Author Archives: nada2002

LIFT Food Security Project

Our Team: Indyanna Vanderlaan, Leen Naser, Lauren Maharaj, Nada Alsaka

Community Partner Collaborators: LIFT Food Security Project, and Adriana (contact)

Introduction

As Media Studies Students, we will be applying the basic concepts and principles of social media to design our partner’s social media presence, promote their work, and create a system they can keep up with. Our deliverables will ensure we are analyzing and tracking our quantifiable performance indicators (i.e. following, engagement). LIFT’s work connects us to the broader field of media studies as we will be representing the youth workers through their testimonies and promoting social programs that will benefit the community and society.

Background Information About LIFT

LIFT is a nimble non-profit doing some pretty innovative things in a rural, remote community of British Columbia. Every day, they feed people at the Community Resource Centre (CRC), Supportive Housing building, and overnight shelter. Their food system is centered around Food Hub qathet, a brand new commercial kitchen at the CRC, which supports their programs and is shifting to operate as a social enterprise. LIFT’s model challenges the current food system, prioritizing social connection, full circle impacts, food security, education, meaningful work, and entrepreneurship. They operate out of three locations: local community gardens, Food Hub qathet, and the Nook Cafe in the public library.

Need + Problem

While LIFT does amazing work for the Powell River community, their biggest problem is finding the time, resources, and capacity to productively share their stories online. Currently, LIFT’s social media team comprises a website-focussed MarComms coordinator, a busy-bee Community Supports person, and their always on-the-fly Food Systems Manager (Adriana). Together, they are able to produce high-quality content for their target audience, but can only manage LIFT F.S.P.’s main social media account (Instagram) within their spare time. Therefore, the CEL partner is in need of someone to find and implement the best strategic tactics to achieve their top three social media goals (to rebrand, promote, and grow online) to include within a streamlined ‘Social Media Guide’ for them to follow within their limited time. With a deeper look into LIFT’s current IG analytics (uncovered within our initial social media audit) unearthed that LIFT currently holds weak ties with a large online community and prospective latent ties with similar organizations, but struggles to utilize these connections to generate greater reach and engagement with their content. Therefore, our project aims to rectify this gap to provide the best content, posting, and engagement strategies to address this need (in addition to using rebranding their account with a profile strategy).

Our Solution & Its Implementations

To provide LIFT with a social media strategy guide from which they can streamline their online efforts, we had to first experiment with and implement a social media strategy of our own. Following “The Life Cycle of SM Strategy” learned in class, we documented our in-depth implementation within a comprehensive Google Document  (“Social Media Strategy Report”) which included our efforts, results, and discovered best practices for our CEL partner’s final review. 

Step 1. Setting Smart Goals: S. M. A. R. T.

(Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely)

Within our implementation, we started by developing our goals in relation to the CEL partner’s current needs. After our initial meeting with our community partner, and review of our Project Plan, we set the following ’SMART’ goals that we intend to address with various strategies:

    • #1: REBRAND: To rebrand the Food Hub qathet Instagram page into a unified Hub and Nook cafe account, as separated but associated with the parent company that reflects the F.S.P’s initiatives and values, to build greater brand affinity with LIFT F.S.P’s existing community.
        • → Profile Strategy
    • #2: PROMOTE: Produce and post meaningful content (approximately 12 posts and 12 stories) that succinctly promotes the F.S.P’s various projects and stories to increase community awareness of what LIFT F.S.P does for the community by April 1st. 
        • → Content + Posting Strategy
    • #3: GROW: To grow the rebranded @FoodHubqathet Instagram to over 900 followers by April 1st, 2022 (end of project date) through various outreach and engagement tactics and experimentation with new content types.
        • → Engagement Strategy

Step 2. SM Audit + Benchmarks: (Jan 1st-31st, 2022)

We then carried on with an in-depth social media audit of our CEL’s chosen platform of focus: the @foodhubqathet Instagram, which informed us of LIFT’s aforementioned need to turn their weak and latent connections into concrete reach and engagement. While a fuller report of our initial audit can be found in our report, certain pertinent details that largely informed our social media strategy are as follows:

    • Current Demographics: LIFT’s target audience is accurately reflected within their current demographic of Powell River-based mothers and grandmothers. 
    • Best post time: 6:00 pm PST
    • Reach: low (290 accounts in Jan) and limited to (94% of) LIFT’s current following, with stories generating the best reach. 
    • Engagement: Not terrible (32 engagements on 1 post in Jan) but can benefit from more posting, with posts generating the best engagement.

Step 3. Strategic Plan (Prior to Implementation)

After meeting with our CEL partner and establishing their goals and needs, we developed a multi-pronged strategic plan that (by nature of our CEL’s three goals) naturally included all four types of social media strategy (profile, content, posting, and engagement). As a result, the purpose of each strategy closely aligned with each of our CEL partner’s expressed social media goals  (Rebrand, Promote, and Grow):

1. Profile Strategy: (Goal #1: Rebranding)

Our profile strategy aims to redesign the Food Security Project’s Instagram page (@foodhubqathet) into a specific account for the Food Security Project, aimed to address the CEL partner’s expressed need to rebrand as separate, yet associated with its main account. Actions within this strategy included: 

    • optimizing LIFT’s profile picture
    • redesigning the account name and handle
    • crafting a smart bio (using emojis to indicate programs)
    • and creating complementary story spotlights.

Using LIFT’s brand guide and combining Hootesuite’s IG optimization suggestions, semiotics, and brand voice, these actions intend to better communicate LIFT’s programs (therefore also attending to goal #2) while expressing LIFT’s brand.

 

 2. Content Strategy: (Goal #2: Promote)

From our initial consultation and the CEL’s project description, LIFT F.S.P. expressed the need to better promote both their (a) stories and (b) programs online. Therefore, separate campaigns in our content strategy addressed these needs accordingly:

    • #TuesimonialTuesday Story Campaign: By tapping into users’ “intrinsic motivation” (just for fun entertainment) and generating “identified regulation” (intentional use for long-term gain) (Mahoney & Tang), this strategy aims to provide entertaining and regular content that shares volunteer experience with weekly stories. This strategic content combines video, image and text and aims to positively resound with volunteers using ethical language.
    • K/G/C Post Campaign: From a consistent post template, this content campaign aims to appeal to ‘selective exposure theory’ (Mahoney & Tang) by providing “green” and “health”-concerned content to their health-concerned followers regarding LIFT’s three programs: Garden, Kitchen and Cafe. We expect this regular post content to provide a consistent brand persona across the page and inform users of LIFT’s projects. 

Both content campaigns focussed on using a consistent brand tone and persona within their visuals, text and captions, by using appropriate colours, emojis, and character style in writing consistent with LIFT’s Brand Guide.

 3.  Engagement Strategies: (Goal #3: Grow)

Due to the project’s experimental nature, multiple engagement tactics were conducted to discover LIFT’s best practices for community building, to include within the final report:

    • Mentions: through mentioning associated and/or similar accounts within our content, we intend to build a greater relationship with similar organizations online, which we expect to measure through responsive comments, likes, and story mentions.
    • Location pinning and hashtags: using location pinning (in stories, posts, etc) and local hashtags (eg #powellriverbc), we intend to better connect LIFT with members of Powell River’s virtual community.
    • Trendjacking: leveraging specific concurrent events as opportunities to stimulate a dialogic loop, we intend to put LIFT in direct conversation with those outside their immediate following that share similar interests. 
        • #InternationalWomensDay
        • #Ukraine shoutout: Mixing both direct mentions and trendjacking strategies, this action aims to increase LIFT’s interaction with similar food security initiatives.
    • Content Experiment with Reels: as an undiscovered content avenue, we also intend to experiment with Reels (using the above engagement tactics) for the purpose of generating greater reach and engagement through likes, comments, and shares. 
    • Interactive stories (questions, polls, reaction stickers): building a dialogic loop with LIFT’s followers, we also hope to generate more direct forms of engagement through responses to our stories. 

4. Posting Strategy

To optimize the most reach and engagement of our content, we also implement posting strategy within our over-all strategic approach by releasing content at the account’s peak time (~6:00 PM PST). 

Step 4. Operational Plan + Content Calendar (ie. Implementation) 

From there, we set an operational plan that included the concrete activities necessary for the successful completion of our project which included a myriad of deliverables to our CEL partner beyond the mere work we aimed to achieve on Instagram. In order to acquire the necessary images for our strategy, within this step we first created a ‘Social Media Photo Template’ that our CEL’s youth volunteers could use to provide us with amazing photographs of their programs and peers in action. 

Other activities included:

    • Creating graphics for our IG spotlights
    • Creating a ‘Post Template’ for our G/K/C promotional campaign
    • Posting regularly using the hashtags, locations, and account mentions collected (as part of our dual content and engagement strategy), with our included watermark.
    • Interviewing volunteers and copywriting testimonial stories
    • Creating and posting weekly interactive #TestimonialTuesday stories
    • Executing trendjacking and engagement experiments with new content types (eg. Reels) 
    • Maintaining regular contact with our CEL for photo and video requirements
    • Acquiring ‘midterm feedback’ regarding our progress

Throughout the implementation, our CEL partner was regularly updated on our plans and progress, guiding the implementation with her own ideas and even posting herself. Simultaneous to our action plan, we created and relied on three ‘on-the-go’ live Content Calendars that planned and tracked our posting progress on the Instagram page (divided by content type). Each section within the calendar template was colour coded to reflect our strategies in use:

Beyond these activities, this section of the project included our list of resources, a list of individual responsibilities, and a project schedule (that organized activities by month, set meeting dates, deadlines, and included midterm feedback). 

 

Step 5. Final Audit

After completion of our 1-month plan, we then conducted an end-of-strategy audit to measure our most successful content (ie. promotion) and engagement (ie. growth) tactics, which we plan to deliver in a comprehensive Social Media Report package to our CEL partner. View the final audit and deliverables here.

Reporting on Results

Our rebrand of the account made the page appear more cohesive and engaging.                      

 

 

 

 

 

 

As showcased in our final audit, reels were the most successful in garnering the most reach with 4,154 accounts reached with 3 reels. To create these reels we used short clips sent over from Adriana, our CEL partner, and put them together with an appropriate song to create short, aesthetic videos that displayed the nook and the kitchen. In one of our reels, we included a clip of bags of local coffee beans used by the lift which got @lift.foodsecurity mentioned on @32lakescoffeeroasters story. Not only did this lead to increased views for our reel, and got us more profile visits and followers, but being shared on another Instagram account develops a stronger sense of community between LIFT and the brand they collaborate with. Another instance when @lift.securityproject was mentioned on @eurosfoodbanks and @bakersagainstracism after we included them in a story trendjacking Ukraine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This brings us to one of our most successful strategies for engagement which was using hashtags and tagging other people and organizations where fit. In our content calendar, we curated a hashtag bank using different hashtags that pertained to the kitchen, the cafe, and the garden which we used on all of our posts. These strategies proved to be fruitful as one of our tops posts was one where we tagged @paradisevalleyproduce with 44 likes and 3 comments.

While stories did not gather much reach or engagement, the #TestemonialTuesdays story posts were our most valued content as we used them to broadcast LIFT’s Volunteers. 

CEL Evaluation

During our midterm evaluation, we had our weekly meeting with Adriana and started off by asking her for any feedback or comments she may have on what we have already posted. As mentioned previously, she highlighted her goal to include more greenery for Spring. We also reflected on how our layout had too many borders which would create meaningful engagement from followers. After the mid-evaluation, our group reconsidered our layout and posting strategy to satisfy our CP and achieve our goals. 

For our final evaluation we created a google form for Adriana to fill out, as seen below. She stated; “I’m excited to see the final result from your side!! I’m always in the background of so many moving pieces so it’s been really cool to trust you all to let go and see what we’re doing from the perspective of this team and to still be showcasing our program to the community! It was really great for our crew to feel heard and listened to. They truly felt the honour of their work which is part of what we aim to do. This type of collaboration has been great!!”

It was truly inspiring working with Adriana and the LIFT Food Security/NOOK volunteers. We learnt so much from each of them and are grateful for how welcome they were to new ideas and strategies for growth. 

Our goals were achieved in the end and our results were beyond what we expected! We hope that LIFT continues to grow and evolve, getting the recognition it deserves. 

We wish Adriana and the volunteers the best in their future endeavours!

 

Process & Reflection Video