Our Team: Anna Gibson, Shu Sasaki, Danae Biln
Low Entropy Partners: Vanessa Wideski, Harveer Mann, Manoj Chaudhary, Jayashankar Etikkota, Rayna Aulakh
Low Entropy strives to create a safe place for community members to come together and connect about a variety of topics. They hold several events each week for anyone, on topics such as Mood Spectrum Disorder, Conscious Connections building, and Sharing Circle events. Since the pandemic, the events have taken place online which expands the reach of the group to help as many people as they can. The foundation is primarily made up of volunteers who want to make a difference in people’s lives. The people who work with the organization are giving and passionate individuals who make an honest and beautiful effort to help the community.
About our community partner
Low Entropy Foundation is a community-building mental health not-for-profit organization based in Coquitlam, BC. The foundation was created in 2015 and consists of a team that is enthusiastic about helping the community. They named themselves Low Entropy because they have set out to create a calm and peaceful state of being. When something has high entropy, it is chaotic, so at Low Entropy, the idea is to give people the tools to be able to calm down and cultivate a state of low entropy through connections and feeling seen and heard.
The problem/need addressed
Low Entropy wanted to reach a wide range of audience members from a variety of demographics. The foundation’s social media team was a well-oiled machine when it came to infographics on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, but their presence on TikTok had been neglected. They wished to reach the younger community members through their social media and they wanted to archive some of their older and less cohesive posts on their Instagram.
Our solution and its implementation
To help Low Entropy we set up a new TikTok account and posted reels on their Instagram account. We believe that by studying the TikTok algorithm we could reach a wider audience for the Low Entropy Foundation and therefore help more people find community support. We set out to create an account that adds to the trend on TikTok of therapy and advice videos. To implement this, we worked with Vanessa Wideski and wrote scripts for three videos that featured Vanessa explaining the purpose of the Low Entropy Foundation. We also reached out to all of the Low Entropy Foundation’s volunteers with prompts and instructions on how to film a video that would add to our objectives with TikTok if they wished to give their insights and advice. Additionally, we filmed ourselves responding to prompts like “what is your favourite quote or mantra” and “what do you do to take care of yourself during a busy week?”. These allowed us to create videos where we asked viewers to duet our posts. This encourages user-generated content and can attract new people to the Low Entropy Foundation. We also posted the three scripted videos to Low Entropy Foundation’s existing Instagram account so there was a concise explanation of the organization on Instagram as well song with completing the foundation’s wishes to archive their older Instagram posts.
The results
The Low Entropy Foundation started with no followers and no videos. Within a few weeks, we gained 18 followers and 51 likes from 7 videos. From the Low Entropy Foundation’s Hootsuite account, we were able to determine the demographic of people that most engaged with our TikTok videos were between the ages of 25 – 36. Our videos averaged about 5 likes per video and received approximately 150 views per video. Our videos on the Instagram account reviewed just over 3,000 views each and averaged 8 likes per video which are on-trend with their usual engagement patterns on Instagram.
Self-evaluation
As a group, we took a while to feel confident to start posting with the Low Entropy Foundation’s values in mind, but once we got the hang of it we were able to build a very strong beginning for the Low Entropy Foundation’s TikTok account. We all learned a lot in this process. We learned how to communicate with an existing social media team and how to take initiative in promoting an organization’s services. It was imperative that we research what hashtags would both be favoured by the algorithm and reflect the values of the Low Entropy Foundation. We learnt how to work in a team to create content and how to professionally and respectfully work with volunteers to experiment with the types of content that will bring awareness to this wonderful organization.
Through this process, we realized that creating and curating social media content takes a great amount of time. Mobilizing a team of volunteers is much more difficult than we knew at the beginning of this project. Reflecting on the work we have done with Low Entropy Foundation we realize that we could have connected the new TikTok account to one of their other social media accounts sooner instead of searching for passwords for as long as we did. Although once we did come to the conclusion that we could start a new account for Low Entropy Foundation and create a fresh and relevant brand persona we built a profile that was interactive and engaging.
We liked and commented on videos similar to our topic and followed accounts that inspired us. Our tactics were researched and have slowly been working to create a following for the Low Entropy Foundation’s new TikTok. With time and consistent posting, we believe that the page we have created for Low Entropy will provide them with a wide range of audience members and therefore more people will feel connected through a community and feel supported in their lives.
Hi guys! I think it was really brave of you to make TikTok the main focus of your project, as it takes a lot of effort to make videos as well as make strategic use of the algorithm. One thing I would love to see is more of your videos, so if you guys could link that or provide some examples in your post, that would be awesome! Also, it would be great if you could write a couple of more lines about the specific work that Low Entropy was doing.
Hello!
I think your team did a great job in this project, especially in the case that you have been focusing on helping an organization with several well-established and well-maintained social media handles to expand the audience base. Creating and promoting a new TikTok account from scratch also shows your meticulous planning and thorough collaboration with the community partner for the project. In the section that presents your results of the project, you include some general data to demonstrate the impact, but I would suggest perhaps detailing the performance of each video you posted in terms of reach (the view count) and engagement (likes), which might help you better showcase your achievements in the project. Additionally, I think it would also be great if you could elaborate a bit more on how the TikTok account could be incorporated into the consistent development of Low Entropy’s brand style and brand image as an interesting idea to think about beyond the scope of this CEL project.
Overall, it is an amazing project!
Running a new social media account is a bold endeavor, and I’m sure it’s not easy! I went through all your video contents and thought you did a great job! This is an account that contains very comprehensive information, including an introduction to the organization and some tips/experiences. I have two little suggestions here. First of all, you can add background music to the video, which will make it even more attractive. Second, information about the organization can also be included at the end of the video that provides the experience as promotion. Overall, you did a great job!
Fangyi
Hi!
I really enjoyed watching your video documenting the process of your project with Low Entropy. I liked how you included screenshots of analytics and metrics you documented from Hootsuite, as it shows you understand the true strategy behind marketing campaigns. Having visuals in your video also helps with understanding your thought process behind the TikTok strategy. In terms of suggestions, I think having more visuals instead of just watching the video of you talking to the camera would make your video more engaging! In addition, maybe having more people voice over the video from the group may also help make the video more interesting. Overall, I really enjoyed learning more about your project! 🙂