Students: Savannah Rawlins, Kavya Vohra, Liam Frost-Jackson & Taylor Weiss

Community Partner Collaborator: Michelle Phung

Introduction:

We had the pleasure of working with Atira Women’s Resource Society this past semester, with the ultimate goal of increasing community awareness of women who have experienced gendered violence and misogyny within the Lower Mainland. With the help of Atira’s social media coordinator, Michelle Phung, and many zoom meetings, we sought out a plan to help generate engagement on their social media platforms, in hopes of reaching our collaborative goal. 

About Atira:

Atira Women’s Resource Society, is a non-profit organization working to end violence against women in the Lower Mainland. With support offices from the Downtown Eastside to White Rock, Atira supports anyone who identifies and lives full-time as a woman. They specialize in housing, daycare, education and even host an art studio where women can come and create art, and later sell it for their own profit. Atira’s value’s perfectly exemplify what they stand for – inclusive feminism, women-centered, harm-reduction and innovation – these values soon became embedded in our own minds as we navigated through designing content for their social platforms.

The Problem:

With COVID-19 and the ever-continuing lockdowns, there has been a major rise in domestic violence across BC and the world. Furthermore, as every company has suffered losses with the pandemic, Atira has suffered the loss of many donors who help facilitate their ongoing programs for women and children. Atira made it clear to us that privacy and confidentiality of the women they help, was something they placed extreme value in. Keeping this in mind, they wanted us to increase engagement, in hopes of spreading awareness and attracting more donors. 

Our Solution: 

Our first response was conducting a social media audit, which quickly presented the gaps within their social media, and engagement statistics. We instantly noticed three simple changes that we could add to their posts and stories that would increase not only engagement, but followers. These changes were hashtags, tags and a limit to number of posts, stories, and tweets per day. Along with these suggestions we provide a list of relevant hashtags that Atira could easily add to each of their posts. Some hashtags we came up with included #FreeofViolence, #EndVAW, #SupportWomen, #WomensShelterBC, and #WomensResourcesBC. Furthermore, we created a hashtag that the staff of Atira could use, which would then file these posts for Atira’s future use on their socials. We also suggested the implementation of tags, especially when working with a donor. Through our research, we discovered that companies love to repost when contributing to local non-profit organizations, which ultimately brings more engagement back to that organization. For example, Lush, the cosmetics company often donates products to Atira to either use for giveaways, or to treat the women who stay at their shelters. Lush having 4.1Million followers, a repost of Atira’s content would attract 2,000x more people, acting as a feedback loop. Lastly, we realized Atira often would post more than 5 posts and stories per day, and again through our research we discovered that the more posts an account posts in one day, the more likely it is for users to skip through and not read the information being given on such posts. Atira being an account that often includes very educational information within their posts, we felt this to be a very key principle to roll out on their platforms. 

Atira already having a very strong social media team, they had planned out most of their content till the end of March, yet trusted us with planning certain giveaways and campaigns that would later be rolled out on their Instagram. The giveaway we planned for April was in partnership with Pacific Basket company, in which we formulated the idea of a spring theme, which we could cohesively use throughout the guidelines and content we created. Followers could simply enter by liking the post, following both Atira and Pacific Basket, and finally commenting their favourite spring emoji and tagging two friends. We also created a content calendar so Atira would know exactly what to post and when. 

Lastly, we designed a campaign for the ‘Summer Haze’ beer by Hoyne Brewing. Every June, Atira teams up with Hoyne Brewing, where every bottle of Summer Haze sold, Hoyne donates 50cents to Atira. While they weren’t able to participate in the campaign last year due to COVID-19 restrictions, Atira is excited to be working with them again this upcoming June. We first came-up with some content Atira could use to further promote the beer, and then planned out an official campaign. Taking inspiration from their past campaigns, we came up with the idea of photographing the bottles, socially distanced, at different beaches in Vancouver, such as: English Bay, Kits, Ambleside, Second Beach, White Rock etc. This would encourage people to not only buy the beer, but to get outside, enjoy our local beaches, while of course staying socially distant. 

Progress Video:

The results:

Tracking the simple changes we implemented on Atira’s social platforms we instantly noticed a major increase of engagement (likes, comments, story views). Furthermore, in just under two weeks we reached our follower goals on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. With Instagram being our main focus, within our first month of working with Atira, we reached our goal of 2000+ followers, and continued to supplement this growth by working on new campaigns. (Hoynes beer, Spring giveaway).

Although we won’t be able to actually track the engagement of the giveaway and Summer Haze campaign, we are looking forward to seeing them being rolled out and interacting with them on Atira’s Instagram. 

Below is some of the content we created for both the giveaway and the Summer Haze campaign:

Self-evaluation:

We were successful in helping Atira achieve their follower goals while also creating an engaging online environment through social media awareness – such as the use of hashtags. As well, the Spring Giveaway and partnership with Hoyne Brewing for the Summer Haze campaign, will help with community engagement in the upcoming months. Throughout this project, we learned that there are many ways to build an online presence. For instance, collaborating with other companies can help you gain followers while also establishing and building relationships in the community. 

This project required not only a social media audit and data analysis, but also research of their social media pages and community partners to get to know who Atira is, and what they stand for. The CEL experience has given us the opportunity to apply in-class learning to a real life situation and test our knowledge and preconceived notions of what social media marketing is all about. In the end, we are extremely thankful for Atira for not only trusting us with our social media advice, yet building our own awareness of the violence against women within our own city.