Title of the CEL project: The Wellness Proposal
Names of students: Michael Wu, Nil Tekin, Haolin Wu, Madeliene Meier
Names of community partner collaborators: The Wellness Proposal
Introduction:
We are a group composed of 3 Media Studies and 1 Master of Management students at UBC. We are interested in learning more about mental health issues and how we can spread awareness on topics that are often misunderstood in society. We wanted to help our community in this way, in a creative and engaging way that would make it possible through this CEL social media management project.
Background info about our community partner:
The Wellness Proposal is a mental health foundation based in Vancouver, BC, providing support for university and high school students. Some of what they do include posting mental health tips on their social media, hosting informative events, creating journals for blog posts, and providing mental health support resources such as 24/7 support.
What we needed to address in this project:
This was our first meeting in January with the social media committee of The Wellness Proposal, and we made sure to take notes in order to get an idea about the foundation’s goals and what they are aiming to and would require our help to improve.
As seen above, they were interested in their blogs gaining popularity, as they only received one to two views on average, with barely any visitors to the page, despite containing the most useful amount of informative content on mental health issues. They also wanted more physical advertising at UBC, and encouraged us to create an event on campus if we could. For Instagram, their main social media platform, they sought to create more interactive posts, to engage on a deeper level with their audiences.
What we did
We understood that creating connections with other mental health awareness organizations in our area was important, to support each other by cross promoting events and posts. We kept this up by answering direct messages on Instagram on behalf of The Wellness Proposal, asking them to post our content on their stories to receive more engagement from their audiences, and did the same for them upon request.
The Wellness Proposal initially did not have a TikTok account, but our team thought that as the platform is increasingly becoming one of the most popular ones for promotion and would give us a lot of creative liberty, we asked the president to create one. Our first video we created was an introduction to the foundation – including information such as who they are, who they are for, and what they do, like how they help university and high school students with mental health.
Our second video was a short skit about the Smiling Depression and how it can affect someone’s mindset. It received 100 likes, 3 shares, and almost 700 views.
Although the members of The Wellness Proposal did not really want our group to focus on the committee that was in the process of creating the podcast, we still wanted to help out in some aspect. Upon their request after a meeting, we helped come up with designs using a digital drawing app, Procreate. Below is the first draft that we showed them for feedback.
Upon receiving further comments, we refined the logo many times and emailed the final images to them.
The results of this project and its impact
One of our goals was to reach more people and grow the audience on Instagram for the foundation. On January 20th, we recorded that @the_wellness_proposal page had 371 followers.
As of March 29, they have 421 followers.
By creating 10 posts and many stories, our team was able to help the foundation’s Instagram page gain 50 new followers.
From the 10 posts, 2 of them were TikTok skit videos and the majority were infographics relating to mental health issues such as social phobia, loneliness during Valentine’s Day, and feelings of isolation while studying abroad.
The average amount of likes that we got on our posts, when analyzing the number on each post appeared to be 31.5, rounded to 32.
(28 + 41 + 38 + 28 + 38 + 27 + 31 + 26 + 20 + 38 / 10 = 31.5)
We also calculated the average number of likes for the 10 posts that were posted before we began our CEL project with The Wellness Proposal, and the result was 20.8 likes per post, rounded to 21.
(26 + 33 + 18 + 14 + 39 + 17 + 18 + 15 + 13 + 31 / 10 = 20.8)
By considering the increased amount of likes that each post generally gets and increase in followers, we can assume that our efforts put into creating social media content contributed to the page receiving more attention and engagement from followers. Keeping up the original schedule of posting informative content and story once a week allowed the account to be seen as active and dedicated to spreading helpful and encouraging information for those who are struggling.
We were aiming to receive more comments from real users under our posts, as a source of keeping up the amount of engagement and interaction that the foundation’s social media page got. Looking at the same previous 10 posts that were published before we began the project, we calculated that the average amount of comments they got were 0.1, with only 1 real comment that was not by a bot found in 10 posts.
(0 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 + 0 / 10 = 0.1)
We counted the average amount of comments that our 10 posts got in comparison, and got a result of 1.7, which could be rounded to 2.
(0 + 3 + 2 + 4 + 4 + 0 + 0 + 1 + 2 + 1 / 10 = 1.7)
Below is an example of the type of comments that we got under posts:
As a group, we visited the UBC clubs that were being showcased outdoors on February 16th, to see if we could speak to some representatives of mental health clubs.
Our goal was to collaborate with a UBC club to help host an event, to represent The Wellness Proposal this way and put their name out there with the locals of Vancouver – and their target audience of university students.
We messaged UBC Mental Health Awareness Club to continue our conversation, and they got back to us, offering to collaborate in a Pet Therapy event with trained therapy dogs, on campus. Although it will take place after the CEL project ends, on April 6th we will help set up on the UBC Nest rooftop at 11:45 AM. The event will be from 12-1:30 PM, with 6 dogs that comfort those who are suffering from mental health issues.
Here is an example of how we are promoting the event:
We also helped the foundation with hiring new media executives and co-directors for their Media Committee. Lots of communication with the founder took place in order to arrange this.
Self-evaluation — What we learned from this project
Our solution did help The Wellness Proposal overall receive more engagement on their posts across multiple social media platforms, especially for Instagram. Gaining over 50 followers as of now may be considered a success, as these new people are the intended audience members of the proposal, from the local community who more actively engage with the posts. What worked well was communicating in a professional context and collaborating with team members to plan out days where we would film or post content. What did not work was promoting their blog page, mostly due to the fact that while we were doing the project, they were on hiatus and not actively posting new journals. What we took away from CEL is mostly how to handle professional accounts on social media, what kind of content works and appeals to viewers more, and what to avoid. Overall, this experience was extremely valuable and made us gain a passion for social media content creation, and seeing progress and positive feedback come as we kept the social media accounts active.
Note: if the images I placed here are blurry, please visit our Google doc to view them in better quality!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NgQzWKgnOWd0i07cexJBGg7868x86KZlDS7x-VXr6hQ/edit?usp=sharing