Ashoka University
My role: Communication Design & Social Media Campaigning
I also worked on the university's website, which can be seen here
WHO
Ashoka University is a pioneer in its focus on providing a liberal education at par with the best in the world, in India. The aim of the university is to help students become well-rounded individuals who can think critically about issues from multiple perspectives, communicate effectively and become leaders with a commitment to public service.
WHAT
As the Deputy Manager, Communications & Media relations at Ashoka University for 2 years, I was entrusted with the responsibility of managing university's brand strategy across all its digital platforms from scratch: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube & LinkedIn
I also designed brochures, posters and other creatives for the university (shown below)
Challenges
As the university rapidly grew in the two years I was there, we faced many challenges:
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I had to ensure that the new upcoming centres, events and verticals followed the brand structures because over time the overall branding started to disintegrate. However, also being careful about helping them build their own presence online or otherwise
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I also had to make sure we represented every facet of Ashoka in our digital campaigns
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A new visual media team was created to document Ashoka's activities for marketing, and I was responsible for strategising and using the same
Step1
Understanding our Audience & Stakeholders
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As our first task as a new communications team in a brand new and burgeoning university, we did extensive stakeholder mapping.
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We realised we needed to focus our effort on making our content for donors, founders of the university, prospective students and their parents, current students and post-grads.
These were a lot of different people! And hence we needed a plan.
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Secondly, we looked up analytics of all our existing social media channels and analysed them for their utility for our stakeholders and our own team size.
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We first focussed on using Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube in our first year and then moved to Instagram later.
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We also set policy guidelines as well as brand help book for social media pages of other centres under the university
Step 2
Understanding our own media channels
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Once we had a clear idea about our stakeholders and the social media channels we wanted to focus on, we moved towards getting in touch with all of them and listening to their ideas and needs from them about what they wanted out of social media.
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Taking all ideas and upcoming events and important dates into consideration, we decided to start creating relevant content
We made a robust content calendar to complete our content and then used tools like Facebook scheduler and then Hootsuite to schedule it well in advance.
We had also been sending out newsletters to our key stakeholders- I designed them and we made its content multimedia and in sync with the social media campaigns of the month!
Step 3
Analyzing our traffic and views
We would keep a constant eye on our analytics to get a sense of our engagements with our audience and tried our best to make the best use of our resources and social media listening applications like Mention and Google alerts to keep us informed of conversations about Ashoka.
Competitive analysis, social media analytics and a healthy team culture that fostered creativity, our own growth and learning enabled us to constantly innovate new ways of telling stories across our platform.