Marketing and Audience Engagement
Having to start a program with three initial people taught me how important it was to get people to care about what we were sharing with them. Whether it is getting them to view our work or join our team, it is so important to reach out to the student population and connect with them.
Leaving a Legacy
As I near the end of my senior year, I have learned how important it is to get other people to acknowledge and become familiar with our content.
Everything I have learned leaves with me, unless I pass it down. That can only happen if we work towards engaging others. Whether it be through recruiting or simply looking at what we produce,
someone has to carry the program forward.
When we set out to market ourselves or engage others, we aren’t just trying to get them to appreciate our work. We are trying to get them to understand the importance of it. If they can see the impact we make, maybe they will want to be a part of the mark we leave too.
When building up our engagement, we were trying to figure out what we could do to drive people to the website. Something we had done in broadcast was request that our newest episode be featured in the weekly email sent out to staff, students, and parents. We decided to do the same for our website and saw how our page views jumped from a maximum peak of about 140 to over 4,000
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Before Image: Site Analytics from August 1 to October 31
After Image: Site Analytics from November 1 to February 9
This was at our Experience Prosper event. This is an opportunity for parents to step into their students' shoes and see what they might be doing in class, or even explore certain subjects they might want their students to try.
We first went through a little bit of the process on how we create the yearbook or how we publish stories for our site. Then we gave each parent a camera and taught them a few basic rules of photography and how to change settings. We gave them a rubber duck to act as their subject and gave them free-range to shoot what they wanted.
There were a lot of parents who told us they had a lot of fun! I think this is a great way to involve the parents into what their kids are doing or even expose parents to electives (such as our media programs) to give them the opportunity to present it to their kids as an option during course selection.
Click on the button to see what the parents did during their time with us!
This was during Expo Night my sophomore year. There were only about ten members on staff during that time, so we were very focused on trying to strengthen our program and try to get more people to join. It was a great way to get students excited about the program, or at least make them aware of our broadcast so they could go and watch. There were a lot of students who were interested in joining, and we even gave a few examples of our work.
I specifically remember there was a girl who came up to me. She was telling me how she saw me on-air. She explained how she thought it looked like so much fun, and wanted to see how she could join. I was super happy that I was able to influence people to join just by being passionate about my own work. I worked with her for a few months to see how we could get her involved and where she should get started.
For all the reels I posted, I also made sure to encourage people to buy their yearbooks and visit the site. Since so many people already enjoyed watching the recaps, it was a great way to add in a little shout out to our own programs and encourage people to view more of our content and boost yearbook sales as well.
We also make sure to post an image of the feature picture of a story on instagram and tell people to visit the site through the caption. This ensures that we put a spotlight on all of the stories we publish on the site and get more people to view our content.