imagery with your announcement, be sure you have permission to use that media. Images in the public domain can be found in the WikiMedia Commons, Flickr Commons, or in other web databases of public media.
Should you need to change information in your announcement after it has gone out, contact the Campus life at campuslife@bates.edu.