Molly’s Presentation: Start a Campaign
Expanding the Project to More than a Zine
Molly gave a great lecture to the class on how we should be trying to do more than just “raise awareness” about an issue by the end of the semester. How do we create a set of deliverables that gets people to act on the issue rather than form a new opinion about it?
In the case of our project, could we get Instagram users to actually change the way they use the platform? I didn’t want people to only look at our magazine and then forget about the message in a matter of days.
Researching Successful Campaigns
After listening to the lecture, I went and did some research on campaigns that got people to take some sort of action in supporting a belief or cause:
Full article (“Cause Marketing: How These 20 Visual Campaigns Created Massive Impact”) can be found here.
The Ad Council’s “Love Has No Labels”: To encourage Americans to forego their subconscious biases towards their peers, the Ad Council launched a transmedia campaign that took off with this viral video. It accumulates 40 million views so far. Thousands of social network users also added a graphic overlay to their personal photos in support of equality. Design lesson we learned: This campaign asked viewers to join the conversation by using the #LoveHasNoLabels to tag their photos. Next time you’re designing for a social initiative, think about how user generated content (like those photo overlays) can help the idea spread faster.
Always, “Like a Girl”: Always, the female hygiene brand, detected that 72% of girls feel that society limits them — especially during puberty. To restore their confidence, the company created a campaign to share how girls can be unstoppable and smash all kinds of limitations. This empowering message spread virally, managing to redefine what doing things #likeagirl means.
Design lesson we learned: When you design cause-driven campaigns, consider how hashtags can help the organization keep track of the initiative’s success. If you tie a clear call to action to the different pieces involved, and ask for answers to be tagged with a certain phrase, figuring out the campaign’s effectiveness will be completely transparent.
Cancer Research UK’s #NoMakeupSelfie: Monitoring social media led the team at Cancer Research UK to run into and leverage the #NoMakeupSelfie trend. They quickly invited online users to #BeatCancerSooner and donate €3. Within 6 days approximately 8 million Euros had been raised thanks to the thousands of supporters who shared their #NoMakeupSelfie.
Design lesson we learned: Sometimes the most compelling typographic choice for cause-related designs is human handwriting. Doctors at Cancer Research UK used handwritten signs both to invite users to participate and thank them once they did.
After looking through plenty of examples, like the ones mentioned above, we started forming some ideas for how we could take our project to the next step. We decided we’d create a campaign to encourage people to be more open and honest with each other on Instagram about personal matters.
People often post only the highlights of experiences on Instagram. This feeds into our research on social comparison and Instagram’s negative impact on people’s well-being. We think people should be able to share any moment on Instagram — good or bad.
Campaign Materials & Components
We based the idea for having a toolkit off of the one we got from the Dropbox workshop at the start of the semester. We liked that the toolkit is something you can keep and carry with you no matter where you go.
To get people involved in this campaign, we plan on tabling in the UC to hand out the zine. It would be packaged inside a toolkit filled with other items such as a poster, set of stickers and most importantly, a call to action card.
- Toolkit: Plastic reusable bag (10" x 7.5")
- Zine: Inform people about the problem, research and call to action.
- Poster: Something to put in their space to remind them of the mission
- Pledge: “Take a pledge to show more of your authentic self on Instagram.”
- Stickers: Promote friendlier/more supportive interactions on Instagram
After going through the zine, the reader would be asked to take part in the campaign. There would be a card included in the toolkit for them to sign.
While this is going on, we’d work with a handful of students to kick off the campaign on Instagram. We’d ask them to post a photo of themselves, write a description supporting the campaign idea and then tag some friends to ask them to do the same. We would reach out to a diverse set of students at CMU to get involved. We’d also try to get in contact with some local influencers as we know that their involvement matters a great deal.
The author’s note at the end of the zine would read as so:
The creators of this zine came together during their final semester at Carnegie Mellon University to research and understand the ways that Instagram affects our behaviors, mental health, perception of self and social relationships on a regular basis.
As a team, we spent several weeks reading research papers and online articles concerning topics related to social comparison, online personas as well as addiction to social media platforms. We looked into how usage of Instagram can either help or harm people’s well-being and self-esteem. In parallel to conducting these literature reviews, we surveyed students on-campus to find out how they view their connection to Instagram as a platform. We chose to package our research findings in the form of a zine so that it can be easily distributed within the greater community.
After having read through the research, we invite you to re-evaluate the way you use Instagram today. If people posted more about what is really happening in their lives, instead of just the “highlights” of their lives, we believe that Instagram would be a space for acceptance and understanding. It could create a form of social media for sharing and support.
Having been founded on a mission statement about sharing life experiences and moments, Instagram has lost some of the authenticity that was intended in the first place. Take the pledge to show a more authentic self on Instagram. Your actions will help encourage others to do the same.
Appendix: We weren’t too sure how “taking the pledge” would work. In our brainstorm session, we kept it simple and said it’d be a card that people could sign and give back to us after taking a toolkit. We had second thoughts about the idea because it doesn’t seem impactful in the long-run to have them sign a pledge card that we take back.
I saw an interesting campaign going on in Donner. I’m assuming they asked students to write down a single word that they care about or want to foster in safe spaces/communities. Maybe we we could do something like this where we display who has signed the pledge. Overall, we’re glad we had this spark to go off into a new direction.
