Supporting sustainability via social media
We’re proud to have been shortlisted for ‘Best Campaign Supporting Sustainability’ in the edurank awards 2019
At Keele University, we’re committed to embedding sustainability into everything that we do.
Our ‘Root and Branch’ social media campaign aims to strengthen this pledge as part of our continued ambitions to become a more sustainable university, and be genuinely sector-leading in the area of sustainability.
The campaign captures and promotes the full breadth of the University’s sustainability activities across our research, education, business processes, campus and wider local community and alumni networks, as well as our external engagement with partners and business.
So far this academic year, our ‘Root and Branch’ content has reached 170,000+ people on Twitter, and 218,000+ people on Facebook (source: Sprout Social tag report). Our posts have had great engagement with 276 retweets and 702 likes, and 1,528 reactions on Facebook. Our sustainability focused videos had 25,000+ views throughout 2018. This is based almost entirely on organic content.
On social media, we encouraged students to donate their leftover non-perishable food at the end of term, which helped result in our fantastic students donating three tones of food to the local Trussell Trust food bank — providing an estimated 7,000 meals. This was as part of the Keele ‘Great Donate’ scheme which was nominated for a Green Gown Award. We also produced social media video content to encourage our students to donate unwanted clothes, books, and bric-a-brac to the British Heart Foundation as part of the Keele Green Move Out.
Our content plan has included sharing 26 key sustainability messages to a broad audience via Twitter, as well as producing dozens of videos in-house such as short student vlogs to explain our sustainability strategy in an authentic and digestible format, and coverage of the launch of our new Institute for Sustainable Futures to share with those who could not make the event — or who may not have previously been engaged.
To complement our wide-reaching media coverage, we have hosted numerous Facebook live broadcasts with our sector-leading academic experts, and creating engaging ‘Root and Branch’ content for Instagram and Facebook through short instanews videos. This has also included several Facebook Lives with Keele’s Dr Sharon George, who is an Ocean Hero on Sky News — such as this chat about sustainable Lego.
Our posts are often picked up and shared by other outlets, including the World Economic Forum.
And Keele must be doing something right, because our students and alumni are winning sustainability awards themselves for digital innovation and app development in sustainability.
We are especially proud that our almost entirely organic (pardon the pun) ‘Root and Branch’ content has helped Keele University maintain a top 10 position in the Edurank rankings in the 2018–19 academic year.
And additionally, for the third successive year Keele has been ranked as one of the top 20 universities in the world for sustainability, one of only a handful of UK universities to feature at the top of this global list. This demonstrates Keele’s strong commitment to educating our students on sustainability, supported through this very campaign!
