1. Please link to a social media campaign that you have created. Give a brief description of the campaign and its goals. Explain why it was successful or not and how the campaign drove engagement to your organization.
I served as Open Signal’s Marketing Manager for three years, from 2017 to 2020. A public access station-turned community media center, our organization’s goal was to make media production more accessible to all Portlanders — offering equipment rentals, filmmaking classes, programs, art exhibitions, screenings, networking events and more.
Year-end fundraising is a crucial group effort for every nonprofit, and this was especially true at Open Signal; we partook in the annual Willamette Week Give!Guide, which rallied together several local businesses every year to collectively raise money for causes that matter.
In my capacity as Marketing Manager, it was my responsibility to helm Open Signal’s online presence and help drive our fundraising campaigns to reach people through different channels — including social media, newsletters, online forums and print collateral. We also corresponded with Willamette Week to ensure that their most up-to-date marketing materials were shared with our community and helped raise awareness of their various fundraising events.
The Give!Guide campaigns entailed regular promotion of several different components, including their annual catalog, special donation incentives, fundraising events and stories from the Open Signal community about what the organization means to them.
As Open Signal’s visibility in the nonprofit community rose, so did our online engagement; our fundraising goals rose steadily each year, surpassing them each time — starting at $5,000 in 2017, rising to $6,050 in 2018 and then to $7,700 in 2019.
The groundswell of promotion activated Open Signal’s user base, with traffic especially increasing towards the end of the campaign; it showcased the input of our community members over the course of the previous 12 months. It never failed to bring in contributions from hundreds of individual donors, who would then in turn join Open Signal’s membership program.
While Open Signal routinely promoted multiple events and programs throughout the year, the Give!Guide always called for the most comprehensive and coordinated efforts from our organization as a whole. It had a history of success not only due to our strategizing and initiative, but also due to genuine and impassioned support from Open Signal’s community members and fellow nonprofits.
2. Create a social campaign that aligns with our pillars and priorities including a brief overview of how this campaign will differ according to our current social channels, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Open Signal’s commitment to equity and technology closely reflects many of the Library’s pillars and priorities, including free access for all and being a trusted guide for learning. It has been also Open Signal’s longstanding mission to empower Portlanders with media production resources, with an emphasis on fundamental technology training — because the current state of the world necessitates telecommunications for day-to-day activities.
During my tenure at Open Signal, filmmaking classes played a large role in establishing the organization’s identity; we offered several comprehensive courses that covered advanced production techniques as well as foundational classes on basic functions, all offered at affordable rates. We also kept our audience up-to-date on career-building opportunities via social media and our newsletters, and we regularly held networking events for community members to meet, socialize and establish connections.
Of note, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Open Signal teamed up with fellow community media center MetroEast in April 2020 to offer free teleconferencing workshops that were open to the public, discussing the basics of using programs like Zoom, Google Hangouts, FaceTime and more.
Based on these experiences, I have used imagery from posts I created at Open Signal to mock up content for the Library’s social media platforms in Photoshop, each centering around fundamental technological skills for career placement purposes.
Facebook, Instagram and Twitter each differ in their formatting; the latter only allows 280 characters per post, while Instagram resizes all images to become 1080px by 1080px squares and emphasizes using hashtags to increase visibility. Facebook is the only platform that does not enforce image or character count restrictions. These factors make brand consistency an essential component of all campaigns, in spite of these limitations.
To be sure, both Open Signal and the Library share a communal spirit in ensuring equitable access to technology and career placement opportunities, and these are intrinsically linked with spotlighting social justice and creativity.