M.A. in Strategic Communication Management: Curriculum

Examine strategic leadership and management topics, addressing the communication theories, dynamics, research, principles, and practices prevalent in all aspects of organizational life. Utilize leadership and management theories to address challenges and opportunities facing for-profit corporations, nonprofits, and government agencies. Group relationships are fostered, creating a collaborative learning environment conducive for personal and professional growth that emphasizes effective communication, problem solving, and healthy decision-making.

Connects morality, ethics, and values with leadership and influence. Explore and respond to challenging organizational dilemmas while balancing personal integrity and organization goals, incorporating these elements into the personal and professional decision-making process. Think critically, gain sensitivity in using appropriate language, express clear ethical reasoning in both written and verbal communication, and research the role of leadership in the creation of an ethical corporate culture. Assess ethical risk to organizations in the public sphere and develop insights into personal philosophies.

Learn various research methodologies that are relevant and effective in organizational settings. Become an effective organizational change agent. Gather, analyze, and synthesize complex credible information using action research methodologies. Students select a capstone project that will demonstrate, using action research methodology, organizational change management. Utilize change management theory to affect organizational change.

Increase leadership effectiveness using resources and tools to manage major projects, analytic performance evaluations, and information from cross-platform projects. Students will utilize project management tools to plan for the successful completion of their capstone project.

Explore how digital communication technologies affect interpersonal and organizational communication. Address how to use various digital avenues to reach diverse publics. Integrate digital communication tools into strategic communication plans. Devise an effective digital communications campaign.

Analyze how leadership depends on healthy communication skills that nurture a healthy organizational culture. Critical management techniques also rely on understanding those leadership skills essential to work with people in a dynamic interactive culture. Focus on successful leadership and management strategies as part of human interaction, conflict, decision making, problem solving, persuasion, mentoring, collaboration, team building, change management, and facilitation. Explore how to effectively communicate with top executives in an organizational setting.

Address the basic types and elements of crises, and the importance of providing effective leadership and management in those conflict laden times. Intersections with other fields will also be addressed, including public relations, conflict management, and risk management. Analyze the role strategic communication, media relations, power, and organizational culture play during a crisis. Develop tools for dealing with the media in less-than-optimal situations, learn how to develop plans for different critical audiences (both internal and external), analyze effective persuasive methods, and discover ways to utilize effective public relations strategies for communicating the organizational message during a crisis.

Develop a structured approach to understanding and managing internal and external communications. Explore media relations, the research and creation of strategic public relations media plans, audience analysis, media characteristics, media and marketing decisions, and how to manage various communication technology functions and budgets. Special attention given to the role of navigating current and future media landscapes.

Create a content strategy that develops meaningful, cohesive, engaging, and sustainable communication content to attract and retain target audiences. Develop a strategic perspective on how content is aligned with customer needs and organizational goals. Analyze stages in the content life cycle. Measure content effectiveness using analytics and feedback. Study storytelling, multi-channel, cross-channels, and omni-channel techniques.

Explore the benefits of a customer centric organization through analyzing different strategic models. Craft a customer experience (CX) strategy to aid organizations in competitive markets. Evaluate how brand, technology, internal and external stakeholders, and processes should be successfully communicated. Understand the dimensions of customer value and effectively map the customer journey.

Review and reflect upon the program’s courses and capstone project to leverage learning for future success as a strategic leader. Complete and present the program’s capstone project.

Explore the major concepts, research, theories, and models that constitute intercultural communication, with an emphasis on using these ideas in applied contexts. Important topics include: worldviews, communication styles, skills development in intercultural arenas, societal influences on stereotyping, ethnocentrism and racism, cultural value orientations, nonverbal dimensions of communication, language interaction, gender communication, intra-cultural issues, stereotypes, intercultural transitions, and adaptation.

This international travel course supports students’ program learning with first-hand experience.