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:
Hello 🙂 I think the highlights of this project is how you connected personally with what Beyond The Conversation advocates for. I like that you worked towards increasing the engagement by posting more interactive elements like polls and questions for your followers. Sticking to a meaningful color theme is also something that helps establish a brand identity for the community partner. Introducing yourselves is a great way of making the audiences connect with you more as individuals, on a personal level. As you mentioned, an aspect that could be improved in 3 days could be posting more frequently, to keep the page updated. An idea would be to collaborate with other UBC clubs based on similar topics to host events together. This will get the organization’s name out there and increase the audience numbers across social media platforms.
Hello everyone, I really like your progress and efforts! I was initially thinking about choosing the organization and I’m very glad to see there is dramatic improvement in the account given there is a good cause for the outcome. It seems to me that you guys are clear about the transition of target audience and are able to adjust your strategies accordingly. In addition, the way you posts descriptions about yourselves is really inspiring, since it provides intimacy with the audience. Apart from the strategies, It would be more comprehensive if you included your evaluations on the outcome it regarding engagements, like/comment/view ratio and how it helps with your events. Also, it would be better if you keep the consistency of posting posts, it seems that you guys are starting a bit late. I would advice that you could also transfer your multiple stories into your highlight reel so every visitor could see your recent activities and events. Overall, really strong project and thank you all for help with this organization, it is truly inspiring and motivational.
Hi, I like your CEL project that help people feel isolated and want to get out of loneliness. It’s so meaningful. And you all did well in increasing the engagement for your social media account. In order to allow audience make friends with each other, interaction is really important.
To improve your performance in 3 days,I think you can focus more on the niche audience who immigrant from a foreign countries, other cities as well. I know that some of them might have trouble in speaking English or adapting new environment. Your organization can build a community or group chat that allow them to share their experience. People who share the same feelings can easily make friends with each other.