Justin Wong
Project Title: Ricks Volleyball Social Media Campaign
Emphasis: Video Production
Project Summary: Ricks College Men’s Volleyball is an independently run collegiate club volleyball team based in Rexburg, Idaho. The team competes in the Mountain West Conference and are currently ranked the 4th Division II team in the nation while also being the reigning Mountain West Conference champions. Over the semester, I helped to revamp their social media identity and launch a campaign to grow interest in the team, and organized and ran a local fundraising event for the team.
‘Ricks Volleyball Social Media Campaign’ Project Outcomes
For this project, a lot of what I intended to do was a little bit out of my comfort zone being a video production major which mainly focused on long form content over short form content & graphic design, so I ended up taking a lot of time in order to do prep work and to really solidify my vision for what I wanted to do for the program and also what kind of message I wanted to convey towards the entire project. Below, I’ve listed the three biggest lessons I learned throughout this project and how I was able to adapt and learn from them.
Lesson #1: Detailed preparation is VITAL towards success
As I began the long process of preparing this social media campaign, I never thought how much it would help me by preparing the ideas and content that I would produce before-hand instead of waiting for inspiration when a post day would come up. Through my own experience while doing video production, preparation was such a large part of multiple productions I would be apart of so that when changes were necessary, they wouldn’t affect the entire production and would rather be minor than major problems.
For this project, I was able to start off by creating a style guide for how the team wanted the page to look and the feel and vibe they wanted to convey to their audience. From there we were able to brainstorm different kinds of content that would connect with our audience best while also working out a content calendar
From there, I was able to plan out certain posts and series that I would create in order to boost engagement with the audience and also expand our reach as a page. We ended up landing on content that would be most relatable for our audience which consisted of highlights, behind the scenes footage, and funny clips to humanize the team instead of propping them up as being untouchable and inaccessible.
When redesigning the page, we also focused on very neutral colors to contrast the dark blue colors of the team including white, grey and tan.
Lesson #2: Don’t be afraid to promote and share your work with others
One of the problems we faced in the beginning was the unwillingness to share the content that I was producing, including myself. I believe that there’s a stigma in asking others to share certain content that you’ve produced but as a growing page, that’s the only way to gain meaningful growth. As shown below in one of our first few posts, growth was stagnant and minimal because of the low share rate.
As time had passed and I became more comfortable with what I was producing and overcame my own stigma of not asking for others to share it, we were able to increase our engagement and reach by tenfold. Going from a decent 1,243 accounts reached with our first few posts and 7 shares, we were able to boost our reach by asking the players to share the reel posted to their own social medias which in turn boost our views and engagement on the post.
Lesson #3: ADAPT, ADAPT, ADAPT!
Adapting was one of the biggest struggles I faced when going through this project. Although I had schedules made and content ideas drawn out, it still took a lot of time to create the necessary content to post as well, which took up a majority of my time throughout this entire project. I had not anticipated this so it was difficult being able to balance both creating and posting the necessary content for the page, but also planning and organizing the fundraising event. With the event, we faced many different problems but I think the one that really stood out to me was the gym. When trying to book gyms, we were met with many scheduling conflicts and a cost issues which made it difficult to book a gym that could meet our needs. We eventually we able to find a middle ground with a gym that was cost effective and also worked with our time table. Throughout that whole process, having to adapt and find certain solutions to problems made me quicker on my feet and made it so that even when under stressful pre-tenses, there is always another solution and you have to adapt to make it happen.
Listed here is a total timeline of the hours it took to putting the entire event together alongside my edit times with content posting.
Social Media Analytics & Data
Here we have some of the posts that we uploaded to our Instagram page to not only help promote the team, but also to help promote the fundraising event I hosted and organized.
Below listed is an overview of how the page performed during the entire social media campaign:
Looking at our insights, we were able to continuously keep a majority of our audience invested throughout the entire campaign, getting a lot of major spikes in engagement with following and also non following accounts following the event we hosted.
As shown here, our reach also significantly shot up, reaching over 1600 non-followers while reaching about 2/3 of our following. Our best performing forms of content seemed to be our reels which beat out our posts by over 700 more accounts reached.
As listed here, reels continued to be our most engaged form of content, increasing our daily engagements by over 2,000%. Our posts were also able to gain a similar audience through shares and comments as well.
Event Organization & Results
Listed above was an event we ran a few years ago which we mirrored this years event after as an example.
For the event we hosted, we ran into a few problems from the start but were overall able to put on a fun exciting event for the community and bring in around $300 in crowd donations which immediately went to the club fund for the upcoming season. We were also able to book a photographer to take photos of the event which is shown above.
One of the biggest problems we faced as I mentioned before was the location. Because many of the venues we had originally had time conflicts and cost conflicts, we had a difficult time finding a venue that could host the event as well as fitting into our strict budget. We were able to settle on a gym not far from the main city of Rexburg named the Zone which was cost effective for us and was also accommodating of our potential crowd as well. The event ran for about 2 hours as the match went to 4 sets. We expected a smaller group of maybe about 50-70 people but we quickly had to accommodate a much larger audience as about 200 people showed up to the event to show their support. Thankfully, extra bleachers were available to set up as we had a difficult time fitting everyone in the section already set up. Overall, the event was a total success and I was very happy with the results of the campaign which seemed to have sparked a large interest in the team so that more people would be interested in attending.
Project Takeaways & Total Results
Overall with this entire project, I was very satisfied with the end result as I had exceeded my own expectations of what I wanted out of this project. Because of this project, I learned valuable lessons in organization, consistency, and adaptability. Throughout all of the struggles and triumphs throughout the entire process, I was able to use my problem solving skills to not only pull myself out of corners, but also to fine tune ideas and expand upon them that I definitely struggled with beforehand.
Another thing that I really enjoyed with this project was stepping out of my own comfort zone. I’ve embarked on large full film projects but I’ve never really explored short form content and planning a social media campaign. I really found a passion in managing social accounts and connecting with audiences. I thought it was interesting to see how we can better personalize brands and connect better with consumers with certain kinds of content and messages we want to convey to them as well.
Throughout this entire project, although stressful at times, I am glad I was able to learn the lessons that I did. If I were to do it all again, I would work to find a better venue at the end of the day. I felt that we could’ve given a better experience by getting food vendors and a better gym because the gym we booked kind of took away from the “professional” setting we wanted to convey. Overall I still think that people had a good time at the match and still were happy with the product we presented.