Creating Engaging Content for your Alumni with the University of Strathclyde

When Suzanne and the Strathclyde Alumni team approached Forumm to review their social media interaction with their community we jumped at the opportunity. Strathclyde is one of those universities that we generally use as examples of best practice, but the team there were looking at ways to make content creation more sustainable.

After carefully reviewing their channels we unanimously decided that the focus should be on growing their Instagram channels, primarily Reels, and finding ways to empower the wider alumni team to create videos that hit a chord with their audience. Instagram is also one of those channels that Alumni are now starting to interact with, where in the past it was primarily Linkedin (which Stratchclyde runs very well). 

The Forumm team got to work on a benchmarking exercise that found other alumni instagram channels that were already creating engaging videos… and to be honest they were hard to find! Most looked like an afterthought repurposed from videos created for other purposes. However, once we identified the key accounts, and reviewed content that worked. Digging a bit deeper we spend a morning with the core team working on objectives, audience and content themes.

We came up with Seven themes that would work for an alumni audience, here are there to give you a flavour:

  • Campus Moments, Landmarks and Nostalgia 
  • Graduation and Ceremonial Pride
  • City of Glasgow and Scottish Culture

     

Love a good workshop! Next up we prepared two half day workshops getting buy-in from the wider team. One workshop revolved around showcasing examples relating to the content themes as well as sharing the objectives of the channel and how people can get involved. The last workshop was a practical where we sent out groups of people to film, edit, add music and publish Reels. 

Outcome?

  • A rebrand of the Strathclyde Alumni Channel – give them a follow
  • Confidence for the wider team to create content
  • Understanding of audience and content themes
  • Instagram strategy and benchmarking document 
  • Three new Instagram Reels within first week of training with over 6,000 views
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