Emilee Lamps – Digital and Social Communication
For my senior project, I rebranded the current BYU-Idaho YouTube channel while also creating a new YouTube Channel that will host all of the BYU-Idaho devotionals. The objective of this project is to create a new strategy for our YouTube channel that follows President Meredith’s new content pillars to provide BYU-Idaho’s audience with valuable and relevant content.
The biggest problem the original page was facing was that BYU-Idaho’s desired audience was not being met. Our current audience looks like this:
We found that our audience is predominantly men who are 65 and up. This is because our main YouTube channel hosts all of the devotionals given at BYU-Idaho. We want to be able to shift this audience to the new YouTube Channel entitled BYU-Idaho Speeches and cultivate a more student-forward audience on the original YouTube page. We want an audience that looks more like this:
This project has two distinct parts that contributed to the rebrand. Part A is the creation of the new YouTube account and uploading all of the devotionals. Part B features creating fresh content that fits President Meredith’s content pillars and creates an environment that our target audience wants to view.
Part A
The first part of this project is the creation of BYU-Idaho Speeches and the branding of this channel.
To start, I performed a social media audit. I looked at the original BYU-Idaho YouTube channel and watched every video. I then decided whether or not they fit the brand anymore, and if they didn’t I unlisted them.
I then created the new channel and entitled it BYU-Idaho Speeches. With this new channel came branding. Our new thumbnails needed to look professional while also looking cohesive with one another. Working in university relations, different departments handle different things for the university. I worked with the design team and gave them sample designs of what we wanted the aesthetic of the channel to look like. From there, the final design was created and approved. Descriptions were created as well that are uniform with one another.
After doing this, I located images from previous devotionals over the past 7 years and photoshopped each image to only include the speaker and the pulpit. I created thumbnails for 113 different devotionals for this project as the start of the rebranding process.
After uploading all devotionals, I then created various playlists so viewers could easily navigate the page and find devotionals based off of what topic they would like to learn more about. Then I created end cards that features more devotionals like the one viewers just watched.
Topics include: Faith, Jesus Christ, Love, Enduring to the End, Temples, and more. Playlists benefit our audience because they are easily shareable and devotionals can auto-play one right after the other if the viewer desires it which is great for our engagement.
I then created a strategy in which we will only release batches of devotionals at a time to help gain more engagement on our page. We would market these devotionals being posted out of order as “Historical Devotionals” or “Devotionals for the Vault”.
The downside to moving all of the videos over is losing the engagement they have gained. If we posted them all at the same time, they would be lost in the algorithm. The strategy is to move the first batch over to get the channel started with a large batch. Then we release our newest devotional and a historical devotional each week to keep our audience fed with content and boost us in the algorithm.
Part B
The second part of this project is rebranding the current channel to reflect President Meredith’s content pillars and creating content to shift our audience to prospective/current students. The first step of this process was planning pilots to be released as a new series on the original YouTube page.
President Meredith’s content pillars:
A total of 22 ideas were created for the new YouTube series. From there it was narrowed down to 6 ideas, which all had creative briefs made for them (4 of them made by me).
Creative briefs include planning out your intended audience, objectives, synopsis, style, structure and timing, elements, and timescale. These creative briefs help you show your clients why they should want your vision for the project. It allows you to fully flesh out a good idea.
After pitching at three separate meetings, the ideas were narrowed down to 4 series. I then took these four series and created a full pitch for each of them with visual pieces to showcase what we wanted.
These pitches included storyboards for each series idea, stylistic choices, video examples, and elements from the creative briefs. I pitched these ideas to the leads in university relations and two ideas were selected to start production on.
After two ideas were selected from our pitch meeting, production started. The two series selected were “What’s in my Bag?” and “Elevator Pitch” (These series have since been renamed).
I was a director on these endeavors and helped plan the set and approved it once completed and also was there to direct our talent and make sure it was fulfilling all of the President’s content pillars. Part of this process was pre-production. During this process, I sought out talent, planned the set, contacted two different departments, facilitated a healthy working environment, and assisted in the editing bay to make sure the final product was something I was proud of.
A meeting was held and our two filmed pilots were greenlit for a new series with some feedback.
Both series were tweaked and I came up with a strategy that allowed for the videos to become more versatile for multiple departments. Elevator Pitch’s feedback included doing it without a teleprompter in the future. It also was renamed as “… in 60 Seconds”. For “What’s in my Bag”, the original series called for just professors. With the added strategy of renaming the series “BYU-I Essentials” students, organizations, and faculty can talk about the essentials for their positions. It also allows for more creativity. It creates the environment for prospective and current students to understand all that BYU-Idaho has to offer. Besides post-production tweaks, these pilots are greenlit to be posted in the fall.
This project took me well over 50 hours. It showcases the skills I have gained while pursuing a degree in communications with an emphasis in digital and social media. This project allowed me to become a project manager, social media strategist, and content creator. Throughout my degree, classes such as visual media, design for social media, public speaking, and digital media analytics and strategy have allowed me to become successful in this project. The class that has benefited me the most on this journey is digital and social media campaigns. From this class, I learned all about project management, how to make a proper case study, working with clients, time management, how to work in a group creatively and logically, how to visually design your content well, and how to make content that is valuable to your brand. All of these skills learned made this project possible and successful.