Project Title: JUMP!-ing into the World of Social Media
Students: Lakshanyaa Ganesh, Katie Lui, Aarthi Sharma, and Patty Tancharoen
CEL partner collaborators: Simon Bright and Gonçalo Quintino
Introduction
Since January 2022, we’ve had the unique privilege of collaborating with JUMP! Canada Society, working with Executive Director Simon Bright and Marketing & Communications Manager Gonçalo Quintino. We were very excited to be paired with them as a part of the CEL project, as we were all eager to put all the knowledge and skills we had gained from our INFO 250 lessons to the test! They approached us with the aim of using social media to increase enrollment in their summer camps, which are returning this summer after a two year-long hiatus since the start of the pandemic. We learned a lot from this collaboration and are excited to share more about our experience in this post!
Background
JUMP! Canada Society, formerly known as Educo Adventure School, is an organization in the field of experiential learning. Before the onset of the pandemic, they used to run yearly summer camps, either with children registering individually or with a school registering a group of children together. JUMP! Canada is also a part of the larger, global JUMP! Foundation that serves the same function but on an international scale. Through their camps, JUMP! aims to not only facilitate enjoyment and fun through their activities, but also help attendees build important traits, such as interpersonal skills, teamwork, leadership, as well as some survival skills. JUMP! camps are also intended to turn attendees into global citizens, by encouraging diversity, equity and inclusion, enhance their sensitivity towards indigenous experiences and raise awareness about environmental degradation and climate change, along with teaching them about sustainable practices.
Find out more about JUMP! Canada and JUMP! Foundation.
Social media links: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn
Problem
When we did our initial research and analysis about the organization’s social media, we first found the handles of JUMP! Foundation and Educo, but struggled to find the handles specific to JUMP! Canada. When we did find them, we observed that they had been dormant for a long period of time, and that they did not have a significant number of followers either. Before meeting with them, due to their scattered social media presence, we were confused as to where exactly we would be posting and what kind of content they wanted us to post, as they did not have a fixed tone or stream of content that they had published.
Upon our first meeting with them, a lot of our doubts were cleared up. We were told that they were no longer using the JUMP! Canada handles, and that we would be focusing on the JUMP! Foundation accounts instead. Those already had a substantial following and were relatively more active. They also told us about their plans to shut down the Educo channels, as they wanted to shift and rebrand their content under the JUMP! banner. They mentioned that their issue lay in engagement. Since they hadn’t run any camps since the onset of the pandemic, their posting, and consequently the engagement of their audience, decreased. Hence, their goal for this project was to redirect followers from the Educo channels to JUMP! and increase enrollment by using JUMP! Foundation accounts to better engage with existing audiences and also work towards drawing in new audiences.
Solution and Implementation
In order to jumpstart JUMP!Canada’s social media presence and to promote their 4 summer camps and generate leads, we created a content calendar for the months of February and March. We established a smooth, well run workflow to create engaging graphics following the previously established brand guidelines on Canva and to write engaging captions with relevant hashtags (#vancouver, #summercamps, #jumpcanada, #educo, etc). as well as location tags. Each of our posts used the same colors and design principles to maintain a clear brand image for JUMP!Canada, and we also used pictures from previous camps provided to us by their team on Flickr.
One of the main goals that JUMP!Canada wanted us to tackle was converting their Educo audience to the JUMP!Canada platform, so that was the first post we made. After evaluation of post performance as well as our goals throughout this process, we also brainstormed posts that would add value to their social platforms and their audiences beyond just the promotion of their camps. We created slide decks of what to bring to summer camps, what to consider when choosing a camp, how the camps’ Cariboo location is unique and beautiful, and many more. We primarily created feed posts on Instagram and also converted some of those posts into stories. We also created content for a “targeted promotional post” that would not appear on their page, but on people’s feeds on Instagram as an ad for JUMP!Canada camps.
Every week, we were responsible for sharing our posts with the JUMP!Canada team on Asana, a workflow software, so they could provide edits at our weekly check-ins before they posted our content on their Instagram and Facebook feeds. We also suggested potential dates and times for our content to be posted based on market research that we had done suggesting when most engagement occurs on Instagram.
Video
Results
As of April 4th, we have created 25 total feed posts and stories on Instagram for JUMP!Canada, and 15 of those posts have been posted so far — the 10 additional have been given to the JUMP!Canada team to post in the future.
From a KPI perspective, most of our posts have generated an average of 9 likes per post and 0 comments, which is much less than we were hoping or expecting based on their audience/follower count of 1,222 followers. Our facebook page views have increased, and our follower count has as well. Beyond these vanity metrics, however, enrollment numbers for JUMP!Canada’s adventure camps are continuing to increase according to our communications with their team. The posts that generated the most engagement were slide decks that weren’t just solely promotion but provided value to the audience in some way. Below are some samples of our posts:
Below are some of our analytic metrics from the last few weeks:
Self-evaluation
At the moment, it is somewhat difficult to measure the full success of the posts we created in generating leads and enrollments as the posts are relatively recent, it’s hard to say whether our posts contributed directly to enrollments of the summer camps. We were successful, however, in creating fresh content and posts for JUMP!Canada to continue to promote their camps and also provide value for their followers, and we understand through our communication with the JUMP!Canada team that the enrollment for camps is steadily increasing. It was also great to be able to do research and learn more about JUMP!’s aims as well as the Cariboo region where their camps are situated.
This project was very fruitful and effective in teaching us the importance of a social media calendar and planning ahead for posts. We had a clear goal for each post and came up with our content ideas well ahead of time to get them approved by the JUMP! Canada team. Over time, we also established an efficient workflow and good synergy, which helped us work together to create posts, as well as build on our graphic design and digital marketing skills. We gained experience using Canva, Asana, as well as Facebook Analytics. In addition, we maintained regular communication with the JUMP! Canada team through consistently sending emails and having weekly check-ins discussing the status and success of the project so far. We did have a bumpy start to the project as the details of our workflow and goals were still being worked out – mainly due to time differences and prior commitments – but once we settled into an established workflow, internal communication within our student team as well as external communication with JUMP! Canada improved greatly.
Overall, we gained real-world digital marketing skills from this project and also were able to fulfill the learning objective of this class to specifically “design, implement, and evaluate social media strategies to achieve organizational and communicational goals”. Although they were unable to implement all our ideas due to the time constraint, our partners were very welcoming and receptive to new suggestions and have stated that they will be implementing some in the near future. This project allowed us to not only create a strategy and content ideas for JUMP!Canada’s future endeavors, but also build upon the concepts we learned in class using our creativity in a hands-on, experiential manner.