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.