AIGA (American Institute for Graphic Arts) Nashville is an important part of the Nashville design community, hosting regular speaking, interactive, or portfolio review events around town. As a sponsor of AIGA Nashville, Circa Design not only supports the group's endeavors, but engages with the group on a regular basis, conducting studio tours, attending events, and assisting with design.
AIGA approached Circa because they were having trouble recruiting volunteers and as a mostly volunteer-run organization, this was becoming problematic. They knew that having a stronger social media presence would help them reach a larger audience and increase engagement, thereby driving up volunteer interest. Short on their own time, they asked Circa to create a strategy that would alleviate their volunteer problem.
We started with defining AIGA and AIGA Nashville, listing the mission of both the national organization and the local chapter, providing us context to remain focused on. Based on notes from the local chapter and by analyzing previous engagement with posts, we defined the Instagram audience of AIGA Nashville and the audience that was interacting most with their posts—while they were and should be targeting current design students, local design professionals, and current AIGA members, most engagement was coming from young, most likely freshly-graduated designers operating from "Instagram Professional" accounts.
We then analyzed the AIGA Nashville instagram feed, identifying problems such as inconsistencies in template usage, repetitiveness of the same posts, a lack of strategy with Instagram Stories, and using missized graphics.
Knowing that AIGA Nashville's Instagram is mostly run by volunteers, we knew that we needed to create a strategy that could be implemented easily by a variety of people and picked up quickly—something that wouldn't take a lot time getting to know in order to do successfully.
In order to help keep the voice of the posts consistent, I created "Jane". Jane is an imaginary persona with a specific yet relatable background, allowing anyone to fill her role and write in her voice, and making her approachable to most audiences. Her bio is short and takes just a few minutes to read. With the bio are specifics on how Jane does and doesn't speak, including specific phrases for specific posts. By following these guidelines, AIGA Nashville can let any volunteer run or post to their account and feel confident that they will maintain a cohesive voice.
After presenting AIGA Nashville with style tiles and mood boards, we created templates for their most common events and types of posts. Similar to the purpose of Jane, these templates allow any volunteer to step in quickly and create posts that maintain the cohesion of the feed. Within these templates, we made sure to follow national AIGA brand guidelines while still displaying a unique personality.
Lastly, we provided AIGA Nashville with a content calendar, coordinated by color, to show when and what type of posts they should be making for maximum engagement. All of these documents were pitched to AIGA Nashville in a zoom client meeting and have since been adopted.
