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.