Category: Case studies

A new Home for the Arts in Sheffield

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Early last year, Sheffield Hallam announced a long-term lease on Sheffield’s former Head Post Office, a Grade II listed building that held many memories for local people. The building had sadly fallen out of use for some years, and was now in need of some serious work.

The renovated building would be home to students from the University’s Institute of Arts, and they would be making and doing loads of creative and interesting projects in the space. The move was clearly a great opportunity to use our communications work to raise Sheffield Hallam’s profile and engage members of the public.

Sheffield's old Head Post Office

Sheffield’s old Head Post Office

We started the planning process by identifying some key aims that would drive our approach. They were:

“Communicate Sheffield Hallam’s sympathy for the heritage of the building and surrounding area, and highlight our sustainable approach to our presence in the city region.”

“Celebrate the Sheffield Institute of Arts and promote the outstanding teaching that is currently delivered by the Institute.”

And the move into the space would clearly have a positive impact on the student experience, helping to create a sense of community cohesion among our art and design students.

So, with some objectives in place, we started to throw ideas around for a social media campaign. The concept that really stuck with us was the idea of the University creating a new home for the arts in the city – a space that wasn’t just for students but, taking into account the public gallery and café, would be for the people of Sheffield.

And that’s why we settled on #HomeForTheArts as a way of aggregating social content. We knew that we wanted lots of visual content, and that Instagram would play an important role for us.

We were fortunate enough to have a brilliant photographer working with us, documenting the whole process. India Hobson, who we’d worked with on other projects, was commissioned to photograph the restoration process at regular intervals, gaining access to all areas of the building.

The Head Post Office interior, by India Hobson

The Head Post Office interior, by India Hobson

The next thing we did was seek out a few Instagrammers who were interested in architecture in the Sheffield area. We found a few, and messaged them to invite them to our very first Instameet. In the end, we took around 12 Instagrammers on a tour of the building, co-ordinated with our partners M3, who were overseeing the restoration.

Well in advance of the tour, we sent them a brief, which included when and where to meet,  what to expect, what they would and wouldn’t be able to get access to, and what the hashtag for the restoration was. This ensured that we’d be able to aggregate their content, share it and help develop a narrative about the building’s restoration.

https://twitter.com/tashbright/status/647305870871785472

We also did our first Periscope, broadcasting from inside the building and the rooftop, which has incredible views of the city.

By inviting a group of enthusiastic photographers on a tour of our building, we reached new audiences, and our Instagrammers helped us communicate our key messages about the building.

The Instameet (and subsequent tours for other groups) allowed us to:

  • announce the restoration project to new audiences
  • develop a bit of a buzz online about the building
  • create a feeling of goodwill towards our sympathetic treatment of the building
  • give local people a sense of ownership of the space

https://twitter.com/faveplaces/status/652567620219215873

It also created an opportunity to talk longer-term about heritage: for the building, and for the Institute of Arts. Again, we had a narrative, and we used behind-the-scenes photos of the restoration and archive shots of the building to talk about our resurrection of the building for arts and culture in the city.

And, in terms of measurement and evaluation, engagement was the key metric. We were looking for shares, likes and replies – and hopefully those replies would be opportunities to further develop the narrative around our role in the city.

Outcomes for the campaign? Well, we have social media users acting as advocates for the University, talking about us restoring an iconic building to create a home for arts and culture in the city. But the real impact will be felt once we start to use the building for public events like the degree show and Catalyst Festival.

I hope the groundwork that was done with the #HomeForTheArts campaign means that people still feel a connection with the building, albeit one that’s shaped as much by the work our art and design students do in the building as it is the rich heritage of the building, and the people who used to work there.

Joe Field, social media manager
@joemcafield

 

Graduation 2015: a strategic approach to social

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People sometimes ask me about our ‘social media strategy’. The truth is that we don’t have one – nor do we need one.

We do have a communications strategy which covers the strategic use of social media to raise profile and manage reputation.

And that’s the right approach. We don’t have a ‘telephone strategy’, or an ’email strategy’. When it comes to social media, we have content strategies, guidelines and a range of different functions that we provide with social media tools.

What we do with social media directly supports our communications strategy. I’ll use the example of our Graduation 2015 campaign to illustrate how.

For two weeks in November, our students took to the stage in Sheffield’s City Hall, shaking hands with Professor Robert Winston and picking up their certificates.

#throwback #graduation #shugrad #proud #sheffield #sheffieldhallam

A photo posted by Camille (@camilleb236) on

It’s a key milestone in the student experience, and a real opportunity to demonstrate the sense of belonging – or brand affinity – among our student and alumni communities. And, by involving those communities in our social media campaign, we had the opportunity to show how vibrant the sense of belonging among students and alumni is to a range of external audiences.

We also wanted to use social media to enhance the experience of graduates during the fortnight of celebrations. So, working with graduate Tom Stayte and his innovative SquareShare social printing service, we gave them a reason to engage with it. By posting their photos to Twitter or Instagram, and tagging them ‘#SHUgrad’, they could get free printed copies, with details of our Alumni Connect service on each print.

On our own channels, we focused on the graduates themselves, ‘doorstepping’ them at the City Hall, and asking them what they loved most about their time at Sheffield Hallam.

As well as promoting engagement with #SHUgrad at the City Hall, we interacted with social media users in real time, offering personalised responses with a view to deepening engagement as conversations developed.

One of the key themes in our communications strategy is our role in the city region. We hold our graduation ceremonies in Sheffield’s City Hall, right in the heart of the city centre. By focusing on visual, student-led content, in and around the City Hall, we demonstrated our civic pride, and our role in providing education, skills and employability in the region.

Liam and my graduation on Friday the 20th! Had such an amazing day and we were so proud of one another 🙂 #shugrad

A photo posted by Kirsty O'Brien (@obrien_marie) on

Lastly, we communicated the University’s values around equality, diversity, and inclusion, by including a diverse range of students – from a range of backgrounds and academic areas – in the campaign.

The #SHUgrad campaign is a great example of a university using social media for community management. Teams from the university’s marketing, communications and alumni functions worked with students from the start, involving them in the campaign (by getting them to create the graduation video) and interacting with them throughout graduation fortnight.

That approach is fundamental to social media at Hallam: we want to show our audiences that we use social media to talk to, listen to, and get feedback from, student and alumni communities. And, by encouraging social media users to post about graduation from their own accounts (and share our posts) we reached new audiences.

Here are the stats: conversations about#SHUgrad led to 6,871,453 brand impressions, and 11,339 engagements with the @sheffhallamuni Twitter account alone. And the #SHUgrad hashtag trended in Sheffield every day for the whole two weeks.

On a personal level, it was also a really good example of teams from across the University working together, with students, on a key bit of University business. And it’s opened the door to even more collaborative, engaging approaches to social media at Hallam.

Joe Field, social media manager

Instagram takeover: letting students do the work

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For a week in March 2016, we gave control of Sheffield Hallam’s Instagram account to the SHUinsiders – a team of seven students who blog and post about student life in Sheffield. This post is about how we did it, what happened as a result, and what we learned from doing it.

I’d been thinking about doing a student takeover of the University’s Instagram account for a while, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, our follower growth had plateaued at two or three new followers per day. Secondly, putting students in the frame is at the heart of our approach to Instagram, and giving them the reins seemed like a great way of extending that. The challenge was finding the right students to do it.

Having worked with the SHUinsiders for a few months, and having got to know them as individuals, it felt like the time was right to take the plunge. I work with Helen Horton in student marketing on everything to do with the Insiders, so we got our heads together and made plans for a week-long takeover.

We started by floating the idea with the students, asking them how comfortable they felt with it. Overwhelmingly, they were very keen. We discussed the kind of content they might post, and the logistics of making it work. And we picked a week that worked for them, and for our social media content plans.

I put together a brief, and posted it in our private Facebook group – we use the group to manage and plan all of our activity with them. They had time to ask questions, and talk things through with each other, before we started the takeover. This was really important: if they hadn’t had time to chew things over and kick ideas around together, it would have been a different experience for them, and for our audience on Instagram.

The plan was very simple: a different student would post from the account each day. They would post a student’s-eye-view of life in Sheffield, and show what it’s like to be a student at Sheffield Hallam.

The takeover coincided with an open day, so we got Clarissa, Saturday’s SHUinsider, to post updates from the open day, as well as her own insights into life in the Steel City. Another SHUinsider, Jamilya, was on Erasmus exchange in Austria – a great bit of fortuity that we incorporated into the takeover.

This week, Hallam's Instagram account has been taken over by the #SHUinsiders – a team of student bloggers from the uni. Today, it's Jamilya (@jama_aa) a second year Events Management student! At the moment I'm on Erasmus exchange program in Austria at Kufstein University of applied science. Didn't really know what my first post should be about, so decided to go with the first thing that we explored in Kufstein. On our second day here we decided to walk to that beautiful lake with other Erasmus students. Most of them are from Europe: Netherlands, Slovakia, Lithuania, Turkey, England, Germany, but there are also some from Mexico and Morocco. I always enjoyed travelling and meeting new people from different countries and Erasmus exchange is a perfect opportunity to do so. Not sure if every Hallam student can apply for it, but if you study at SBS you definitely can! #shuinsiders #loveshu #erasmus #fhkufstein

A photo posted by #WeAreHallam (@sheffhallamuni) on

I changed the account password every night, in preparation for the next day (we briefed them in advance about what it would be on their day), and I changed the account bio to explain what was going on. The Insiders had some boilerplate text to paste at the beginning of each post, so it was clear who they were, and they included the #SHUinsiders tag in every post.

Most of them tagged their own accounts in each post as well. We didn’t ask them to do that, but it was really nice that they did. Generally, people are interested in other people, and making social content about people is always good.

This week, Hallam's Instagram account has been taken over by the #SHUinsiders – a team of student bloggers from the uni. Today, it's John, a first year Film Production Student! It's no secret that Sheffield has an exciting and varied musical history, as well as being home to a myriad of interesting people. Pictured above are newly wedded couple Alan and Donna Smyth, outside their studio, '2Fly'. As part of a uni project, I recently got to meet them, subsequently making a documentary about what they do. Alan is an accomplished music producer, with quite an impressive portfolio of artists under his belt. He is the man responsible for producing the Arctic Monkeys first album, "Whatever People Say I Am, That's what I'm not", as well as lending his hand to Pulp, Milburn and Reverend and the Makers alongside countless others. His passion for the Sheffield music industry is certainly palpable, and I'd encourage any aspiring local musicians and bands to get in touch with him via their Facebook page, as he is still producing to this day. His tip for who to keep an eye on this year are local band " I Set the Sea on Fire", and I have to agree, they're amazing, check them out!

A photo posted by #WeAreHallam (@sheffhallamuni) on

So, to recap, we wanted to increase the number of followers on our Instagram account. We did that. Our followers grew from 2,747 to 2,833 over the seven days of the takeover. We also wanted to raise the profile of the #SHUinsiders campaign. Although we don’t have stats on reach, the hashtag ‘#SHUinsiders’ was engaged with 819 times over the week. This suggests that users were clicking on the tag to explore other content.

And all of the students reported a small increase in followers on their own accounts, along with lots of new likes to their existing content. Finally, we wanted to demonstrate our willingness to talk to, listen to, and work with, our student community. It was really important to us that the takeover showed this, because so much of the work we do on social media is about developing and enhancing a sense of belonging among our student audiences.

The fact that there were 1,706 engagements (and counting) with the takeover posts, along with the growth in followers, shows the positivity that people responded with. And, anecdotally, all of the feedback we’ve had to the takeover has been really positive.

Is there anything I’d do differently? Possibly, but not because anything went badly. Giving the students the confidence to go out and be themselves was key. They needed a little bit of encouragement at first, but that’s completely understandable – it’s a big responsibility.

Instagram is the perfect channel for a student takeover, but I’m not sure I’d ever hand over a corporate Twitter account in the same way. There’s too much customer service happening in that space.

Lastly, the important question now (and maybe one which you’d be willing to answer in the comments) is ‘what next’?

Joe Field, social media manager

TL;DR version:

  • takeovers on Instagram are fun
  • planning is critical
  • so’s talking it over face-to-face, before you take the plunge
  • keep it unfiltered and authentic

 

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