Jikke van der Putte new Head of Marketing & Communications Department
In February 2025, Jikke van der Putte succeeded Annet van der Helm as Head of Marketing & Communications at Leiden Law School. We talked to Jikke about her vision and ambitions for the department.
A better leadership transition at the Marketing & Communications Department (M&C) is hard to imagine. Jikke van der Putte, having worked at various organisation including KPN and the Dutch Tax Office, joined Leiden Law School back in September 2023 as team leader Communications at M&C, under Head of Department Annet van der Helm. Now she has succeeded Annet as Head of M&C as of February 2025. High time to get better acquainted with Jikke and hear about her plans for the department.
You’d already been team leader of the Communications team (editors and communication advisors) for a year. Was it a big step to take over the entire M&C department?
During my time as team leader Communications, I learned a lot about the day-to-day affairs here at Leiden Law School. When Annet took a three-month sabbatical in 2024, I temporarily took over as Head of Department. That allowed me to find out what the role involves and it gave me time to develop my own vision. My professional background is in marketing communications, so I’m glad I can now use my marketing experience in my new position. And I’m glad that I can do so together with a team of professionals I already know and who also know me.
What’s your first priority as Head of Department?
First, I want to focus on maintaining a professional and stable team. That means developing the right energy, work-life balance and atmosphere, so that everyone can give their best. I’ve already started working on that, but I’d like to develop it further. The M&C team includes professionals offering different areas of expertise; from a translator, marketing specialist, communications consultant and editor, to an external relations and alumni expert. We want to identify our tasks and how we perform them to achieve better cross-fertilisation within the team. In this way, we can continue to build on our expertise and achieve even more.
What else do you think is needed?
We need to work on positioning the team better as a partner within the faculty. While it’s true that the content comes from the institutes, we have the expertise when it comes to marketing & communications. Only by working together, can we show who we are and what we do. So, we need each other to be able to position the faculty as a whole to its best advantage. Whether we’re marketing our degree programmes or showcasing our research, it’s all about working together with the institutes and other support departments. In that way, our work will become more proactive instead of reactive. After all, at a time when we’re facing government cuts while rolling out our ambitions for educational innovation, it’s essential that we stay in touch with each other.
How do you want to raise the team’s visibility within the faculty?
It’s important that people become more familiar with our team. For some people, M&C still seems to be a ‘grey’ area – they don’t really know what we do exactly. After all, we’re all good at communicating, right? But here at M&C, the question we ask is: are we reaching the audience we want to reach? Thinking from the perspective of the target audience and the goal you want to achieve requires a clear strategy and well-formulated communication and content. And we can only achieve that by working together. So as a team, we need to be more active and visible within the organisation. And vice versa, the organisation needs to know how to find the M&C team.
What do you think is important in a team?
One of my core beliefs is working together. I’m a big fan of creating synergy. To achieve that, you have to know each other well and know how you can complement and support one another. But a healthy dose of humour is equally important: we all need to laugh. It helps to put things in perspective and it helps us be creative and enjoy our work.
What can we expect from you in the future?
I’d like to keep building on cooperation with the institutes and faculty support departments. That we all know where to find each other within and outside the team. Together with the M&C team, I hope in this special anniversary year to position Leiden Law School as a faculty that is at the heart of society and always on the move. I invite everyone who wants to know more about M&C to take a look at our page or arrange a meeting with me.