Nicoly Vermeulen and Joost Ravoo have more in common than they may have thought themselves. TU Delft ‘s Vice President of Operations and Director of Marketing & Communication are both dyed-in-the-wool in the communications profession and not afraid to speak out. Part 1 in a series of interviews with executives and their communications directors.
Since February 2019, they have been working together on the TU Delft campus. They didn’t know each other but clicked almost immediately. Joost Ravoo came to talk about filling the position of Director of Marketing & Communication on an interim basis. Nicoly Vermeulen had joined the Executive Board a year earlier as Vice President of Operations.
Joost: “I liked Nicoly right away, I don’t know if it was the other way around, but I found her open, honest and direct. Nicoly has done and experienced great things in her career and she is not afraid. I think that’s very important. I can’t work for a scared boss, that cramps things up. Nicoly: “We definitely have a click. We are often on the same train between Delft and Haarlem and talk a lot together. Joost is also part of my management team, where he contributes to matters that transcend communication: discussions about change and cooperation. Joost shows guts, enters into discussions, names issues. Sometimes he gets a bit wild, then he just shouts something to the mayor of Delft, who fortunately can take it very well.’
That Joost likes to get – and take – space was to be expected. It is the reason he left last January after a year and a half as Director of Communications at Gemeente Amsterdam. His departure had to do with the Board of B&W that had taken office in May 2018, Joost explained in Adformatie at the time: ‘I started working at the City of Amsterdam to professionalize communications and give it a more long-term perspective in connection with the city. Under the new administration I didn’t get the space and support for that. That’s why I left.’
That Nicoly does give that space and appreciates that a communications director is bold is perhaps even more courageous in light of her experiences at the Social Insurance Bank SVB, where she was board chair from 2012 to 2016. SVB makes tens of billions in payments such as child support and AOW benefits every year. In 2015, all sorts of things went wrong with the payment of personal budgets, and as the organization’s boss, Nicoly became the target of heavy criticism. Therefore, after the situation stabilized somewhat, she left.
She held her heart for a moment when one of TU Delft’s professors was interviewed by the NOS Journaal on television about self-driving cars, just after the accident in the United States with Uber’s Volvo XC90 car that killed a pedestrian. It was March 2018, Nicoly had just been working in Delft for two months. ‘I had seen an NOS van on campus that day and thought it was about a report of a TEDx event, but in the evening I suddenly saw the professor on the NOS News and I thought, oh dear, what is he going to say? He had a very good story, really excellent. But I came from an environment where things sometimes went very wrong because people made autonomous statements that suited them politically. I became very keen on that.’
About TU Delft’s communication, Nicoly did not have to worry, because it was in order. As many as 150 people work in various communications departments at TU Delft, which encompasses a community of 26,000 students and 10,000 faculty and staff. TU Delft was and is regularly in the news with beautiful or interesting scientific news. Joost is now a permanent employee there. He had already hoped so, as he indicated earlier: “TU Delft is a figurehead of Dutch knowledge and skill, with a nice socially engaged mission, so staying here a little longer would not be a punishment.
Nicoly about that, later: ‘What was nice: because he started as an interim, I had a fairly long probationary period with Joost, we were able to get to know each other well. His profile is very different from that of his predecessor.’
What kind of personality were you looking for?
‘There are a lot of smart, opinionated and also somewhat conservative people working here, some of whom want to keep everything the way it is. I was looking for someone who can be connective in different areas and occasionally strict, but who can also switch between different levels. Science is a somewhat anarchic jungle, you also have to facilitate that in a way, you have to be able to deal with it, whereas you have to manage other things much more tightly. If you have a good story and know your stuff, people will follow you.
‘I was also looking for someone who could sharpen the public relations function. I felt we were a little too reactive instead of actively managing our publicity. You might think: science sells itself, we don’t need to do marketing and public relations. We are among the top 20 technical universities in the world and the media know us well. But you can make an even greater impact when you give publicity more direction and focus. In short, there was a need to position the TU Delft brand more sharply externally and better connect the various faculties internally, through a more integrated and thematic approach to communication. Internal communication could also be more effective and efficient.
Joost: “Just before Nicoly came, a strategic framework was written entitled Impact for a better society. College president Tim van der Hagen put it nicely in the FD last year: ‘We are demolishing the wall between science and business.’ Pure science wants nothing to do with that commercialism, but if you say: we want to solve relevant social issues, we go for impact on society, then you also have to work with commercial partners. We’re pretty good at that, but that’s also something that could be much better.
What is the added value of communication to the organization, if anything?
Nicoly: “The role of communication is essential in all areas and at all levels. We deal with ministries, the municipality, the province, with major partners from the international business community. We work intensively with all these parties. Then we have our internal organization and the international labor market. Communication touches on all these aspects. I also really see it as a profession. My two colleagues in the Executive Board are scientists; they say they know nothing about communication, but they do see it as important professional support.’
Has the importance and role of communication changed much in recent years?
Nicoly: “Definitely. It’s faster, everything is more transparent but also more likely to be distorted. The playing field is bigger, more international. You have to be better prepared and be able to move quickly; know what your story is. Just reacting is not enough, you have to be proactive in your communication. We are working on stories so that we can plug them well. TU Delft is a very open university and wants to be just that: open and accessible. We literally are.
Have you experienced any “communication issues” together?
Joost: “The most bizarre thing was the man arrested as a suspect in the murder of three people, in early May, who were walking their dog. His LinkedIn profile stated that he was studying at TU Delft and was still working on his thesis. In the evening this news appeared on social media and we immediately figured out if he was indeed registered with us as a student, what this meant for the people at the faculty and how best to inform the people in his immediate circle. The next morning everything was settled. We made sure there was attention within the faculty to the people around him, telling them that we did not yet know exactly what was going on, but that we were there for the people. We also immediately sent a message to all staff and students, which is quite exceptional for a university of hard science. Our culture is to get everything straight first and then act.’
Nicoly: ‘It’s definitely special that we did that. My fellow board member, the chairman of the Board of Trustees, also thought it was empathetic to inform the community, even though we didn’t know the exact facts yet.’
What are the most far-reaching and interesting developments in the communications profession?
Joost: “I don’t believe in fleeting communication hypes. Communication is all about fairly enduring things. We have all the high-tech communication tools, but what really matters is: how do you craft messages that highlight the people’s story and the organization’s story? We also classically deal with press approach and social media policy. Our stories have to match the setting and social trend, connect to a theme going on somewhere in the world or an urgency that is there.
‘Internally, it’s also much more about essential things. When we sit together as an executive team, sometimes there are pink elephants in the room. The guts I am fortunate to be credited with is naming them. That triggers discussion and there’s nothing high-tech about it – that’s just daring to tell it like it is.
Speaking of social issues, TU Eindhoven has been working with a female quota for academic staff since June. Is that also an idea for TU Delft?
Nicoly: “I think the issue is very important but I don’t know if you solve the problem with a quota. We have a female program, Delft Technology Fellowship, and work with an external search firm that connects data, allowing us to target women. We do a lot to attract more women but also feel it is important to retain them by providing an environment where they can land well.
Joost: “There is definitely more to it than a quota. If we start recruiting more on purpose from our social ambition, on what we want to do for society, this is also going to help us get more women on board. I’m convinced of that.
About Nicoly Vermeulen
Nicoly Vermeulen has been Vice President of Operations in the Executive Board of TU Delft since January 1, 2018. Previously, she was Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer in various divisions at ING and Chairman of the Executive Board at the Social Insurance Bank (SVB), respectively. Nicoly studied business informatics and business economics.
About Joost Ravoo
Joost Ravoo has been Director of Marketing & Communication at TU Delft since February 1, 2019. Before that, he was Director of Communications at Gemeente Amsterdam for a year and a half. Until July 2015, he was director of NS Business. From 2002 to 2007, he was Director of Communications at NS. In 2004, he was voted Communications Man of the Year. Joost studied business administration at Nyenrode and earned his master’s degree in corporate communications at Erasmus University.
This is the first part of an interview series with executives and their communications director initiated by Herman Rutgers Executive & Interim Search.
