As I recently finished up our organizational communications plan for this fall, I reflected on growth.
Did we adapt and change our communications to address everything that has gone on the past year?
Did we reach our audience (did we grow our audience)?
Did we increase engagement and collaboration?
What was a byproduct of how we had to pivot our work online this year?
This led me to a conclusion I have said many times over the past few months: we can all agree that 2020 has been the most challenging, distraught, and unprecedented year of many of our lives. However, the strength and resilience we all have has pushed us to be better. To do better. As a result, our online community has grown tremendously and thrived over the past year. There was no question. So many programs immediately pivoted (I will petition Merriam-Webster to make that the 2020 word of the year) to providing services online. Project Directors, Coordinators, Counselors, everyone jumped online, on to social media, to ensure they were staying connected to students, families, and the community.
However, pivoting to providing services online through social media requires more than just posting. During Summer School in August, MaeAnna Edwards (New Hampshire GEAR UP Alliance) and I talked about a three-pronged approach through two lenses: Presence and Engagement.
Define – Look at the specific goals for your grant or your school site and define specifically what presence and engagement online should look like for you.
Your grant is in year 3 or 4 with high school students:
Your approach might be similar to the University of Texas (with Matt Orem & Megan Mossman, check out San Marcos GEAR UP on Twitter): where you are providing virtual career exploration workshops, virtual mentoring, virtual academic summer camps, and providing more content potentially targeted to academic support or career exploration.
Your grant is in year 6 or 7 with graduating high school seniors or first-year college freshman:
Your approach might be similar to GEAR UP Alabama (with Samantha Briggs & Ashton Ray, check out GEAR UP Alabama on Instagram): focusing on summer melt, college preparedness advising, social-emotional learning as they begin an important life transition, and elevating the student voice to empower students to advocate for themselves.
Evaluate – Look at what you have done online and check out the data to evaluate your success.
Twitter analytics provides an in-depth view of your impressions, engagements, and actions on Tweets.
Instagram Business profiles can look at data in 7-14 day time periods
Check your data regularly
Tip: Every Monday spend an hour or so reviewing your social media data
Facebook provides an in-depth view of your content – and for those of you who love spreadsheets, the data is downloadable into excel spreadsheets!
Increase – Media today is constantly overloaded and changing, so you will always want to increase something.
Based on your evaluation what do you need to increase?
Engagement through replying to tweets, interacting with others’ tweets?
On Twitter specifically, there is always an opportunity for more content
Use scheduling tools like Hootsuite or Tweet Deck to alleviate the work burden but still consistently post content
Are your videos performing better on Instagram than posts with graphics and text?
Include more videos in your communications plan!
GEAR UP Alabama (and many others in the GEAR UP community) did two significant things as they shifted services online to social media.
1. Increased the content they were posting
2. Focused their content on student engagement
The second piece is critical, not only were they empowering the student voice, but by ensuring their content included students, they knew it was reaching students. How do you know if your online services are being as effective or close to the same effectiveness as in-person services?
You are reaching students.
As we continue the march forward, keep Presence and Engagement top of mind for your virtual service engagement, especially on social media.
Stay tuned for more community engagement on the topic of social media, and as always share your tips, knowledge, and resources with your colleagues by dropping a comment below! (share your GEAR UP program social media handles too!)
If you want to hear more from our social media session at Summer School, or GEAR UP Alabama’s Summer School session, and you registered for the GEAR UP Summer School event, log on to the event site and watch the recording!