Starting From the Ground Up
We are a team of four senior Journalism students at the University of Texas at Austin in pursuit of creating digital products to enhance the launch of Public Health Watch. Our team, Kaylee Benavides, Carissa Georgelos, Jasmine Lopez, and Julia Rasor are working on this project in the context of our Digital Innovations Capstone class taught by assistant professor of practice at the School of Journalism and Media, Christian McDonald. Julia Rasor was drawn to the project established by Public Health Watch (PHW) to help support a “new wave of awareness that can be promoted to the next generation. A group of people we need to inform and educate as they will be the ones who have the power to make the change we need to see”. Jasmine said she liked the project because it was new, and wanted to work on a project that is “fresh and has an agenda for empowering readers with knowledge”. Carissa is passionate about creativity and with a double major in advertising, she is excited for the creativity she can bring to marketing Public Health Watch to a targeted audience. Kaylee cites that she was drawn to the project for its timeliness, since the pandemic heightened awareness of public health and “inspired citizens, including myself, to take these lessons beyond the pandemic and incorporate their safety and health education into their daily lives”. Kaylee is excited for how the information provided by PHW will be an asset.
The idea for the new site predates the pandemic, and instead focuses on other, everyday health concerns such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease, mental illness, drug addiction and heat exhaustion, with focus on demographics of women and children. Self described as “a nonprofit, investigative news organization that focuses on threats to America’s wellbeing” PHW focuses on a preventative and proactive approach to health.
Our team’s ideation was preliminary, as we didn’t first know the needs or wants of Jim Morris, founder of Public Health Watch. We had bounced around the idea of creating a bot that could hang out and answer questions, but after speaking with Jim Morris, we found that a lot of necessary groundwork is needed, such as marketing tactics and cultivating a social media presence that would effectively connect and engage an audience. We started ideating about the need for a comprehensive media toolkits that advise about social media platform best practices, the creation of logos, a newsletter, finding a consistent voice, and all the other components that went into creating an online presence. We thought of ways we can leverage the Advisory Board of Public Health Watch, who are all experts and renowned in their field, but have very little online media presence themselves. We all agreed this would lend Public Health Watch the necessary credibility to be a legitimate voice, and to use this as a differentiator for promoting the new site.
So far, we have created personas that will help guide our online presence and the way we think we can most effectively reach them through marketing. With the communication platform, Trello, we have outlined our tasks that set the parameters for our Sprint 1. This has set out our work to do for the next two weeks, including drafting slogans, doing market research on nonprofit organizations, creating the media toolkit, and establishing overarching missions. We have also outlined a vision board that gives direction over our project, which includes our business goals, vision, needs, product, and target group we are trying to reach. Just as we are trying to lay the groundwork for Public Health Watch’s online presence, we are also laying the groundwork for our semester.