The largest project in my final technical communication class, I was tasked with creating a social media account, content strategy guide, and posts which followed the guide. I chose to continue with the Georgia Democracy Coalition for this project, defining more aspects of their branding and what an effective online presence would look like for their organization.
The most challenging aspect of this project was surely my lack of experience with social media. In the class, however, I was learning more about the genre conventions of posts on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter and what these platform's affordances organizations, companies, and celebrities leveraged to cultivate their mission and brand online. I started this project researching the content strategies of non-profit organizations like my own: I researched the visual branding, topics, frequency, and length of their posts, and I learned how these non-profits interacted with users and followers. I looked at their user engagement to better understand what worked and what didn't, and I used this to inform my own vision for the GDC's online interaction.
Beyond learning about posts on social media, the prompt would require a deeper dive into the world of branding– like logo, post, and tone design– that wasn't necessary with my first two GDC projects. To create a social media content strategy document for the GDC, I continued by identifying the mission of the GDC's social media presence online, the audience it was speaking to most, and the appropriate tone to reach them. These, of course, would shape the posts and messages the GDC published. Flowing from original goals I had for the GDC, I decided that their social media presence would target Gen Z GA voters most, helping them inform themselves and encouraging them to participate more in government. The posts would be mute without the right tone, though. To reach young voters in Fulton County, GA, a group that is predominantly disillusioned with politics,This was especially true of posts that touched on necessary albeit controversial topics– like navigating misinformation.
In addition to engineering the messages of posts in the content strategy guide, I would communicate the detail of GDC's visual identity more specifically than my first two projects while also expanding it; I needed to create a logo, a more robust color palette, and parameters for both. Next, I created visual rules for the individual posts for what media should and shouldn't be used to curate the organization and its mission online. I designed the content strategy in the hopes that anyone following it would have a comprehensive guide detailing the visual and textual elements that could be associated with the GDC, protecting its democratic vision and identity online.
The full, detailed guide can be accessed above. Click on the screenshot of the GDC instagram page below to access the GDC's page on Instagram.
The posts themselves, more than embodying the visual rules set in the content strategy, also expand and express the organization's interaction with the world; some posts give guides about misinformation while others, for example, encourage Gen Z voters in Fulton County to take a more active role in democracy by attending events hosted by other non-profits, live concerts, and democracy talks on their college campuses.
All five of the GDC's slides for posts can be viewed individually below, and the full posts can be accessed by visiting https://www.instagram.com/gademocracy/.
