Learn about how our consultants created new marketing and communication strategies for Swipe Out Hunger's national social media platforms.
Problem Statement
How can we strengthen Swipe Out Hunger’s social media presence to boost engagement and spread awareness?
About Swipe out Hunger
Swipe Out Hunger is an organization dedicated to fighting hunger on college campuses. With 1 in 3 college students facing food insecurity nationally, SOH works with food banks, government agencies, and for-profit companies to issue grants and fundraise subsidies towards meals for college students.
Problem Description
Our team was tasked with finding strategies to help SOH grow their Instagram engagement. The problem is broken down into three main sub-issues.
1. There is low social media engagement on all Swipe platforms
Online brand messaging is not reflective on Swipe’s advocacy element
Social media platforms lack organizational structure and clear content breakdown.
Project Agenda & Objectives
The project goal was to first understand what the problem might be and how we can first eliminate problem factors within the project. For instance, there was no comprehensive MARCOM plan for Swipe and they had little data as to what their target audience really resonated with. We began by sending out surveys to college students asking them to give their thought's on Swipe's Instagram.
We then provided analysis on survey results and delivered the proper recommendations through the building of a MARCOM plan. This newly revised MARCOM plan contains all the feedback we had received from the survey and also created new design elements for infographic creation. We also included a Best Practices Model, engagement tracker, comparables document.
These will all help Swipe determine the best course of action moving forward to achieve their goal of growth.
1) Data Collection, In More Depth
The first work stream approach was to create a survey and send that form out to as many students as possible to gather data. It was crucial that we were confident that our hypothesis about Swipe's social media was also backed up by other students. We then looked at the results, which luckily did match our hypothesis, and pinpointed that one of the main problems with Swipe's social media is its unappealing design and lack of behind-the-scenes content. To better connect with Swipe's audience, we asked survey responders for their input and included their feedback within our final deliverables.
2) Competitor Analysis, In More Depth
The second workstream focused on comparable organizations and performed a competitive analysis on better performing social media platforms. The approach here was just to do research into other food-insecurity organizations. We then did content breakdowns on these organizations in terms of what these other organizations had as IG content. We noted that almost all of these organizations were incredibly successful when they made posts about their actionable items and mission statements. Thus, we included said recommendation within our final deliverables deck as well as the best practices model.
3) MARCOM Plan, In More Depth
The third workstream was the creation of a MARCOM plan. This MARCOM plan is full of incredibly useful resources such as a posting calendar, content breakdown, instructions for creating infographics, IG takeover guide, design palette, etc. This MARCOM plan is a key feature to our project because it combines Swipe's mission and goal in conjunction with the feedback we received from the survey. This workstream's deliverable will be the primary focus of this project.
As an additional "cherry on top", the PM created an engagement tracking sheet where the Swipe team can input the appropriate data and the formula will generate average engagement statistics based off of the type of content. For instance, 'average like count for promotional posts'.
The Impact of 180DC's Work
This work will be implemented progressively and through time. Our first round of infographics that we had sent swipe has already been posted (implemented) and we've seen a growth in their numbers. Previous infographic posts received significantly less engagement compared to our new infographic designs.
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