Winter Giveaway
SUNY Oswego Career Services Office | 2017
Overview
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While working as the Public Relations and Marketing Intern at SUNY Oswego’s Career Services Office, I was asked to manage the office’s social media accounts. One of the semester’s goals was to increase student engagement on the Facebook and Instagram pages. To do so, I created the Winter Giveaway. This campaign ran for two weeks and gave students the opportunity to win a grand prize for completing all of the required steps to enter. Promotional material was created for the digital aspects of the giveaway such as the graphic for the Facebook and Instagram posts, digital signage around campus and printed materials to be handed out to students on campus. The campaign reached over 26,000 people.
Audience
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The rules of the Winter Giveaway stated that the winner of the giveaway must be a current SUNY Oswego student. The age and demographics of students range widely, as there are some adult learners enrolled in classes. Therefore, the post graphic and rules had to be designed for a large audience with one thing in common, their current university. When using the promotion tools that Instagram and Facebook offer, I came to the conclusion that a large seven-day boost to all of the page’s followers in a 10-mile radius and also to their friends would be an effective way to reach our audience base.
Audience and Promotion options on Instagram.
Goals
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The goal of the giveaway was to gain followers. While a large number of followers makes an account look official, it was important to my client that the new followers would be ones that would ultimately benefit from the information the Career Services page promotes. To make sure that the individuals entering the giveaway contest were the ones that would truly benefit, a series of 5 steps were required to ensure that they really wanted the prize and would follow both social media accounts.
There was a secondary goal of ensuring the word choice in the giveaway post was simple and understandable to the wide age group SUNY Oswego students fall within.
The final goal was to continually update the social media accounts so that the new followers would be consistently given information about future events and the resources that are available.
Visual Research
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While browsing Pinterest, I found these images as design reference. I liked the colors from the first image so I used one of the blue colors and used it as inspiration to develop my own color palette. I found these to be successful. I wanted to incorporate a style like these and images to create eye-catching designs for my system.
Image belongs to Envato.
Image belongs to freepik.com.
Image belongs to Envato.
Giveaway Items
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I worked with the Oswego Campus Store in obtaining the prize and learned what financial actions I needed to complete in order to use Career Service’s monetary resources. I was given a budget of $100 and chose seven items to include in the giveaway. Once purchased, I set up a photo shoot to capture images of the items to add to the promotional design. I’ve noticed with other giveaways that the ones that are the most successful usually had images of the prizes on the post.
Sketches
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I decided that the giveaway post’s design was to have a snow globe incorporated within it along with images of the prizes. I sketched up some ideas where both of these elements would balance one another. Since it was called the Winter Giveaway and the client was planning on a Spring Giveaway, it was important to include the title within the post image for recognition. The Career Service Office’s logo would also be included. It was important to sketch out ideas, the post, handouts and the digital signage at the same time so that they looked together but could also stand on their own.
Color and Type
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The color palette that was ultimately chosen for the design reflects both the season of Winter and the excitement of a contest. There is a good range of tones which was used to create contrast. White was also used for some type and the snow.
The main typeface chosen for the large text was American Purpose. Myriad Pro was used for some of the text on the handouts and digital signage.
Social Media Posts
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Giveaway Handouts
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A colleague and I stood in the SUNY Oswego Campus Center for 4 hours giving away the handouts to passing students. When they stopped we told them about the Winter Giveaway and also educated them on other Career Services resources. By talking one-on-one with students, I got to see their excitement about the giveaway and also got to witness them interacting with the post and following the pages.
Results
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The culmination of the giveaway increased Instagram followers by 51.8% and the Facebook likes by 41% within a two-week time period. All of the promotional material formed a system and successfully worked across mediums to promote the SUNY Oswego Career Services Office and their resources. Prior to the Winter Giveaway, the highest interacted image on their Instagram page had 32 likes and after the Giveaway, the record reached 109.
