MSU Community Writing Center
Developing a content strategy for community engagement
Image credit: East Lansing Public Library
Problem
The Community Writing Center had no attendance in Fall 2022 and low attendance in Spring 2023. The partnership needed a content strategy that would engage target audiences, especially youth and teens, and convert them to attendees.
Goal
To increase the number of weekly attendees among youth and teen groups at the Community Writing Center, we will create a campaign strategy that employs social media and in-person communication materials to promote a kickoff event for the beginning of the fall semester that targets the diverse needs and interests of the audiences we purport to serve.
My role
Project manager, liaison with client and stakeholders, interviewer, designer
Timeline
4 weeks
Deliverables
Content strategy, governance plan, social media mockups, document design
Research Methods
Stakeholder interviews, landscape analysis
Context
The Community Writing Center (CWC) is a partnership between the MSU Writing Center and the East Lansing Public Library. It is a space for community members to receive feedback, encouragement, and collaboration for any type of writing that they would like to bring in. The values that the CWC emphasizes in its mission statement are accessibility, community, and innovation.
This project arose from the intersection between my role as Community Engagement Coordinator for the MSU Writing Center and my experience as a student in WRA420: Content Strategy. Part of my role as Community Engagement Coordinator for the Writing Center was attending the CWC at the East Lansing Public Library, where I became familiar with the problems it was facing with promotion and communication. As a student in WRA420, my team was charged with creating a campaign strategy for an organization or product. Because my role with the CWC included creating public communications materials and developing sustainable strategies, my team saw that this class project was an opportunity to have a real impact on the community by creating a content strategy for the CWC.
The Notion task manager I created for our team to track our progress.
Research Process
Method 1: Stakeholder Interviews
We interviewed the Communications Specialist at the East Lansing Public Library, who was my collaborator in coordinating communications for the CWC across ELPL and Writing Center platforms. We also interviewed the Community Engagement Committee at the MSU Writing Center, comprised of Writing Center staff who were occasional consultants for the CWC and helped to make decisions around communications and program coordination. Ideally, we also would have gotten input from at least one stakeholder in the demographic that we were hoping to target: East Lansing youth and teens. However, due to time constraints around recruiting participants and coordinating interviews, we were unable to make that happen.
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We need to integrate CWC processes with the existing communications strategy at the ELPL
We need a proactive approach to reach audiences with programming, which will involve getting communications materials at least 2 weeks ahead of our desired posting date
Best practices to improve social media engagement:
Including more pictures of events in action in posts (with participant permission)
Connect with local organizations who are already reaching our target audience (i.e. Greater Lansing Area Moms)
We need a governance plan that takes the burden off our ELPL partners
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This is the body that will be responsible for implementing the strategy in the future
We need to translate the imagined event generated for the class project into a template for future actual CWC events
We need a governance plan that keeps things moving smoothly between staff transitions
Method 2: Landscape Analysis
We used a landscape analysis to help us determine how we could best utilize multiple platforms to promote a community writing center. We found two institutions that had community writing centers and robust communication channels for them: University of Wisconsin-Madison and Salt Lake Community College. The findings from this landscape analysis indicated that communication across multiple channels and platforms was standard for these community writing centers. Staying active and posting regularly on social media was common across both of them. Additionally, their websites had consistently updated information about their programming with clear calls to action (i.e. event registration, program contacts).
One of the comparable platforms we analyzed.
Design Process
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Instagram Posts
Both the ELPL and the Writing Center already had substantial followings on Instagram. We leveraged this by making it our primary channel for content and making our designs easily shareable.
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Flyers
Print flyers leverage local relationships by making our presence known both in the library and other community spaces.
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Governance Plan
We needed a strong, implementable governance plan that could sustain the content strategy through staff changes each year.
Instagram Mockups
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Instagram Mockup 1
Goal: To introduce the CWC to community members with coherent branding and easily digestible information about events.
Design Choices:
Only includes the name of the event, a very brief description, and the date/time information in the design
Makes the post highly visual, easily shareable, and informative with the fewest clicks
Includes the CWC logo and color palette for continuity across designs
Simple, brief caption with clear information about the event
Moves away from including large chunks of mission language in promotional materials; moves toward event and audience focus
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Instagram Mockup 2
Goal: To create proactive communications materials to supplement posts about upcoming events.
Design Choices:
Celebrates a previous event to portray the CWC as vibrant and active
Includes more photos to boost engagement
Limited text in the image and used the CWC branded color palette to make the post recognizable, shareable, and digestible
Tested color contrast and included alt text for accessibility
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Instagram Mockup 3
Goal: To translate the CWC mission into a single digestible and easily referenced post.
Design Choices:
Breaks down the mission and “about” information into very brief text on each slide to give the audience a sense of what we do without including the full mission statement
Includes images of primary associated staff members to humanize the CWC and provide points of contact for interested followers
Flyer Mockup
Goal: To create an in-person communication asset including only the most important information for a prospective attendee.
Design Choices:
Centers the “what,” “where,” and “when” of the event
Replaces large chunks of mission text with a brief blurb at the bottom to describe what the CWC is and does without overwhelming young audiences
Visually simple, colorful, and includes a large version of the CWC logo to attract young audiences and increase brand recognition
*Note: at the time of presentation, we did not include the date of the event under “when,” as we wanted the client to be able to easily edit that in when the actual event date was decided.
Governance Plan
Goal: To clearly delineate roles and procedures for communications related to the CWC.
Governance Choices:
The Community Engagement Coordinator is responsible for creation of all CWC-related content and for pushing that content out to stakeholders
The ELPL Communications Specialist is only responsible for posting assets created by the Community Engagement Coordinator to the ELPL Instagram and in person at the library (i.e. flyers) in order to remove the majority of labor from the community partner
We will leverage relationships with other community partners throughout the workflow to expand the audience for CWC communications
We created a timeline template that can be used for any event
Outcome & Impact
We presented this project to the Community Engagement Committee and ELPL staff members involved with the CWC. All of the stakeholders we presented it to were looking forward to having some pre-existing prototypes of communications materials to model future work after. They were particularly enthusiastic about the governance plan, which was a previous gap in procedure that seemed to be felt heavily on both sides of the partnership. Additionally, staff turnover is frequent in the Writing Center, so they looked forward to having some guiding documentation to share with the incoming Community Engagement Coordinator and other future staff members.
Lessons Learned
Expand each lesson to learn more.
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The Writing Center is largely staffed by students, meaning there is constant turnover between staff members. This amount of turnover is a threat to the sustainability of any strategy, so we took the following steps to mitigate this challenge:
Thoroughly documented all aspects of the project
Emphasized governance and detailed the communication materials development timeline
Made the governance plan position-specific rather than person-specific
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Because this project was initiated by a course assignment and therefore needed to meet the requirements of both the course and the client, we were limited in the extent of our research and design iteration. Here’s what we did to make sure our final product was still of good quality:
Identified research methods that would allow us to get direct feedback from the most important stakeholders (interviews)
Workshopped designs synchronously as a team and iterated in real time
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Because we were working to meet both course and client requirements, we had to negotiate and find alignment between the needs of both. Some key steps we took to do that:
Focused our work on templating the steps toward an actual event
Framed our project as a starting point that could be reiterated by future Community Engagement Coordinators