Mollie
Usery
Jenna
Qualsett
Dalton
McMullen
Rachel
Stiehm
Common Connections UNL
“When I first came
to college I was 100 percent out of my element. Transitioning from a small town
where I was born and raised, to a school of 25,000 was overwhelming to say the
least. I decided to not rush and to separate myself from my high school friends,
therefore I had few connections, and few friends. As a current sophomore I look
back at my freshman year with regret, wishing I wouldn’t have gone a year not
having the connections I have now. I wish someone would have connected me with
my people sooner.” -Jenna Qualsett, group member.
One of the University of Nebraska’s
most unattractive qualities is its enormous size, and the fear of feeling like
you are just a number. That’s where Common Connections at UNL comes into play.
Our Instagram page, @commonconnections_unl, helps invite students who are
looking for new clubs, trying to make new friends, or who are uninvolved, to
get involved with clubs and different organizations throughout the university.
This can ease some of the burden of joining clubs or having to figure out which
clubs to join.
The page works in a very simple way.
There is a picture with someone involved in a certain club. The pictures are of
an individual smiling at the camera or in action with the club. The pictures
grab the attention of the viewer, and lead them to a description explaining who
is pictured and what club/organization they are apart of. The description
continues and explains the club in order to pique the interest of the person
examining the post. After the description, the Common Connections at UNL
contact information is provided so viewers can inquire more about a specific
club. Once a student contacts us, a survey will automatically be sent out
asking students a series of questions pertaining to their career and leisure
interests. This email will serve as a connection between students and club
officers.
Our initial problem at the start of
this campaign was gathering followers, and that is still an issue. Building
followers on social media such as Instagram or Twitter can be quite difficult
to do. The account’s target audience is composed of current and prospective
students at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. An advantage is that there are
many students at the university, which means the following can grow immensely,
but ‘how’ is the hard part. A possibility is to use another page that already
has a large following i.e., the official UNL Instagram page, to give the Common
Connections at UNL page a shout out. This page currently follows the Common
Connections at UNL page, so using that to advertise is necessary.
As a guerrilla marketing
deliverable, we created a UNL Common Connection poster to display around
campus. The poster highlights students featured on the Instagram page, and
includes our main goal (to connect students with the organizations of their
interests, therefore connecting students with other students) and contact
information.
After setting up an Instagram and
Gmail account, we contacted various clubs at UNL to set up our initial
advertising. Once we had the interest of some clubs, we set up times to meet
with some of their members so we could see how the meeting was run as well as
interview and photograph members. From there, we used their image and the
information from their interviews to formulate a post. In the descriptions, we
mentioned the year and length of membership of the various members. We also
included quotes about what each member gained from the club or why they enjoy
being in it. After that, we posted the picture with the description in hope of
gaining student interest and followers.
Currently, we have posted six
pictures and have eight followers (three more than we’re following). Besides
the clubs we’ve posted about, not many people are aware of this page. If we were able to get unlincoln, an
Instagram page with 20.3 thousand followers, to post about us, we may get
traffic and increase our audience size. The page created can be found at this
link: https://www.instagram.com/commonconnections_unl/
We decided that Instagram would be
the best platform for our campaign since it pairs written information with a
captivating picture. We also recognized that it is a familiar site that many
students participate on. Through the use of our page, students are able to
reach out and make real-life connections along with social media connections.
It also provides an easy and efficient way to take a step in getting involved
at UNL without leaving your place of comfort. The pictures and descriptions
present a sample of what one could look forward to if they wanted to
investigate the club or organization. The pictures also give a more reliable
way to receive information about clubs rather than by word of mouth or
searching for a way to join an email list. In all, our posts are designed to
provide information that will captivate students’ attention and encourage them
to get involved in the featured clubs and organizations.
As far as what went well, the fact
that we have a major Instagram page following us is a major success. It’s also
good that, so far, six clubs are aware of the page and are able to utilize it
to join other clubs. The unlincoln Instagram page only followed us recently. If
we had more time, we could have reached out to them to gain more traction among
the students of UNL. Along with this, we could have utilized the audiences of
other larger pages that could have followed us. We also could have contacted
more clubs and had more interviews, which would have resulted in more posts.
The sequence of events that took
place in order for our campaign to get started was fairly simple. The four of
us made a timeline in our proposal in order to facilitate what exactly we
planned on doing. First, we started by
creating our Instagram page and a few posters to hang up around campus. We also
created an email address in order to get in contact with organizations on
campus. Then, we had each group member come up with a list of organizations and
clubs that we wanted to interview. As a group, we were able to reduce the list
to six clubs that we found the most interesting and thought weren’t very well
known on campus but could relate to a broad audience. Emails were sent out to
club members in the hope that our group could attend their next meetings. Some
of us reached out to people we knew in clubs to ask if we could meet with them
or attend their next meeting as well. Then, we split up into groups of two and
met with club members. While we were at
the meetings, we took pictures of members and asked them questions about their
organization and why they had decided to join.
Once we had met with all six organizations, we created posts on the
Instagram page to complete our campaign.
This campaign may have just started as a class
project, but we, as a group, believe that we can take this project beyond the
limits of a rubric. The exigency that we set out to erase is still a haze on
paper, and that is why the Common Connections UNL Instagram page must continue
and grow followers. Luckily, most of the group members will still be around for
the upcoming years at UNL. To keep this page going and to make it flourish,
more posts need to happen. We will include more groups and grow this page so
that it is easily known by UNL students, and can even be mentioned as a tool
for new and “out-of-the-loop” students to make friends and enjoy their time
more at college. All in all, it is not about how many followers the page ends
up receiving, but rather the quality of affecting students in their quest for
higher education in an environment that they enjoy. Common Connections UNL is
only starting, and has some great days ahead of it.
Some
examples of posts on Common Connections UNL
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