Student recruitment

Tailoring communication with student members is important. Just like our full members, each person will have different reasons for considering membership. Student members may be at different stages of studying and gauging their knowledge of the union will be a helpful start to conversations.

The union’s equality bodies, and democratic decision-making processes lie at the core of the NUJ. Remind student members that as members, they can become involved in activism within the union - a great way to learn more about our structures.  

Here is a list of institutions to consider making contact with:

• Technological University  Dublin

• Dublin City University

• Griffith College

• National University of Ireland, Galway

• University College Maynooth 

• Munster Technological University

• University of Ulster Coleraine

• University of Limerick

• University of Ulster

• Queens university, Belfast

• Social media takeover days – allow student members to plan content and post on your social media, sharing experiences of being an NUJ member
• Facilitate a student meet and greet – online/in person. Ensure online meetings taking place are inclusive with closed captions provided
• Encourage student members to attend branch meetings to find out more about priority local issues
• Ask students what priority areas they would like the NUJ to campaign on 
• Ensure members are aware of NUJ Active and Informed and how to receive publications

• Introduce the work of the chapel to members and consider a welcome email with an introductory message from a rep
• Include a section for students in your branch newsletter and highlight events taking place (nuj.org.uk/events) they can attend
• Remind members about how they become involved in the union by sharing an interview with a rep about their NUJ journey so far

It’s been over two years since the covid-19 pandemic began and many of us found ourselves attending online meetings and webinars, up-skilling on digital platforms. When planning student network events online, it’s important they are held in inclusive and accessible ways. Here are steps to take:

•    Ask in advance if members have access requirements and how these may be supported

•    Encourage people to stay muted when others are speaking, to avoid background noise

•   Activate automatic captions as a default. These are not perfect and require people to speak clearly and not overlap, which is good practice for any meeting

•    Encourage those who can, to have their video on when speaking and ensure their faces are clearly seen and well-lit to support lipreading

•    Request that all contributions are made through the chair and summarise key contributions or points to support understanding

•    For larger meetings and public facing events where accurate captions are necessary, book a Speech To Text Reporter. BSL interpreters should be booked well in advance where attendees use British Sign Language. Further information can be found below

•  For in-person meetings, consider locations with minimal background noise and good lighting where members can see speakers clearly. Be aware that lipreading is tiring and not always reliable. Automatic transcriptions such as Otter or speech to text apps are unlikely to work well and good chairing of meetings is important to ensure inclusion

Zoom auto captions
Auto captions can be enabled within Zoom by logging into the account through the browser and changing the settings as below. This cannot be done during a meeting but once the settings are enabled, they remain in place unless changed again: 
•   sign into Zoom
•   ‘In Meeting (Advanced)’ > allow ‘Closed Captioning’ and 
•   ‘Enable live transcription service’
•   when a meeting starts, the host selects the CC icon at the bottom of the screen to select ‘enable auto transcription

Attendees then click on the CC icon in the Zoom meeting to choose running captions or a side window with the full transcript