Next up in our Social Citizens Makeover series is Lauren Schwartz, 23, of Macungie, Penn.
Like many college seniors, Lauren found herself nearing graduation and still unsure of exactly which of her many interests to pursue. Her exploration of different career paths and job listings led her to the AmeriCorps VISTA [2] national service program. VISTA members serve for one year at a nonprofit organization or local government agency in programs designed to bring individuals and communities out of poverty.
Lauren is serving as a volunteer coordinator at Lehigh Carbon Community College [3] (LCCC) in Schnecksville, Penn., through Pennsylvania Campus Compact [4], an organization that strives to build civic engagement into academic life and to strengthen communities like Schnecksville through partnerships between college campuses and community organizations. Lauren is passionate about exposing LCCC students to the same types of community service and experiences she says have helped to shape her life. Her goal is to put these students on “the path to becoming more aware, conscious and active citizens.”
When Lauren wants to invite students to attend campus service events or to help student groups connect with community organizations, she has only a few ways of reaching out to them. She has communicated with students using email and by hitting the streets to talk to them face-to-face. She says she has also found flyers and old-school bulletin board posts to be fairly effective, but she wishes she could use something that would foster a greater sense of community and allow for interaction, rather than just one-way distribution of information.
Although the college as a whole has a great web presence, Lauren says her office has very little. Lauren uses a lot of social media tools in her personal life, but she could use some help from our Social Actions [5] social media expert to determine how those same tools can help her communicate more effectively with the students, many of whom are still very new to social media themselves.
Comments
Way to go, Lauren!
Hi Lauren,
Congratulations on winning the Social Citizens Makeover contest. I have enjoyed working with you over the last few weeks to develop a few social media recommendations. I have pasted below the plan we discussed on the most recent conference call.
Social Actions is recommending a blog centered approach:
- Setup the WordPress blog for your position (so someone can inherit it after you leave the VistaCorps program)
- Create an account on Twitter for your position
- Use the Twitter stream to complement content on the blog, and attract followers
- The students at Lehigh Carbon Community College must be using Facebook. For this reason, I'd suggest that you embelish your Facebook group - perhaps changing the name to "Students Volunteering at Lehigh Carbon Community College"
- Populate the Facebook group content with blog entries and twitter account activity
- Create a weekly blogging schedule that keeps the content fresh and gives you an idea of what to work on
- Use the Flip camera to post an occasional video on the blog
- Set some metrics for your remaining time of the AmeriCorps vista program
- Use Google Analytics to track the effectiveness of your efforts to draw people to the blog
- Link to the Facebook and Twitter group from your blog
- On occasion, invite students who have volunteered to add guest posts to the blog
Please let me know if you have any questions about these recommendations by leaving a comment on this page. Let's schedule a follow-up call for next week to discuss how best to setup the WordPress blog.
All the best,
Peter
Peter Deitz
Social Actions
Hi Peter - Thanks for the recommendations! I've had my blog up and running for a little while, here is the link: http://lcccvolunteer.wordpress.com/ [7] I've got my Twitter and Flickr there on the side. I am working on getting a link to it put on the college website.
I have a facebook group and just invited all the students that I am friends with - certainly a small part of the student population.
Let me know how it looks!
Lauren
Hi Lauren, It's great to see the LCCC Volunteer Blog up and running. So far, it's looking great. I really like the integration with Flickr. And Congrats on the 44 Twitter followers. That's a big accomplishment for just a few weeks of work. For some reason, the tweets are showing up on the blog. Let's schedule a call for next week to wrap up this make over. :-) All the best, Peter