Title of the CEL project: Better Together – Our Unique Social Media Project with UGTS

Names of students: Anneke Dresselhuis, Anna Shubina, Kate Macleod, Madeline Carson-Thornhill

Names of community partner collaborators: Unique Get Together Society – Christine Li-Leger, and Debra Abraham

Introduction

This semester our team had the opportunity to partner with the Unique Get Together Society (UGTS) for our community engaged learning project. Through discussion with our Community partner we identified our task to be to create a promotional social media campaign with the goal of encouraging more people to donate as well as creating more brand awareness to support the programs and services that UGTS runs. The majority of our communication with UGTS was facilitated between our group members and UGTS’ Marketing Manager, Christine Li-Leger. We also met with UGTS’ founder, Debra Abraham, who taught us more about the organization’s values and mission throughout our meetings.

Our Community Partner

Unique Get Together Society is a Nonprofit organization that focuses on supporting and empowering indigenous, marginalized, and underserved communities within British Columbia. UGTS Programs are designed to support the mental, physical, spiritual development, and social-emotional well-being of Black, Indigenous, and people of colour. The support that UGTS offers manifests itself through programs with diverse focuses such as nutritional health, family support advocacy, and subsidies. The values at the forefront of UGTS’ work are Healing, independence, community, service, change, and love. Throughout our project we endeavoured to work with these values in mind as well. 

In our work with UGTS, we aimed to create a promotional campaign for their Walk For Trauma event. The Walk For Trauma is an annual walk that was run for the first time last year. This event is one of UGTS’ pivotal fundraising opportunities during the year. The Walk For Trauma raises awareness for childhood trauma and is important for generating funds to help with the provision of trauma services for children and families. The program that the Walk for Trauma helps to raise funds for are essential to being able to run these trauma informed programs which offer help to clients as young as five years old.

The Problem/Need

In our communications with our community partner and our first audit of their social media platforms we identified the problem they were facing in not receiving donations as a lack of engagement on their social media platforms. In our initial meetings, we learned that many people who utilize the services of UGTS are unable to access social media for a variety of reasons. Instead of trying to reach those who use their programs we focused on attracting people who do have social media and had the means to donate to UGTS’ programs. Through the donations of those who can afford to do so, this helps subsidize the cost of programs for people who do not have the funds to access these services.

Another problem that our community partner faces is that they are a very busy organization with a smaller number of staff. Christine Li-Lieger, who was our main point of contact, was the only person who worked on UGTS’ marketing and therefore had to manage a lot of other responsibilities in addition to social media. As such, we wanted to provide guidance through creating content for the Walk For Trauma as well as creating a social media strategy guide to formalize our recommendations and centralize the location of branding information and design objectives.

Video of Process and Reflection of Learning

Our Solution

The first step that we undertook as a team to address our projects challenges and goals was to conduct a social media audit of each of their platforms. Through this process we learned that UGTS had very low engagement across their platforms, with the most active audience being present on Instagram and Facebook. We also identified their most engaged audience, which are women in the vancouver area between the ages of 35 to 44. After our audit we decided to target our focus on Instagram and Facebook to build up the sense of community and further engage their largest audiences.

Some of our initial recommendations included using standard hashtags across all of their posts (such as #UGTS #thisisUGTS #community #healing #IWalkFor #Walk4Trauma #WalkforTrauma), using unified branding through colours and fonts across their posts, and posting to their stories to encourage engagement with their content. For visual content, we created a number of graphic templates that would be easily manipulated for consistent use. The intention here is to create a more cohesive visual feed for UGTS. We use multiple eye-catching graphic elements, consistency of colour, and varied formats to develop a unique style for UGTS’ social media platforms. Both visual and textual elements are designed to communicate information and create a lasting impression on their audience. Use of organic shapes, welcoming colours, and personalized images help to communicate UGTS’ unique community presence. Additionally, these templates are intended to promote and drive donor traffic to their website for the Walk For Trauma event.

We also decided to tackle some of their issues with engagement and reach by applying for the Connect to Community Grant offered through the Centre for Community Engaged Learning. We were successful in our application and have attained $1500 which we plan to use to execute the remainder of the Walk for Trauma campaign. Throughout the term we met with our community partner to determine that the funds would be allocated to run paid social media ads and cover the costs of a few print materials for the fundraiser. The funds will be deployed outside of this course as a few teammates continue with this project on their own time this summer!

To meet the goals we set for ourselves at the outset of this project, as a team we decided to have weekly meetings amongst our group members. In order to be respectful of the time and other responsibilities of our community partner we communicated with them through sending weekly emails with updates and asking for further materials. During our weekly meetings we were able to plan our promotional strategy which we communicated through a content calendar, we discussed course concepts that would be most beneficial to include in our strategy guide for our community partner, and were able to learn from each other through discussion.

Deliverables

As a trial run for the strategies that we were going to use on our walk for trauma campaign we were invited to UGTS’ Black history month event at the end of February. At this event we were able to meet in person with our community partner, learn more about their organization, and run an Instagram takeover of their stories. This experience allowed us access to their Instagram accounts and to learn more about how their community engages with them online. At this event we posted several stories encouraging people to attend the event, highlighting the vendors that were in attendance, and sharing some of the educational materials that had been prepared for the event. In our stories we implemented strategies such as video content to increase engagement, interactive posts to encourage people to comment on the event, and a cohesive visual style to encourage people to repost our content.

Following our attendance at the event we again audited the results that we had achieved through our posts. We reached over 50 people with our Instagram stories on the day of the event. The event itself also gave us insight into UGTS’ in-person engagement. There were a small number of people in attendance, which taught us that the people who are utilizing the services of UGTS are not as likely to engage with their more social events and instead are more likely to attend the program that they offer. 

This informed our content calendar such that we decided to create content to re-introduce the people and programs at UGTS as well as their core values because if people were primarily only attending programs there may be people they have yet to meet at the non-profit or programs that they are unaware of.

We created a series of graphic templates through Canva that we were able to input this information on to create cohesive graphics according to how we believed people were most likely to engage with their content. Our decision to focus our content on the people and programs was guided by our intention of encouraging people to donate. Through focusing on the programs that people’s donations will support we planned to be able to direct people towards the resources where they could donate.

Our first posts that we gained approval for and were able to have added to the UGTS feed was an introductory post highlighting the upcoming Walk for Trauma. These posts served to mark our entrance into the promotional campaign for the Walk for Trauma and the captions for each of these posts introduced the guiding principles of the event.

Although we weren’t able to post a majority of the content that we created, we have also compiled those posts here to demonstrate the effect that we had hoped to create on their feed. Our plan for posting was to post a value highlight every Friday, and alternate between a staff and program highlight each Tuesday so that we could create a balanced feed and share important information with their audience. 

Reflection and Self-Evaluation

Firstly, in our reflection we wanted to focus on the things that we accomplished and enjoyed while working on this project. We were able to apply our learnings from the course and discover more about how to collaborate and work with a nonprofit organization. We also were able to learn about how to generate realistic plans and be flexible with changes when the need for them arose. Through our social media audits throughout the term we were also able to demonstrate the course learning outcome of conducting social media analysis and applying that information to critically evaluate the design and how the impact of our posts might connect to social media theory. Although we weren’t able to post very much, we were able to problem solve and connect the content from our audits to the strategies and suggestions we’ve collected and put forward in our strategy guide.

We also faced several challenges during this process which influenced the deliverables that we had intended to create. Due to a variety of factors including our community partner’s busy schedule we did not receive the login to Facebook or the platform that they used for scheduling content until late March. We have submitted 15 posts for approval but so far only 4 posts are visible on their Instagram. As such we are unable to utilize metrics from the three posts that we have available on their Instagram so far. Additionally, we are also unable to track the amount of donations generated from our posts because UGTS has yet to create the donation link for the Walk For Trauma which means that we weren’t able to create a direct link to track click-thrus.

Keeping in mind some of the limitations that we faced in this project, there were some ideas and suggestions that we would have loved to accomplish but were not able to do so based on limitations on our time and resources. One of the things that we hoped to accomplish this term was to start using paid ads to amplify the work of UGTS, unfortunately we were not able to start that process during the term and that will be something that is carried out after assignment is submitted. Another goal that we had during the assignment that we were not able to reach was that we wanted to post twice a week starting at the beginning of March to test out different posting strategies to have our official walk for trauma campaign posts backed by the trials that we could’ve run during March. 

Overall, our team enjoyed this project and are proud of what we accomplished and hope that through some of the team members continued involvement with UGTS that we will be able to achieve some of the goals that we had set for this semester.

Our Team: Riley Job, Vanessa Matsubara, Nicole Medearis

Our Community Partner: South Vancouver Neighbourhood House

Introduction

Our work with the South Vancouver Neighborhood House (SVNH) was focused on serving a specific community and their unique needs which we were able to do with help from our community liaison, Danvic Briones. In tandem, we were able to evaluate their current status on social media, provide recommendations, and collaborate to create a social media strategy that focused on clear communication from the organization to its community. In our meetings and touring of the SVNH facilities, it became clear to us that the organization wanted to improve and change the way that they delivered information and the markets they targeted to better support the younger members in their community.

About South Vancouver Neighbourhood House

SVNH is a community neighbourhood house part of the Association of Neighborhood BC and serves the Killarney, Sunset, and Victoria-Fraserview neighbourhoods. SVNH seeks to provide resources to its uniquely diverse community which is composed of many immigrant families who bring their own unique cultures into the community. SVNH provides a myriad of support systems to its community through workshops, food security programs, education programs, ESL services, subsidized child care, and more. They mainly seek to cater to their specific community which is primarily composed of elderly residents with a special focus on programs for young families and children.

Problems and Needs

In their introduction, SVNH wrote that they wanted to focus on promoting their new space, the Southside Hub, and the daycare program in it, Salmonberry Childcare. Because of the pandemic and COVID restrictions, the community has not yet seen the new space, separate from their existing facilities, or programs. After looking at their pre-existing social media pages, we found that they seemed to mainly use Facebook and LinkedIn. We noted that their infographics were cluttered with many elements and wanted to optimize the transmission of information. When we talked to Danvic, he said one of their goals was to reach a younger audience (11-23). As the SVNH had an inactive Instagram account that hadn’t been posted on since 2016 and contained a very different branding than that of their current style and goals we decided to start fresh and create a new account. To ensure that posts were clear and easy to read we ventured from their typical single infographics image to a multi-slide format to improve the aesthetic and not overwhelm the users. Another concern that Danvic expressed was that he wanted the posts to primarily reach members of the South Vancouver Neighbourhood instead of trying to achieve as much engagement as possible.

Solution and Implementation

We decided on a virtual tour of the South Side Hub to post on their Youtube channel so that the community could see the new space while also staying safe and adhering to provincial restrictions. Unfortunately, because of external conflicts and scheduling issues we were unable to shoot a complete tour. We created many different types of posts in templates more suitable for the Instagram platform that included event information, sneak peeks to the new facility, and so on. We made sure to keep the graphics clean and legible as we found the originals hard to digest. Because of communication obstacles, these weren’t added to the posting schedule but have been kept as references by SVNH.

Initial Post for Salmonberry Published on Instagram

As for the goal of reaching mainly members in the neighbourhood, we decided to use specific hashtags and geotags as there wasn’t a budget for promoting posts. Due to unforeseen obstacles, we weren’t able to post all of our content before the project deadline. As a solution, we have catalogued content for the SVNH that they can use going forward as they see fit.

Products Created

Salmonberry Campaign 

We furthermore were able to create a full media campaign that spanned the majority of their social media platforms for the launch of the Salmonberry Childcare Centre based on the promotional materials given to us. Throughout the process of the creation of products for the Salmonberry Centre, we went through multiple proposed templates and styles and ultimately culminated in a particular style that married the traditional SVNH branding with the unique identities of the different programs at Salmonberry. We were able to create a distinctly branded series of posts that toured and highlighted key factors of the centre to create awareness of the program in the community. We focused on creating a modern design that targeted the young millennial families within their community in the launch of their new Instagram account @southvancom. As we spearheaded the launch of the account we coordinated the formal introduction of the community onto the platform while simultaneously launching the Salmonberry campaign. 

Promotional Posts for Salmonberry Childcare on Instagram

Other Materials 

Despite not being able to follow through with our initial goal of launching the SVNH youtube channel due to underlying factors we were still able to create the framework for the organization to launch it in the future by creating a banner that follows and utilizes their traditional branding in an eye-catching geometric design. Furthermore, we were able to aid the centre in the creation of custom-made advocacy posts which aid to provide the community information surrounding SVNH’s greater values and mission which are set to be posted in late March.

Proposed Promotional Post for Southside Hub for Facebook

Full repertoire of posts created for SVNH social media.

Impact of Products

We were not able to measure the impact of our posts due to the organization’s need for the posts to go through rigorous approval processes and decided to opt for storing their content for their use in the future. Additionally, due to the unique situation of our community partner we opted to help him create and catalogue materials in order to best suit his changing needs within the upcoming month. Therefore we were not able to gain any analytics from our content but can extrapolate from creating a new account with very weak community engagement from other SVNH affiliated accounts on Instagram accounts we can assume that the account would not reach wide audiences or receive a lot of engagement with the posts initially. Furthermore due to the demographics of the community being older building a following on Instagram would be more difficult. However, we were able to impart some of our techniques learned within this class in our suggestions for future content.

New and Improved SVNH Instagram Page

Video

Self Evaluation

Despite the many setbacks that we encountered within our project we were still able to create quality content that is valuable to the mission and vision of the SVNH. Furthermore, we were able to gain valuable experience working in a real-life setting which includes navigating the various challenges included in a non-controlled environment which allowed us to showcase our resilience and tenacity. One of our biggest strengths was our flexibility throughout the project as we had to frequently pivot our vision, content, and timeline in order to meet the frequently changing needs and actions of the organization. However, despite many setbacks we were able to use creative problem solving to create a myriad of content that accurately promotes the essence of the Salmonberry Childcare Centre and the greater SVNH organization. Despite being unable to complete some of our initial goals of creating a wider variety of content we still were able to achieve one of our main goals of creating a uniquely SVNH online presence within the South Vancouver area. Through implementing strategies, such as the use of geotags and hashtags, we helped the organization develop a stronger online presence within the desired area. 

Though we cannot measure the success of our project from an analytic standpoint we were still able to create a successful campaign that launched not only their Instagram but the majority of the launch for the Salmonberry Childcare Centre. With a wide variety of posts on various posts at the disposal of the SVNH, we aided them as we were able to create unique marketing for Salmonberry that still is cohesive with the traditional SVNH branding. Additionally, through the launch of their Instagram, we were able to advise and start the initiative for targeting the younger audience that they desired to connect more heavily with. Our youth was an asset to this branch as we were able to give an educated opinion on what content is age-appropriate for their needs. However, we wished that we could have devoted more time to diversifying the content on Instagram and having a more robust catalogue of posts.

If we were to redo the project we would implement a stronger emphasis on having concrete responses surrounding formatting guidelines as, despite our efforts, we weren’t given the proper materials as soon as we would’ve liked. Furthermore, a greater emphasis on planning a timely content posting strategy would have further helped our delivery of posts and created a smoother launch of the @southvancom Instagram. 

Kiwassa Social Media Strategy 

Team Members: Jessie Reyes, Helena Ventosa, Paige Sullivan

Community Partner Collaborators: Elise Barber, Joanne Nellas, Ida R., and Natalie

INTRODUCTION

In January 2022, we began working with the collaborators at Kiwassa Neighbourhood House to come up with a plan to revamp their social media accounts as well as teach their staff social media content strategies. Through an online collaboration plan, our team was able to bring our studied knowledge about social media management and content creation to an accessible space for the folks at Kiwassa. As a result, the organization was able to see noticeable change and improvement in the cohesion of its content creation strategy.

OUR COMMUNITY PARTNER

Kiwassa Neighbourhood House is a community-based agency that provides free or low-cost services to the people of the Sunrise-Hastings neighbourhood located in East Vancouver. For over 60 years, they have been offering social services and programs to those of all ages in their community. Kiwassa works with other community agencies, as well as businesses and government organizations in order to meet the needs of their local community. The agency strives to create and strengthen bonds within the neighbourhood, serves its neighbours through necessary programs, and partners with fellow agencies to progress the development of its communities’ services. Not only that, but Kiwassa Neighbourhood House acknowledges the diversity within their outreach and values inclusivity for all, no matter one’s ethnicity, identity, belief, culture, economic status, ability, or sexuality. 

THE PROBLEM/NEED WE ADDRESSED

During our first meeting with Kiwassa, they discussed how they wanted to shift the way they use social media. They felt like their social media presence was not as cohesive as they would have liked it to be, and they expressed an interest in wanting to create a unified personality or identity on Instagram and Facebook because they felt that they were lacking one. A coherent personality on social media would bring in more traffic, which was something they wanted along with an increase in interaction with users that interact with their pages. As well, they mentioned how their staff wasn’t very tech-savvy and up-to-date on content creation and social media management, so they wanted live demonstrations and templates to follow so that their whole team could work on their social media content creation and management moving forward.

OUR SOLUTION: WHAT WE DID

To address their concerns, we came up with three ways to implement a social media strategy change: a social media takeover, a live workshop on zoom, and an accessible template that includes everything we taught them during the workshop. 

Before any of that began, the collaborators at Kiwassa spoke about how they wanted our team to give them a social media audit — we were to identify the gaps in their social media process (what wasn’t working) and provide them with details about what was missing from their accounts (aspects of Instagram that weren’t being utilized to their fullest potential, for example).  From there, we were able to identify what had to be worked on and what would be valuable to teach them during the workshop.

During the social media takeover, we revamped their Instagram feed and implemented the strategies we decided to teach them during the workshop. Previously, their feed lacked a clear theme, and their posts were crowded and not as eye-catching as they could be.  We created content that matched the style of their profile picture (we changed it to their logo) and highlights, as well as captured an overall more modern and minimalistic theme in the posts we created using 3 main colours, bubbly fonts, and clipart. To increase engagement, we pasted relevant hashtags in the comments of each post, as they had not been using them. As well, we posted each post on the account’s story and used interactive media to gain attention from their followers, which is something they also had not been doing before. We liked and replied to each comment we received, and we liked the posts of their community partners. A fun thing to note is that the account reached over 1000 followers during our takeover and Kiwassa’s social media engagement went up by 1000%!

After a few more meetings with the collaborators from Kiwassa, we presented a workshop on Zoom to about 20 staff members. During our workshop, we shared our screen to show their staff the updated Instagram account — the new profile picture, the posts we made, the captions we wrote, and the hashtags we posted. We walked them through step-by-step how to create the kind of posts we made on Canva, and we showed them screen recordings of the story creator from the Instagram app so that they’d know visually how to use it. We made sure to explain the importance of social media when it comes to representing their agency and how having a positive, active, and well-planned account can increase their engagement. 

To ensure that what we taught them wouldn’t be forgotten, a recording of the workshop was taken and we also made a template that outlines all the important points we made, like how to use hashtags, what colours and fonts to use on Canva, and how to write interesting captions. The recording helped staff who couldn’t attend the workshop to learn from us asynchronously. Moreover, all the materials are available to the people that are part of Kiwassa on Google Drive if they need to consult it before creating a post in the future. 

Templates used in the workshop:

• Canva Platform Instructions PDF
• Kiwassa Social Media Strategy PDF 

VIDEO OF PROCESS AND REFLECTION

SELF-EVALUATION

The Facebook takeover didn’t really work out because we couldn’t log in and Kiwassa could not log us in either (technical difficulties). Moreover, the workshop worked really well over Zoom since they were able to see what we had done so far and which programs (Canva mainly) we were using to create the posts. I think we needed more time and better communication since we were only using email, which could be tricky at times. This could have helped us achieve more optimal results. Overall, I believe it was a great experience, I learned a lot about social media and content creation for an account other than my own. – JESSIE

This was a great learning experience and it was nice to actually work with an organization in the real world gaining actual experience in this field. Our main goal with Kiwassa was to teach their staff how to use social media better and improve their engagement and I feel that we have achieved that here. We had a successful workshop and the posts the staff have been making are great! We did have other things we had planned on doing as well that we did not end up doing like a promotional video, but we got the main goal done and Kiwassa social media is growing tons! I learned how important communication is when working with teams of people and I feel like our group was very good about keeping each other in the loop and working as one. – PAIGE 

We can definitely say we are at least proud of the outcome and the progress of Kiwassa’s social media. The workshop clearly worked very well and it is evident that they learned the strategies we proposed to them in the workshop – we are seeing this now that they are creating their own posts. Their followers and exposure also increased through the use of stories, hashtags, and a cohesive visual style. I would say that the only thing that did not work so well was the communication, which was mainly done by email, being hard to talk in real-time to them. During this project, I’ve learned to listen to the needs of an institution but also to communicate and teach them about social media strategies. It was a really great hands-on opportunity and I enjoyed working in a team and seeing the results of it. This project definitely allowed me to apply the theoretical concepts learned in this course regarding social media strategies. Hashtags, stories, comment replies, and visuals do matter when it comes to a more engaging use of social media! – HELENA

by Cadderly Kingsbury: 75651612, Sophie Diebold: 17859463, Aylin Turker: 58867250, Amelia Liza-Carre

Beyond The Conversation

Community Leader: Amie Peacock

Introduction:

We wanted to work with Beyond The Conversation because, after moving here alone last year, it was very hard to create a new life by ourselves. While going to university, we were also learning how to be completely self-sufficient, good at money management, and had to increase our self-motivation. Our past experiences would give us a lot to share, and they inspired us to help find other people and show them that they are not alone. Thus, we wanted to normalize feeling alone, destigmatize loneliness and help people understand that it’s not bad at all.

Background:

Beyond The Conversation was created to help people who don’t have a lot of family or friends, and generally feel isolated in life. It’s for people who want to meet people; people that want to get out of loneliness and do new things but don’t know where to start. This organization gives people a safe space to discover new things and people. It is a fairly new organization, and when they started, they didn’t focus on younger audiences, or people our age. As it was curated by people 50 or older, they targeted their generation; the people they knew and knew how to appeal to them. As they grew, Beyond The Conversation leaders wanted to expand their market to people our age, so they began advertising on social media. They tried, but they weren’t familiar with everything, so their accounts have been pretty dormant and unsuccessful. They posted mainly on Facebook and LinkedIn, which are not the main spots for millennials and Gen Z.

What Issues We Targeted:

After the first meeting, Amie was very excited to work with us. She had so much she wanted us to do and frankly, it was at first very overwhelming. Our goal was to improve their social media presence, but she wanted us to go way beyond, such as helping organize events, making group t-shirts, applying for government grants, and more… We were able to narrow it down to a few main goals. The first was to improve their engagement levels. We soon found out that they rarely post, which is the main reason they weren’t getting any traffic on social media. Two was to focus on their Instagram. In a meeting with Amie, she said that she is active on LinkedIn. As great as LinkedIn is, it isn’t a huge social media platform. Instagram was our strong suit, so we focused on growing that. Lastly, we wanted to create a cohesive, aesthetic layout. The logo (featured above) had some really great colors with beautiful meanings behind them. We decided that purple, blue, and orange were going to be the main focal point when looking at this account.

Solutions and Implements:

• Instagram stories

Instagram stories are one of our favorite things we did to increase engagement. We posted them often, which allowed people to view them and lead them to our account every day. Additionally, we used Instagram polls, engaging questions, and interactive stickers to encourage whoever views it to react and interact. In the end, the stories were a great success.

• Consistent, Cohesive Posts

As briefly mentioned above, in terms of aesthetics blue, purple, and orange are the colors on Beyond The Conversations logo because they represent friendship, community, and warmth. I think that message is beautiful, and we wanted to stick with it. Amie, our community partner, agreed. By doing a checkerboard style layout, with white in between the colored background posts, we think the aesthetic looks great. When posting white quotes, which are the ones in between the colored backgrounds, I take a look at the previous colored post and use that to frame, and add colorful distortions, to make it more cohesive. We would say that the beginning of the cohesive theme was successful, and the plan we were making for Amie will help continue that. As for the consistency, it’s tough when we are all very busy with other responsibilities but within the last few weeks, we were able to post either one story OR one post almost every day, which was great.

Infographics

Infographics are aesthetically appealing, colorful, and cute. As a group we did some, showed them to Amie and she loved them! They also were effective to post as an Instagram story, in addition to them being on our feed. We tried to do a minimalistic, clean look, with not too many images and more bold, visible, simple text. Not only did that help with our image and get more information out, but it was a way to make connections with other communities that have the same ideology and goals as us.

• A personal touch

Amie wanted us to be very present, so we made a template for us to insert some photos and text that talks about us, a fun fact, why we are helping, etc. We posted one of ours and Amie loved the idea. We added it to her package at the end.

Self Evaluation:

Perhaps in terms of quantity, we could have done better, especially near the end, but overall, we did a lot to help Amie and set Beyond The Conversation on the right track. Amie is now understanding the importance of hashtags in order to appeal to wider audiences, themes to appear more professional, and consistent posting to maintain active online. We could have spent less time planning and started posting sooner or we could have made a vlog like Amie suggested previously. However,  when looking at what we did do, we did it very successfully and it made statistics go high, and more importantly, it made our community very happy, which is what the goal was in the long run. We also set Amie up with a package to maintain this social media strategy successfully.

In the beginning, the Beyond The Conversations page was dead and messy. They posted sporadically; 3 times a day and then nothing for 4 months. There was no theme, they had very few followers and interactions. After us, we were able to increase their activity by the thousands, and they ended with 183 followers, and are on the right track.

Our video presentation:

Food Hub Campaign

Kelly Chim, Charlene Chiu, Austin Lam, Olivia Santoro

Names of Community Partner Collaborators

Little Mountain Neighbourhood House
Riley Park Community Garden
Point of Contact: Joanne MacKinnon

Introduction

Little Neighbourhood Mountain House offers programs and initiatives that support fellow residents in the community. From childcare, to counselling and art therapy, to programs for newcomers settling in Vancouver, LMNH serves its community in various ways. For our project, we worked directly under LMNH’s Food Hub – a program they created to address food insecurity within the community. At the time our project began, Food Hub was wrapping up their Collective Food Resilience toolkit (a free downloadable infographic/guide that’s meant to help other community-based organisations create food security strategies). Their goal for us was to help them increase their reach so that more people in the community would know about Food Hub and hopefully more people would also download their toolkit.

Background Information about the Community Partner

In 1978, three staff members and a group of volunteers came together to form Little Mountain Neighbourhood House in order to address the local, regional and national issues that residents in the community were experiencing. Nearly fifty years later, LMNH remains a grassroots, volunteer-driven organisation and continues to serve the community by offering programs and initiatives that strengthen neighbourhood life.

LMNH’s Food Hub addresses food insecurity within the community by increasing access to healthy food. Through their Riley Park Community Garden, Yard Garden Harvest Project and UBC Farm Practicum Program, community members are able to build relationships with one another as well as how to grow their own food. Some of the produce grown went towards LMNH’s weekly food distribution. This program provided non-judgmental, low-barrier spaces where individuals who are experiencing food insecurity can come and feel welcomed and supported. Lastly, Food Hub created their collective food resilience toolkit. This toolkit aimed to help other community-based organisations create food security strategies by offering practical examples, resources and tips for implementation.

Problems We Addressed

The problem we had to solve in this project was the lack of engagement on LMNH’s social media. In order to promote LMNH’s toolkit (previous project) and raise awareness on the issue of food insecurity within the community, we had to analyse their previous posts’ analytics and determine how to best increase their engagement. Some of our challenges included not being familiar with their organisation’s structure and working around their system of manually recording post statistics.

As our project focus is on food insecurity, we worked closely with the staff members of LMNH’s Food Hub. We aimed to raise awareness of LMNH’s toolkit and their available programs so that LMNH could see an increase in the number of volunteers and people participating in their events. However, as the length of our project does not permit us to see if more people signed up for future LMNH events, our success will be based upon the analytics of the posts we created. We discussed various methods of promoting their toolkit, such as reaching more people through other platforms such as TikTok or using Instagram stories to engage more of their current followers. Eventually, we decided on simply posting Instagram posts so that it would be more straightforward, and made clear that this project was an extension of the previous toolkit project. 

Solution and Implementation

As our project is an extension of LMNH’s toolkit project, we specifically worked on creating posts that would highlight the toolkit’s “action phase”. 

In order to achieve our goal of increasing engagement, we decided to introduce faces, i.e., real people, on their feed as it was something lacking in their recent posts. This was a major factor in our decision on how to create the “action phase” posts. Based on this factor, we created posts which introduced key members of the Food Hub and their roles in order to demonstrate how action was taken by people using the toolkit. The process of creating each post included interviewing staff, copywriting, designing graphics, editing, and receiving approval, before they were ready to be posted. These posts not only introduced the members, it also highlighted how various programs within Food Hub functioned during the pandemic and the lessons staff members took away from working in Food Hub during a time of high food insecurity.

Although we were mainly targeting a higher social engagement on Instagram, our posts were also uploaded on Facebook and Twitter to widen LMNH’s reach. Keeping in mind their previous project’s design, we stuck with a relatively similar design for our first post which was intended as a transition post to our later posts. Additionally, we also made use of their custom-made watercolour graphics in our posts for continuity. The biggest difference with their previous posts was our use of photos and non-technical language. In total, five posts were created.

The graphics above are a few of the posts we created for the project. 

Example caption:

As of April 4, we have only posted three of the five posts (of which the third one was taken down and is to be reposted), garnering a total of 950 post impressions and reaching 781 unique accounts. Compared to LMNH’s previous 28 posts about the toolkit, which have garnered around 3100 post impressions and reached around 2300 unique accounts. According to the average reach per post (260 unique accounts for our project and 82 unique accounts for the previous campaign), it appears we are still relatively successful in reaching a large number of people with few posts. In addition, our average engagement is higher, with an average of 27 likes per post compared to their average of 5.5 likes per post. We have also gained new followers in the short duration of our posting (March 22 – April 1) and an increasing number of profile visits. This indicates that we have been able to increase the content engagement rate for LMNH.

Self-Evaluation

Overall, working with our CEL partner has been an interesting learning experience. While we have yet to finish our campaign, the content that we have already posted is doing well. This is evident from the increased engagement rates before and after we started our campaign. Our solution, a series of posts highlighting the work of Food Hub staff, introduces the staff members to their community and shares their stories about the programs they lead. As LMNH does not use plug-ins on their website and is unable to measure link clicks and downloads on their website, we do not know if we have achieved the original goal of increasing the exposure and engagement rate of their toolkit. However, we were able to achieve their goal of sharing their stories. 

Although we have been somewhat successful with implementing our solution, we have also faced a few issues throughout this project. Communication has been a big problem throughout the course of the project. While our group had some miscommunication issues at the start with regards to delegation of work, we were able to resolve this quickly. On the other hand, we’ve consistently had miscommunication with the CEL partner despite efforts to rectify the situation. An example of this is our partner changing their mind on the type of content they want and the changes they want made despite the copyediting and graphics being approved in previous meetings. In addition, there were miscommunications within the group as emails got lost between team members, so on many occasions the graphic designer and copywriters were unaware of changes our partner wanted before posting. This has thus lengthened the time needed for each post and impeded the full use of our content strategies (posting times). 

While we worked in line with the learning objectives of the course (conduct basic content analysis of social media data, design, implement, and evaluate social media strategies to achieve organisational and communication goals), the project did not fully enable us to achieve a better understanding of them. As we had limited access to LMNH’s social media accounts, the data that we could retrieve was also restricted. While we were able to conduct an analytics report for the toolkit project we wrapped up, later content analysis was conducted purely through Hootsuite and Meta Business which did not have all the information. This lack of information combined with the miscommunication negatively impacted our attempts at a comprehensive social media strategy.

As we started working with our CEL partner at the same time as the course started, we found ourselves lacking knowledge on content creation and social media marketing skills and strategies. In retrospect, we should have created a more effective and efficient line of communication with our partner. And while we did have weekly meetings with our point of contact, these meetings were not as efficient as they could have been in terms of editing or preparing content. 

Working on this project has shown us the work that needs to go into a successful social media campaign and has increased our appreciation for the coordination needed in social media marketing, especially with regards to social organisations like LMNH. It also allowed us to learn about the difficulties of food insecurity within the community. Despite the setbacks we faced, it has been a fruitful learning experience and a great opportunity to get real-world experience.

Title of the CEL project: Media’s ‘Bounty’: Urban Bounty Social Media Marketing Strategy Project

Names of students: Emily Chan, Caleb Chang, Fangyi Liu, and Ruitong Zhao

Names of community partner collaborators: Stephanie Mak, Urban Agriculture Program Coordinator of Urban Bounty (Richmond)

Introduction

Over the course of the term, we have had the pleasure to work in conjunction with our community partner, Urban Bounty, to evaluate their current social media strategy and develop refreshed digital marketing strategies. This project aimed to increase the organization’s presence on social media platforms (i.e. Instagram) with more web traffic and audience engagement for their upcoming campaign. Though our communication with  Urban Bounty was primarily online due to the impacts of COVID-19, regular virtual meetings and email correspondence supported us in conducting a social media audit, constructing a strategic social media content plan, and generating appealing digital content particularly for promoting the Community Seed Library Program. Ultimately, in addition to helping our community partner improve their brand awareness via social media, the collaboration has provided us with great opportunities to practice knowledge and skills learned in class in a hands-on way. By carrying out the CEL project, we have acquired valuable experience that furthers our understanding of the social media landscape of the contemporary moment.

Background Information about Urban Bounty

Urban Bounty was initially established in 2002 by the Richmond Poverty Response Committee as the Food Security Task Force, and it grew to become an independent society with a societal vision of healthy people, community, and environment in 2009. The organization is dedicated to engaging a resilient local food system through education, advocacy, and community-building initiatives. Their programs have sprouted passionate youth leaders, budding young cooks from low-asset backgrounds, happy gardeners, local seeds, and surplus fruit for those in need. Over the years, Urban Bounty has also held a variety of organic gardening, cooking, and canning workshops in its efforts to increase local food literacy.

The Problem/Need

The problems that we focused on addressing in this project were related to the two major goals set up by our community partner. On the one hand, Urban Bounty required an analysis and evaluation of its existing social media strategy. Based on the traffic data of their major handles and their competitors, we found our community partner lacked the consistent branding of their account and the regularity of posting, which we needed to help to tackle during our collaboration. On the other hand, another key objective of Urban Bounty was to advertise their Community Seed Library Program with a specific social media strategy that aimed at increasing reach and online engagement, and we were instructed to propose a content calendar as well as the content itself for the campaign. In this case, the challenge that Urban Bounty posed to us was that there were not enough high-quality images and/or videos from previous on-site in-person events. In other words, we had to figure out ways to access sufficient footage to create content for the Seed Library Program’s campaign. We and our community partner’s collaborator then discussed alternative approaches to specify what the useful pictures and videos were expected to look like for each piece of content. Thus, we could use the opportunity to produce attractive content while maintaining the authenticity of elements featured in the promotions.

Our Solution & Its Implementation

The initial step we took in this project was to conduct a thorough audit of Urban Bounty’s social media accounts. By evaluating the current states of each handle and analyzing some provided key metrics, we informed ourselves of their existing marketing strategy and corresponding deliverables. This helped us to present our community partner with a report that showcased our findings and some suggestions for the development of a refreshed social media strategy that could tailor the upcoming campaign specifically. Taking our advice into consideration, Urban Bounty made minor adjustments to their accounts, such as adding and categorizing highlight stories on their Instagram profile page, but our community partner also allowed us to implement the new social media marketing strategy by creating and posting three pieces of content for their Seed Library Program’s campaign. We utilized various formats to conduct the promotion, from images to videos, in order to help both raise awareness about the program and encourage participation while following their established social media branding and style guide.

Video of Process & Reflection of Learning

Results (Products & Impact)

Social Media Audit: 

We concentrated on Urban Bounty’s Instagram/Facebook accounts as well as their Mailchimp account. Through the social media audit, the target audience was determined, as well as ideas to boost brand recognition and broaden the audience. To determine the influence on targeted audiences, we studied the substance of social media messages/posts as well as reactions to the organization’s social media material. This covered positive and negative reactions, audience behaviour, response kinds, questions, and comments, and what individuals said about our organization on social media. We also conducted competitor analysis across several social media profiles.

Campaign for the Community Seed Library Program on Instagram:

Content #1: We created a reel on Instagram to introduce the Seed Library Program to the audience. 

Content #2: We made 3 images for a carousel post to show people’s feedback from participants of the Seed Library Program. 

Content #3: We made a “Guess The Seeds” contest and giveaway post with an additional version of Instagram stories. 

Since our goal is to introduce people to the Seed Library project, we made a series of actions on Urban Bounty’s Instagram page. First, we made a reel to show people who we are, what the Seed Library Project is and how to get involved. It achieved 16 likes and 3155 plays in total. Second, we decided to show the audience some feedback from last year. This post ended up getting 29 likes in total. Third, in order to achieve more interactions with the followers, we decided to make a “Guess The Seeds” campaign. People were able to comment on the post and win the prize. We got 30 likes and 10 comments at the end, which definitely achieved a better interaction with people. As a result of the process, we see an increase in likes and comments that leads to a 142% engagement rate in total. 

After the three posts were published, 6 people signed up for the seed library campaign which means that our promotion was working. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing the number of click-throughs.  Also, It’s worth noting that the organization received inquiries about our Seed Library project from Chatelaine magazine and Amazon as a result of the social media material we developed. This benefited the community by introducing more people to our Community Seed Library, which promotes food security in Richmond.

Self-Evaluation

In general, our solution of conducting a social media evaluation followed by the implementation of the new social media marketing strategy in the Seed Library Program’s campaign has solved the intended problem to a great extent. For instance,  the report of our social media audit presented our findings and advice for developing Urban Bounty’s social media strategy which was indicated to be useful in the Seed Library Program campaign. Specifically, during the campaign, we noticed the increase in reach (i.e. the view count) and engagement (i.e. likes and comments) on the content that we curated and produced to concisely inform the audiences about the Program.  Therefore, our content and strategy worked well in the sense of promoting Urban Bounty’s Community Seed Library Program. More importantly, our refreshed social media strategy and the content as corresponding products appeared to help our community partner and their Seed Library Program draw attention from Chatelaine magazine and Amazon. This has further satisfied the identified need of enhancing Urban Bounty’s brand awareness and influence as a non-profit local food security community. Additionally, regular and timely online conversations within our group and between our group and our community partner worked quite well to facilitate the overall progress as well as detailed modifications of the CEL project.

We have recognized three shortcomings during the process. First, because we were required to work on both auditing and Instagram posting, we only have three posts planned for our Seed Library Project promotion. This short period of promotion may lead to lesser effect. Second, we didn’t get a chance to go to Urban Bounty’s farm in person because of COVID-19 restrictions. Therefore our posts lacked on-site footage collection and can only be provided by partners. Finally, because of the partner’s social media policy, we couldn’t get the Instagram account. The lack of effective monitoring makes it impossible to observe the implementation of the strategy at any time. However, our efficient communication with our partners has made up for this shortcoming as much as possible.

The CEL project has connected us with an organization outside the university and allowed us to get involved in a larger community. From this collaboration, we learned about practical skills in social media management, as well as useful strategies for effective communication and interpersonal collaboration with individuals and groups engaging in different fields. This experience can work to our advantage in future work and careers. Moreover, the CEL project provided us with a chance to practice theoretical knowledge and skills learned in class, and we were able to try out different approaches to apply them in an engaging, hands-on way. In this case, what we learned from this project was able to achieve many of the course learning objectives. Though what we learned in class and from weekly exercises laid the foundation of our work in the CEL project, more professional social media listening and monitoring skills and graphic design tips might be helpful in terms of achieving more optimal results. With these, we could provide further and more thorough assistance for our community partner within the course of the term.

Ultimately, this learning experience was quite worthwhile in terms of applying social media strategies, collaborating with someone other than our peers as a team, and forming a level of knowledge about food security, food literacy, and the importance of a resilient local food system. Having an opportunity to work with a local non-profit organization has helped us look deeper into the significance of social media and its implications on contemporary society. Last but not least, we would like to thank Urban Bounty and their collaborator Stephanie for working together to pursue our goals with a focus on the progress of the CEL project.

Project Title: JUMP!-ing into the World of Social Media 

Students: Lakshanyaa Ganesh, Katie Lui, Aarthi Sharma, and Patty Tancharoen

CEL partner collaborators: Simon Bright and Gonçalo Quintino

Introduction

Since January 2022, we’ve had the unique privilege of collaborating with JUMP! Canada Society, working with Executive Director Simon Bright and Marketing & Communications Manager Gonçalo Quintino. We were very excited to be paired with them as a part of the CEL project, as we were all eager to put all the knowledge and skills we had gained from our INFO 250 lessons to the test! They approached us with the aim of using social media to increase enrollment in their summer camps, which are returning this summer after a two year-long hiatus since the start of the pandemic. We learned a lot from this collaboration and are excited to share more about our experience in this post!

Background

JUMP! Canada Society, formerly known as Educo Adventure School, is an organization in the field of experiential learning. Before the onset of the pandemic, they used to run yearly summer camps, either with children registering individually or with a school registering a group of children together. JUMP! Canada is also a part of the larger, global JUMP! Foundation that serves the same function but on an international scale. Through their camps, JUMP! aims to not only facilitate enjoyment and fun through their activities, but also help attendees build important traits, such as interpersonal skills, teamwork, leadership, as well as some survival skills. JUMP! camps are also intended to turn attendees into global citizens, by encouraging diversity, equity and inclusion, enhance their sensitivity towards indigenous experiences and raise awareness about environmental degradation and climate change, along with teaching them about sustainable practices. 

Find out more about JUMP! Canada and JUMP! Foundation. 

Social media links: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn

Problem

When we did our initial research and analysis about the organization’s social media, we first found the handles of JUMP! Foundation and Educo, but struggled to find the handles specific to JUMP! Canada. When we did find them, we observed that they had been dormant for a long period of time, and that they did not have a significant number of followers either. Before meeting with them, due to their scattered social media presence, we were confused as to where exactly we would be posting and what kind of content they wanted us to post, as they did not have a fixed tone or stream of content that they had published.

Upon our first meeting with them, a lot of our doubts were cleared up. We were told that they were no longer using the JUMP! Canada handles, and that we would be focusing on the JUMP! Foundation accounts instead. Those already had a substantial following and were relatively more active. They also told us about their plans to shut down the Educo channels, as they wanted to shift and rebrand their content under the JUMP! banner. They mentioned that their issue lay in engagement. Since they hadn’t run any camps since the onset of the pandemic, their posting, and consequently the engagement of their audience, decreased. Hence, their goal for this project was to redirect followers from the Educo channels to JUMP! and increase enrollment by using  JUMP! Foundation accounts to better engage with existing audiences and also work towards drawing in new audiences. 

Solution and Implementation

In order to jumpstart JUMP!Canada’s social media presence and to promote their 4 summer camps and generate leads, we created a content calendar for the months of February and March. We established a smooth, well run workflow to create engaging graphics following the previously established brand guidelines on Canva and to write engaging captions with relevant hashtags (#vancouver, #summercamps, #jumpcanada, #educo, etc). as well as location tags. Each of our posts used the same colors and design principles to maintain a clear brand image for JUMP!Canada, and we also used pictures from previous camps provided to us by their team on Flickr.

One of the main goals that JUMP!Canada wanted us to tackle was converting their Educo audience to the JUMP!Canada platform, so that was the first post we made. After evaluation of post performance as well as our goals throughout this process, we also brainstormed posts that would add value to their social platforms and their audiences beyond just the promotion of their camps. We created slide decks of what to bring to summer camps, what to consider when choosing a camp, how the camps’ Cariboo location is unique and beautiful, and many more. We primarily created feed posts on Instagram and also converted some of those posts into stories. We also created content for a “targeted promotional post” that would not appear on their page, but on people’s feeds on Instagram as an ad for JUMP!Canada camps. 

Every week, we were responsible for sharing our posts with the JUMP!Canada team on Asana, a workflow software, so they could provide edits at our weekly check-ins before they posted our content on their Instagram and Facebook feeds. We also suggested potential dates and times for our content to be posted based on market research that we had done suggesting when most engagement occurs on Instagram.  

Video

Results

As of April 4th, we have created 25 total feed posts and stories on Instagram for JUMP!Canada, and 15 of those posts have been posted so far — the 10 additional have been given to the JUMP!Canada team to post in the future.

From a KPI perspective, most of our posts have generated an average of 9 likes per post and 0 comments, which is much less than we were hoping or expecting based on their audience/follower count of 1,222 followers. Our facebook page views have increased, and our follower count has as well. Beyond these vanity metrics, however, enrollment numbers for JUMP!Canada’s adventure camps are continuing to increase according to our communications with their team. The posts that generated the most engagement were slide decks that weren’t just solely promotion but provided value to the audience in some way. Below are some samples of our posts:

• Cariboo Adventurers Camp Promotion
• How do you choose the best summer camp for you?
• Testimonials

Below are some of our analytic metrics from the last few weeks:

Self-evaluation

At the moment, it is somewhat difficult to measure the full success of the posts we created in generating leads and enrollments as the posts are relatively recent, it’s hard to say whether our posts contributed directly to enrollments of the summer camps. We were successful, however, in creating fresh content and posts for JUMP!Canada to continue to promote their camps and also provide value for their followers, and we understand through our communication with the JUMP!Canada team that the enrollment for camps is steadily increasing. It was also great to be able to do research and learn more about JUMP!’s aims as well as the Cariboo region where their camps are situated. 

This project was very fruitful and effective in teaching us the importance of a social media calendar and planning ahead for posts. We had a clear goal for each post and came up with our content ideas well ahead of time to get them approved by the JUMP! Canada team. Over time, we also established an efficient workflow and good synergy, which helped us work together to create posts, as well as build on our graphic design and digital marketing skills. We gained experience using Canva, Asana, as well as Facebook Analytics. In addition, we maintained regular communication with the JUMP! Canada team through consistently sending emails and having weekly check-ins discussing the status and success of the project so far. We did have a bumpy start to the project as the details of our workflow and goals were still being worked out – mainly due to time differences and prior commitments –  but once we settled into an established workflow,  internal communication within our student team as well as external  communication with JUMP! Canada improved greatly. 

Overall, we gained real-world digital marketing skills from this project and also were able to fulfill the learning objective of this class to specifically “design, implement, and evaluate social media strategies to achieve organizational and communicational goals”.  Although they were unable to implement all our ideas due to the time constraint, our partners were very welcoming and receptive to new suggestions and have stated that they will be implementing some in the near future. This project allowed us to not only create a strategy and content ideas for JUMP!Canada’s future endeavors, but also build upon the concepts we learned in class using our creativity in a hands-on, experiential manner.