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