The Idea
On a normal afternoon ride home from work earlier this summer, Charlsie, the Social Media Manager for the Harbert College of Business, started chatting about her plans for social content during the first week of school. She mentioned posting a tour of Auburn’s business campus. It was a great idea. With so many new students not able to visit and alumni that have been quarantined away from their alma mater, what better way to engage people than with a tour?
As we continued talking, I had the idea to make it bigger: “What if we made it a campus wide tour? We could link everyone together and all benefit off of the shared engagement.”
She liked the idea.
We spent the rest of the ride home brainstorming how this might work. Of course, we got home (and first let the pup out and played with him because priorities) and then we began drawing out ideas to figure out the best way to make all of the logistics work.
That was the easy part.
The Implementation
The next morning, we scheduled a meeting with our central Marcomm office to pitch the idea. Luckily, they loved it! After a short pitch, we incorporated some of their ideas like trying to find ways to incorporate the university’s strategic goals, development efforts and stewardship when possible during the tour – an idea that I believe elevated the tours. We offered to do all of the heavy lifting, including creating the graphics to unify the look of all the tours. After that, it was off to the races.
The key piece to all of this was linking everyone together. We decided that the central university account and the student affairs account would link to all of the colleges, while the colleges would link to the central and student affairs account to create a big circuit. Drawn out, it looked like this:
**TIP: If you are thinking of doing something similar, be aware that you can only link to 10 accounts on an Instagram story.**
After the meeting, Charlsie and I prepped a presentation for campus communicators while our central team organized the meeting.
I was responsible for creating the sample tour, and Charlsie worked with her team to build the graphics.
After pitching the idea to 16 different distributed Marcomm teams, the idea moved forward with surprisingly little push back.
Everyone began producing their own Instagram tours.
It is not very often (in fact almost never) that all of the Marcomm teams work together like this. It was so fun to see everyone take the same idea and graphic templates and implement them in completely unique ways to best serve their audiences.
So how did it all work?
The Results
I was really impressed by the almost instant feedback we all began receiving. Messages from students, followers, emails from coworkers and new followers across campus - we were seeing some really great results.
Within eight hours, accounts across campus had increased by over 300 followers collectively. When the stories expired 24 hours later, the average audience increase was 2%.
The saying goes “A rising tide lifts all boats,” and that is true. When the boat is made up of 13 colleges & schools and two institution-level units, creating a tide means a lot of planning, communication and collaboration. It is hard, but it is worth it.
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