Friday 23-10-2020 - 09:19

As your Students’ Union, we’re always asking you to tell us if you have any problems. Whether it’s asking you to DM us, email us or fill in a survey, we constantly want your opinions, concerns and suggestions.

However, sometimes you might not want to share your view because you don’t know what we’ll do with that info. That’s why we thought it’d be helpful to share the process with you, so maybe you’ll feel better about telling us what’s up.

Sending us a DM

If you message us on social media, it’ll get picked up by someone in the Marketing team. If you’re asking for opening times or help from the Advice Centre, we’ll just reply with a straight answer. If you’re sharing a problem that we feel needs more help, we’ll speak to the person at The Union who will either give us the answer, or find out the person you should get in touch with.

Emailing an officer

If you email a Student Officer it’ll go something like this:

+ They’ll identify your main problem
+ If it’s not in their remit, they’ll signpost you to who best (e.g. Advice Centre, your personal tutor, another officer etc.)
+ If they know the answer or solution, they’ll reply with that If it’s an issue that only affects one or a small handful of students, they might email someone like a Pro-Vice-Chancellor or a Head of Department for questions or clarification
+ If it’s an issue that is affecting a lot of students, they’ll likely reply to you to keep you in the loop about what they’re doing, and bring it up in their Officer meeting to keep the issue moving forward.

Here’s a specific situation Bran (Education Officer) was dealing with:

“A Fine Art student emailed me about losing access to Creative Cloud. I emailed back saying I’d send an email off to the Faculty Head of Education for Arts & Humanities (Philip Drake) and let them know of any developments. Philip forwarded my email to someone within the faculty who was working on access to Creative Cloud, who then replied to me with what they’re working on. I passed this info on to the student, who seemed mostly satisfied, but I made a note to check up on this issue in a few weeks to make sure the implementation was going well.”

It will vary depending on which officer and the nature of the problem who they speak to, but it works pretty much that way!

Filling in a survey

If you fill in a survey, your responses will get collected together with all the other students who have told us stuff too, sometimes in a report. A staff member at The Union reviews every response and will pass them on to the Student Officers and Senior Leadership team, and use them to make sure when they speak to the University, they’re talking about the right things.

We hope this makes things a little bit more clearer, and knowing about the process will encourage you to keep getting in touch.

So whether you’re awake in the middle of the night, or maybe having a bite to eat and there’s something bothering you — DM us, email us, or fill in this quick survey and keep letting us know what’s on your mind.