As a consultant for Unity, I made specific recommendations on how they could leverage their web content and social media content to better serve their clients and look for new ones. They began posting content with more frequency, including content from outside gardening-related sources, and keeping some posts themed (“Nerdy Tuesday” and “Friday Factoid”).

They’ve gained over 100 followers since implementing these suggestions—an admirable growth for a small specialized nursery in a very rural area.

To premiere Washington College’s first music video, the school pulled out all the stops. This culminated with a viewing party and a “home page takeover.” Leading up to the event, however, I used stills and animated gifs from the video to tease it on Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr. (This was in a time before Twitter threads had popularity, but this would be even more fun now!)

The response to the campaign—in addition to a packed Visitor’s Center at the viewing party—was a YouTube video with 30,000 views in the month following (and just shy of 50,000 views today). For a school that averages viewership counted by the 100s if it's lucky, these results were pretty good.

The roll out included targeted paid advertising on Facebook driving users to a page where the video played automatically and visitors had the option to request more information.

I created a social media plan for two institutional accounts (@washcollalumni and @washcoll) to complement emails and challenges throughout the first Giving Day. Content included graphics, video, and text posts. Some of the graphics I created were meme-style “Captioned Adventures of George Washington” modeled after a popular Tumblr post of the same name.

My choice of hashtag—#GiveWithGeorge—has been used in subsequent Giving Day challenges.

Specific "challenge" goals were met throughout the day. For a first go at a Giving Day, the campaign was successful. Social posts were shared by alumni, which extended the reach far beyond that of the primary social media channels.

The #DamTheDebt hashtag was used with images of quotes from students who benefited from the program and from donors as well as any news coverage the program received.

Dam The Debt is an example of how a program can definitely benefit from additional planning and content creation, and why it’s important to work with your content team when building a good social campaign. Engagement with the social content that existed was low but steady, indicating that it had buy-in from the core but not from the target audience.

If this campaign ran again, I’d work with a content team to build infographics or an explanatory video for the program so that the target audience—prospective parents and students—understood the impact this program had for graduating seniors.