Students
Penny Chan, Evens Wong, Hui Wong, Chloe Zhang

The Wellness Proposal (Community Partner) Collaborator
Rishika Selvakumar (The Wellness Proposal Founder and President)

Introduction
The Wellness Proposal is an organization dedicated to mental health awareness, especially in applying proper mental health in the day-to-day. In working with them, we hoped to be able to benefit their organization in a meaningful way. As the organization was looking for help with their social media page, we communicated and worked with them and their marketing team in both implementing content strategies and creating content. We chiefly gave suggestions for directions their Instagram could take, spent time creating a new visual scheme for the page, and helped in increasing reach. Our role revolved around creating a scheme that would hopefully reflect the goals of the organization as a space for mental health, ensuring that the page could convey a certain atmosphere. Though we ran into challenges along the way, we have gained a lot through experiential learning in this project, especially in managing communication virtually through the Covid-19 pandemic. We ultimately hope to have helped the organization moving forward past the CEL project.

Background information
The Lower Mainland Wellness Proposal Foundation (The Wellness Proposal) is a UBC student-created group that focuses on applying proper mental health daily. The Wellness Proposal aims to help provide everyone with the ability to care for and support the well being of themselves and others in a group dynamic. They view wellness as an ongoing, imperative process, and aims to help individuals make and execute wellness plans. To this end, they have held a number of events including an art contest, a volunteer fair, a video series to benefit first-year UBC students, and a panel to help ease university transitions. They have also collaborated with Campus KNCT @ UBC and Richmond Cares, Richmond Gives.

The problem/need addressed to solve in this project
The Wellness Proposal aims to raise awareness around student mental health, provide a safe platform for conversations about mental health, create a society of students who support and empower each other, and provide mental health tips on their platform(s). They want social media campaigns that reach potential volunteers and student ambassadors, provide a platform for talking about mental health, and send useful messages. The organization wanted suggestions on how to better engage with their followers and reach a larger audience. The need was then ways to increase social media activity and engagement in general.

Solution and implementation
Coming up with a solution
To come up with our solution, we spent time meeting with each other looking over The Wellness Proposal’s Instagram page. We did a comprehensive social media audit, as suggested by our Hootsuite training, and from there, worked through strategies grounded in class readings (such as fostering social relationships and engagement as explored by Mahoney and Tang). Our approach and inspiration from this angle were drawn from looking at The Wellness Proposal’s page as users of their page, and brainstorming how we might change it. As we did our audit, we sent messages to communicate suggestions to each other, eventually articulating ideas that could be implemented in as social media strategy.

Our solution
Our solutions came after we had taken a comprehensive look at The Wellness Proposal’s Instagram page. Below are our implementations and strategy:

1. Color palette: We decided to work on revamping the color scheme of the Instagram page, using a new color palette (see below). We picked a color scheme that we felt would convey their message visually to work alongside the content they create.
2. Logo: We also decided that we would try to rework their logo.
3. Content Strategy:
   • A week before implementing our social media strategy: Each group member came up with content that revolves around mental health and wellness. We made sure to match our content with our targeted audience – Highschool and University students.
   • Each content post comes with individual captions that invite the audience to engage with our post. Using phrases such as “comment your favorite xxx”, or “leave a heart emoji if you …”, or posing questions for the audience to answer.
   • Each content post also comes with 30 hashtags. 30 is the maximum number of hashtags that Instagram allows creators to use. We deliberately chose specific hashtags that belong to our niche, so that our post would show up on the feed of audiences who are interested. To come up with these hashtags, we searched up adjacent mental health pages and posts, and looked at the hashtags they were using. We also thought from the perspective of a user to qualitatively judge what users may search up. It was a balance of ensuring that the hashtags were neither too niche nor too general. Due to our current follower count (196), we also made sure that our hashtags are not too big (below 1M) or our post will get lost in the pool of content under those hashtags. We also chose smaller hashtags that are specific to what we post as well. Therefore, an increase in reach was achieved. In 30 days (Feb. 2nd – March 3rd), there is an increase in reach of 24.5%.
   • We scheduled to post content 2-3 times a week because the Instagram algorithm favors content creators that post with consistency and show their commitment.
   • We also requested our partner to repost content on their story from other mental health blogs. Given that The Wellness Proposal are not licensed or certified to give out medical tips on mental health, we shared our ideas with Rishika to ensure the strategy could be implemented.

Screenshots of pre-planned content
 

Our implementation ran into some trouble as the organization had just hired a new marketing lead as we were going to begin. As a result, some of our ideas had to shift as we faced some miscommunication. This resulted in a changing of the color scheme (to another one out of the ones we had already picked out), as well as a different logo design. Nevertheless, the post content and the hashtags stayed, and our social media strategy ended up being carried out.

We ran into a few issues in posting, as the organization was posting more frequently than planned; our content ideas had run out earlier than expected. However, we still felt as though we were able to provide The Wellness Proposal with a new visual scheme moving forward post-CEL, as well as hopefully have brought awareness to their organization.

Video of Process & Reflection of Learning

 

Project Results and Impact
Example posts (Hyperlinks in images)

Before

After

Graphic Reflecting Impact

Above are some screenshots and graphics that reflect both the products we created and the impact that we had on the organization. We posted fairly regularly, and as shown in the impact graphics above, generally managed to increase impressions, reach, interactions, and followers to different extents. From these datasets, we can suggest that our social media strategy, in conjunction with The Wellness Proposal marketing team’s strategy, were somewhat successful in achieving the goals laid out initially.

Beyond the numbers, however, we also believe that our impact lies in the way the organization may now have new ideas to take away from working with us. We also hope to have impacted individuals following the account in accordance with the goals of The Wellness Proposal; that is, we hope that the content we created were beneficial and helped to encourage mental wellness. We hope that our time with The Wellness Proposal has been especially helpful to benefiting the organization, both behind-the-scenes and for individuals.

Self-evaluation
For us, the CEL project was a great learning experience, despite the difficulty and challenges we faced along the way. Though we ultimately might not have implemented our strategy as well as we would have wanted, we still ended up with a lot of experiential knowledge about helping to run an Instagram page with an organization, as well as about communicating and generating ideas with a working partner. We did not generate the follower count we had hoped, but we had engaging content and helped to provide The Wellness Proposal with ideas moving past this project — such as a new visual scheme.

For us, what worked best was increasing engagement with posts, using captions inviting audience participation and suggesting hashtags to the organizations (as shown in the before/after and impact screenshots above). We think that this worked well as the content we had planned aligned with the goals of the organization, namely to create a space for wellness, and encourage interaction within the Instagram page. Further, we think that something else that worked was the color scheme the organization and us had worked out.

Some things that did not work well for us were increasing the follower count of the page, as well as effectively communicating our ideas and working out a strategy with the new marketing team at The Wellness Proposal. Driving up followers was difficult, and this was especially exacerbated by our miscommunication. For us, however, we ended up coming to an agreement and working through it; an effect of this was that our content ended up being posted faster than expected.

From this project, we learned a lot about working together with a partner and working as a team. We learned about cohesive communication in the relationship between working as a team and working with a client, as well as negotiating that communication to produce a strategy that works for the both of us. In terms of social media strategy, we learned about how to best engage followers, achieving this through posts that were curated to the goals of the organization. In terms of learning objectives for the class, the CEL project was especially beneficial in learning to apply social media strategies, conduct social media content analyses, and reflect on how social media could be used to a larger end: a socially good one.

Ultimately, we would probably have benefited from having more experience working with a client/partner before the CEL project. Nonetheless, we still took away a lot from it that we could use in future work. Though challenging at some points, the experience has been an especially useful way to understand how social media may be used for good, and how we, as students, can work within the realm of social networks to do so.