ABOUT THE GROUP
University of Delaware - POSC499 - Group 2
Four senior students working towards our senior project to bring awareness to the general public through various social media elements.
Strategy:
“We assert that NGOs’ network positions and engagement on social media can influence NGOs’ abilities to have their messages heard in the networked public sphere—the digital space where politicians, journalists, organizations, groups, and citizens publicly negotiate issues” (Yang & Saffer, 2015). Social media is the best way to reach our audience. In the digital age, most people in the United States have access to social media. There are many different platforms of social media, so the hardest part is finding the best ones to use for our campaign. Twitter has a user base of 206 million monetizable daily active users worldwide, with the biggest user base being the United States of 73 million active users, (Statista). Instagram has roughly a billion active users a month, with India and the United States having the most active user base, (Statista).
The digital age has also brought about the usage of emails. Many political campaigns, news sources, and various other groups use this strategy as another way to outreach. The usage of an email campaign will send information to our users so that they will not have to search for information on our other platforms. This ties in with our website, which creates a centralized location for all of the platforms that brings our user base information about human trafficking.
Twitter:
As a group, we decided Twitter would be a good platform for our campaign to reach our audience (general public) and obtain our goals. The idea is that our Twitter audience will differ from the other elements we chose, using Twitter will help us quickly and effectively be in contact with other campaigns and sources that have similar information and goals as our campaign. After being connected with these other Twitter pages surrounding human trafficking, it is easy to retweet the information to be viewed on our page as well as Tweet out quick helpful information and sources on our page as well. The sole purpose of our Twitter account is to be as informative as possible in a quick and efficient way to our audience.
Instagram:
Instagram is another social media platform, but we are going to be posting different content in hopes to reach the same audience but on an emotional level rather than an informative level. Instagram is a social media platform where people are constantly sharing photos to interact with one another. Using emotional photos in our campaign can help grab the attention of not only our audience but all those who come across the page. Having people's emotions involved is important, if you feel strongly about something on an emotional level, you are more likely to dedicate your attention to it. We will still be providing information and sources within the comment section of our post. Instagram also has some useful features that can help get out page notices, for example, the use of hashtags, sharing posts to our stories rather than just the main page, as well as the explore page aspect of the app. Instagram will be a great element to display the seriousness and help people visualize what is going on with human trafficking.
Email:
HTAC will use one primary email campaign to interact best with our audience. As previously mentioned our audience will be the general public in the United States. Emails will be sent to members of our audience, they will sign up by submitting their email on either our website, Twitter or Instagram. The goal of this campaign will be to fundraise for our organization or another non-profit. According to Anspach and Draguljić, the best framing device to use would either be economic or personal. “However, we find strong evidence that economic and personal frames are effective.” (Anspach, 14). Framing our emails so that they relate to our audience will greatly increase their effectiveness.
Website:
The website we have made will be used as a general platform that encourages our audiences to look into our campaign. The website will also be the element that has an overload of information on human trafficking where our audience becomes very informed about the topic as well be provided with sources and access to our other platforms regarding our campaign. The focus of the website is to have the information that we have obtained in one general area. We have designed the website to be convenient and easy to navigate through the information and sources provided. The URL will be provided in our emails, as well as posted in the bios of our social media profiles for easy access.
Overall Strategy:
The overall strategy of our campaign is to use the elements that have been listed above to get the information that we have gathered out to our audience of the general public, the best and most efficient way. All of our elements will work together in promoting one another so that we can have all four elements as active as possible. Our social media accounts will probably have the most engagement from the audience, which is why it is important for us to use our knowledge of social media to our advantage for this campaign. Twitter and Instagram are two of the most used social media platforms. This is good for our campaign because both apps are a great way to gain a significant following, which will expand our audience. As previously stated, our email and website will be made easy to access from the social media pages. Another aspect of our overall campaign is that we will be distributing different content throughout the different elements. We will use each element to touch base on different topics within our campaign, this is so our audience does not think of us as redundant or limited on the information.