Students weave web to promote community engagement

Beedie MBA student Danielle Friesen weaved a “community web” as part of a guerilla marketing campaign to raise awareness for isolated seniors.

A group of Beedie School of Business MBA students weaved a web of yarn in a guerilla marketing campaign to raise awareness for isolated seniors and older adults who live alone and find themselves disconnected from the community.

The web was part of a wider project that required the students to design a social media strategy for a local nonprofit organization as part of their marketing and management information systems classes. The group, consisting of Joanna Kipp, Danielle Friesen, Geordan Hankinson, Negar Hadavi, and Mohammad Nasiri, chose to help local community driven charitable organization Marpole Place Neighbourhood House.

The students designed and implemented a social media framework for the organization to utilize, which included making better use of their existing website, and Facebook account, and also setting up a blog site and Twitter account. The students went to great lengths to make sure they put in place an ongoing legacy for the organization, creating social media guidelines for staff to follow once the project was completed.

After crafting the social media strategy, the students decided to focus their attention on a new initiative from the organization, the Forever Connected program, which aims to reduce the isolation of the community’s seniors. As older people who are isolated from the community tend not to use social media, the group faced the challenge of finding a way to reach the program’s target audience. To counter this, they came up with a novel marketing campaign.

“We knew that we needed a theme – we didn’t want to just go out on the streets and hand out pamphlets,” says Kipp. “The web represented both the world wide web and the community – even though there are isolated people in the community, everyone knows someone who would be able to help them. We thought that by creating a physical manifestation of that web it would help us spread the word about the program.

The students set about creating a web of coloured yarn outside Marpole library. Passersby were encouraged to write their names on papers hung onto the yarn while the students explained to them the purpose of the Forever Connected program.

“When you are so invested in a project like this it is becomes very easy to put effort into it,” says Kipp. “We have done a lot of projects during our MBA, but I have to say that this has definitely been the most interesting and exciting one so far. It was nice to be able to help such a worthwhile cause – no one should have to be alone when they are living within a community web.”

More information can be found at Marpole Place’s new blog, Facebook page, or on Twitter at @MarpoleplaceNH.