Little Mountain Neighbourhood House

Students: Eduarda Nogueira Marion, Evan Cheung, Lynette Yu

Community Partner Collaborators: Joanne MacKinnon, Joel Bronstein, Michael Labre

 

Introduction:

During the last couple of months, our team has been working closely with our community partner collaborators to develop strategies that could be used to increase social media presence and engagement. Overall, the staff at Little Mountain was welcoming and understandable with all our ideas. Come check out how this process has been.

 

Background information about Litle Mountain Neighbourhood House (LMNH):

Little Mountain Neighbourhood House is a community house that seeks to connect neighbours through programs and events. They have programs aimed at the whole community, from camps for children to Mahjong meetings for the seniors. Every day multiple events are being hosted in the house. One program that we got really close to was the Riley Park Community Garden. The garden is administered by Little Mountain and volunteers, and it is the core of Little Mountain’s food distribution program. 

What we were working on improving:

• Since Riley park community garden is a project attributed to LMNH, we are responsible for managing both. The major challenge is that we need to promote them interactively and garner more audiences who are generally interested in the little mountain neighbourhood community and find a better way for users to associate LMNH with other projects such as Riley Park Community Garden.
• Finding long-term solutions posts ideas to create more engagement and reach on LMNH social media pages.

 

Our solution and its implementation

LMNH and Riley Park have an older audience as their target (most programs are focused on seniors, families with young kids and adults). Since researchers suggested that older audiences are the most familiar with Facebook, we decided to work solely with this platform. Afterwards, our immediate response to that problem was to conduct an extensive research over the past posts to understand what has worked and what has not. Overall we gathered the following information:

• Posts with images and videos have a higher reach and engagement. We plan to have more photos on the feed and try to use the stories tool. As well we include this information on the staff meeting.
• The post “this week at the garden” had a good engagement, we tried to schedule it as a weekly post, if possible for both pages.
• The information posts seem to be doing well, we will continue with those.

We also noticed that the following could be improved:

• For the events, they usually just post the graphic with the dates when it will happen and that is all. Our solution is to start using the events tool on Facebook. By using this tool the events will be highlighted on a special tab, you can set the event as recurring, and people can respond to it and receive reminders from Facebook. They are all good. We will guide the staff to start using this solution.
• Lack of posts that asked questions to the audience. We developed some fun and interacting graphics where we would ask the audience for their responses and use polls.

Lastly, to further incorporate the connection between the Riley park community garden page and the LMNH page we created Facebook covers that invited the users to check their other pages.

We were hopeful that this combination between continuing with what was working and developing a new type of post would be the best solution.

 

Deliverables and impacts:

For the Facebook covers the main goal was to project an impacting headline to catch attention. As well, our mentors wanted us to continue with the previous images they had as covers to show what is the program’s core. For Riley Park: community and volunteer engagement. For LMNH support for everyone, a photo that represented they were a caring and upbeat community.

 

Our results in this particular deliverable were not possible to calculate. However, we strongly believe that having the graphics above will make people aware of their other pages once they visit the page.

The following photos are some of the interactive posts we developed. Which we asked users to comment down below.

Can you spot the mistake we made on the veggie graphic? the Q is missing. And people did notice, and we started a conversation thanks to it, something Riley park does not usually have. The post had a comparatively high reach and engagement. However, we are not able to tell whether people truly enjoyed it or if our mistake had some influence on the high numbers.

For the second graphic, our first plan was to post the graphic with a poll. This way users would interact with low effort. Unfortunately, the poll feature was temporarily unavailable. So, we proceeded to ask our audience in the caption to tell us what type of tea do they resonate with the most. Unfortunately, this post did not have the best outcome.

The information posts continued with regular reach and engagement. We decided to change our strategy by posting more photos on “last week in the garden”, which turned out to break the records of reach and likes.

Lastly, the events tool seemed promising, but they did not score well when it comes to reaching. Posts, where we shared the event, seemed to have a much lower reach than just posting graphics of the event. 

Here are some of the successful graphics we created for Little Mountain Neighbourhood House and Riley Park Community Garden:

We created a basic vegetables infographic for Riley Park Community Garden to post on their Facebook Page on their “Info Mondays”.

Here’s an illustrated tutorial we created on how to make an easter bunny step-by-step; we posted it on Little Mountain Neighbourhood House’s Facebook page on Easter, and had a high reach.

We found that the best way to engage with our audience is through sharing photos with captions, just like our series “last week at the garden”. Informative and interactive graphics, such as a neat infographic, a lovely recipe, and a mini-game, all of which are instant and amusing, and easy to digest also worked. This visual content pulled off a coup in boosting engagement and can be reused by Little Mountain Neighbourhood House in the future. 

 

Another problem we found is that Little Mountain Neighborhood did not fully deploy Facebook’s features, so we conducted a Facebook 101 workshop during their all-staff meeting. We prepared slides detailed with How-Tos, and here are some excerpts:

Self-evaluation

For this project, our strategy is to focus on the visual content and we endeavour to recruit more volunteers to Riley Park Community Garden, a food security project associated with the Little Mountain Neighborhood House community. In the end, though the increase in the number of new members wasn’t that significant, we pulled our old ones closer by amusing them with creative visual content, as well as photos from the events. The interactive graphics such as mini-games turned out to be quite effective because there was a significant increase in comments, which signifies a small achievement in building and consolidating loyalty with our audience. Our graphics are reusable and can also be used as templates for them to reference in future designs. Nevertheless, not all graphics were effective in terms of garnering reach; upon realizing that we may be over-emphasizing the designs and may bore our audience, we changed our strategies by posting relevant photos to promote the community per se. Overall, partnering up with Little Mountain Neighborhood House was a valuable experience as we have not only learned how to implement creativity in direction as a means to promote social media pages but through the process of problem-solving, we understand the challenges of social media marketing, specifically being targeting a different age group and coping with their needs. Despite all the challenges, our partner was very responsive and understanding and guided us through this journey.