Goals and Objectives of The Campaign

• Broad Goal: Give high school age teens access to environmental education online to increase their knowledge and awareness following the EPA guidelines for what Environmental Education is. They describe it as, “Increases public awareness and knowledge of environmental issues,” “Does teach individuals critical-thinking,” “Does enhance individuals’ problem-solving and decision-making skills,” and “Does not advocate a particular viewpoint.”
• The outcome we are looking for is for teens to have a broader knowledge of the environment; many teens receive no environmental education in school, which we feel is detrimental. Hopefully, we can increase their awareness and concern for the environment.

• • This will be provided at no cost to the consumer; they will have free access on social media platforms then it is up to them how long they want to spend on it and what they want to do with the information.
  • This will occur primarily on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Twitter; these interfaces have a great deal of popularity with our target age group and are easy to create. Our secondary interfaces would be Facebook and YouTube; these are ways to show our content to adults who would share it with teens and good platforms to advertise on to direct viewers back to our primary networks.
  • Our communication will primarily be short informative posts, memes that provide educational content while still being humorous, polls, quizzes, and other similar content that can be viewed quickly.
  • This all ties into our brand identity, which is best described as Informative, Upbeat, and Trendy

• How and why are we trying this?

• • For this campaign, the desired attributes are that we connect with teens and increase their environmental knowledge and their concern for environmental problems. There is a correlation between exposure to environmental education and the involvement of a teen in environmental causes. Going along with this as they age, the window in which their opinions are still moldable closes. As ecological problems increase worldwide, increased activism and concern amongst this age group have a growing importance in society and the benefit of giving them a greater wealth of knowledge.

Target Groups and Audience

• The specific prioritized groups are the high school age teens and the outliers in those age groups so male and females ages 13-18. We especially want to focus on those who are open to learning new things and share this knowledge with those around them. Hopefully, a small section of views could come from adults who view this and then share it with the teens in their life.

• The subgroups we most want to focus on are people of color, teens whose first language is not English, and students at low-funded schools. Data shows that these traditionally marginalized groups receive little to no environmental education. It is often written off for them, for there is no funding for proper curriculum and teacher education. The importance of getting these groups environmental education should be of the utmost importance as it is shown to increase other subjects’ performance.
• We feel that all young adults desire to expand their world view and learn about what is around them even if they don’t realize it at the time. It will be essential to us to create a variety of content that will appeal to the vast interest of teens these days, a challenge will be keeping up with what the current and relevant interests are, and one way of doing this will be monitoring what posts do well and then capitalizing on those subjects to increase engagement and viewers.

• • We feel that a quantifiable way of seeing if we are appealing to teens would be reaching 40,000 followers on a platform; this number being about 1% of the American population of teens would be a great indicator that we are spreading our message and can hopefully continue to grow from there.

Potential Partners 

• • We have two paths for collaboration, one with brand and individuals with similar platforms with a strong environmental focus that would add credibility to our pages and create content similar to our brand.
  • While these are big goals, social media accounts such as Patagonia, National Geographic, The NRDC, Rare.org, The Sierra Club, and Gretta Thornburg would significantly boost our goal on the environmental side and could certainly help promote our message.
  • Our second collaboration path would be working with popular influencers that teens look up to; if able to connect with them and develop content that supports both of our images, it is a great way to broaden our audience and spread our message to more teens.
  • It will be up to us to stay in touch with modern influencers on social platforms and reach out to them with collaboration ideas. For example, many teenage girls have interests in fashion, shopping, and skincare. If you look at social media, currently popular influencers in these subjects are Devon Lee Carlson, Victoria Paris, Emma Chamberlain, and Skincare by Hyram. These people have success across many platforms and could collaborate on sustainability in shopping and skincare. While they create content on how to do this and ideas people can follow, we could mirror this with posts on the effects of fast fashion on our environment and the plastic problem with cosmetics.
  • There should also be a focus on us sharing fan-based content where followers can submit their materials, hopefully fostering an increase in engagement from our audience.

Core components and strategies of the campaign 

• Our core content will consist of

• • Instagram– Informative Infographics, Educational Memes, Polls, and Quizzes
  • Tik Tok– Videos in line with the current trends on Tik Tok, but the message is on environmental education. We will engage with the latest trending audios and hashtags to try and reach as many peoples for you page as possible.
  • Twitter– Using Twitter to share all of the content we post on another platform to make it easily reposted by people and tweeting and retweeting things that align with our message.
  • The general tone of this should be fun and lighthearted, and we want the message to be enjoyable and engaging instead of being too severe and scaring them off as things such as the news may today.
  • We will make our pages rewarding and engaging with features like fan reposts, weekly shoutouts, and lots of interactive content.

Key Messages we feel are integral and should be promoted are

• • Learn More About the Outdoors, Get Out and Get Involved, Green is good, For the future, #instaclimateaction, #ecomonday

Content Examples

Instagram Examples	Instagram Image Source #1	Instagram Image Source #2	Instagram Image Source #3	Instagram Image Source # 4
Sample Posts (Possible Memes and Infographics)
Poll questions (Engaging and thought-provoking, hopefully)	Do you shop sustainably? Yes or No	Do you know about climate change? Yes or No	Do you want to learn more about climate change? Yes or No	Have you spent time outdoors today? Yes or NO
Quizzes (Personality type quizzes that will have educational explanations after)	Which National Park are you?	What kind of tree are you?	Answer these 10 questions, and we will tell you which greenhouse gas you are and why!	What outdoor activity should you and your squad do this weekend?

• Tik Tok Example– This is a good example of a Tik Tok we would use as it is short, informative, and provides a message that people need to be educated on while using popular audios and treading hashtags

Implementation

• Our goal is to launch by the summer of 2021, possibly June or July; we have this goal in mind as it will be when school is not in session and teens are spending more time on social media. Also, as few will be doing school with, we feel there will be educational gaps teens are looking to fill without even realizing it.
• Short Term Implementation Goals: To launch the campaign on multiple platforms, our initial milestone will be to reach 1000 followers, 100+ shares hopefully increasing as kids return to school and share more with their peers.
• Long Terms Implementation Goals: Possibly integrate our content into some high school curriculums, work with larger brands and influencers who share a similar message, reach the 40K/ 1% of all American teens in followers on a platform.
• Who is needed? An environmental expert and or teacher to help decide on the message, engage teenagers, and then social media team to help create the content, share the message, and effectively brand ourselves. It would help have teenage interns help provide input on what content they think would perform with peers and help keep the message trendy.
• Most significant risks we face? – The biggest threat to our campaign is that it will not take off or misses the mark. If it is too educational, it will not appeal to a broad audience and will be boring and unapproachable to many kids; simultaneously, if it is too fun and silly, so to speak, our goal of education will be lost. The challenge will be finding the balance between the two while keeping it engaging and something teens will relate to and want to share with their friends.

Weekly Calendar Example

Original Data and Effects Evaluation

Analyzing the effects of the campaign is obviously not possible as it is yet to be made public, so to get some introductory analytics on how it might do, I surveyed a group of teens who fit into our target demographic to see their background and how they felt about the campaign via a google survey. With my time constraints, it isn’t a perfect survey and may be a slightly biased group is still is a mix with a variety of backgrounds.

I think this poll alone shows a promising future for the campaign and all it could offer to teens. When it launches, it will be important to continue to monitor attitudes surrounding the campaign and follow our insights to see our viewers’ engagement and activity. Following the suggestions of Community Tool Box’s Implementing Social Marketing Toolkit, we will track our implementations of different parts of the campaign, Assess changes in our demographic and public awareness of our campaign, and then examine the results we are having always making necessary adjustments.