putting the “art” in “artefact – UOW Visual Arts Society DA

Contextual Essay

My digital artefact’s future focus is considering the short-term future (to September 30th) of the UOW Visual Arts Society by developing the club’s online social media presence and a marketing guideline for the utility of passing it on the elected marketing manager at the end of the year.

DA Links

Brand Socials

Website: https://uowvisualarts.wordpress.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/uowvisualarts/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/uowvisualarts

Twitter: https://twitter.com/uowvisualarts

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/uowvas

Marketing guideline document

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ukWceGdUhJIBURD6bKae3nSY7CICMvKUphuB-NYhFmc/edit?usp=sharing

Social Utility

My aim is to ensure successful change over and maintenance of a strong club brand to ensure the club’s survival past my graduation. This survival will lead to the club providing opportunity for visual arts culture to be preserved on campus.

Future focus questions:

How can I use social media platforms to recruit and engage club members?

And how can I develop a consistent social media brand that can be passed on to future executives to ensure club survival?

Background Research

My background research involved considering subject content and applying it to my DA in a marketing context. I considered Bell’s Three futures (1996) and Masini’s Reconceptualising futures (1982) by applying it to the club as a project to improve humanity in a micro sense. I then applied this: “preferable future” vision to developing buyer personas and setting SMART objectives, researching digital marketing theory via online blog, journal, and course sources.

Future Prototyping

This DA is a work in progress, going into spring semester is giving me the opportunity to continue to develop both the programming of the club as well as continue to improve the online marketing activity – working toward the SMART objectives stated in the guidelines.

Yidi’s feedback on my beta presentation linked me to an article on how to market a club. When considering the PESO model, I noticed I have already implemented a lot of the owned and shared channels, but the article also suggests channels such as influencer and public relations channels, which is something I can attempt to utilise when considering my future focused objectives (Johnson n.d).

Additionally, Sean’s feedback was to sell a brand “personality” before the service offering to encourage more sign-ups. This is great advice as it’s important I continue to develop the club’s brand voice, and experiment and analyse results in order to develop a clear guide of what the club’s identity is, and include this in the guidelines.

Through public feedback, I have identified that Instagram is our core social channel to reach our buyer personas due to the focus on visual learning and the image first, text second delivery of Instagram content (Shift 2014). Instagram has developed the most organic engagement, reach and following – hence I should continue to develop content catered for Instagram. At the same time, I have noticed that the Twitter account, which I have been posting the same content as Instagram, has been gaining no engagement or followers at all. Moving forward, I am going to develop the Twitter page to specifically target BCM students as there is such solid engagement on the platform for these students. I will begin to experiment with this targeted content and add it to the guidelines after positive results have been achieved.

References

Bell, A 1996 ‘An Overview of Futures Studies’ in The Knowledge Base of Futures Studies, Vol. 1. pp. 28-56 and 290-99 https://sociology.yale.edu/publications/overview-futures-studies

Johnson, J n.d ‘10 ways to market your student club on campus’ in Canva https://www.canva.com/learn/10-ways-to-market-your-student-club-on-campus/

Masini, E 1982 ‘Reconceptualizing Futures: A Need and a Hope’ in World Future Society Bulletin, v16 n6 p1-8 Nov-Dec http://master-foresight-innovation.fr/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/EMasiniReconceptualizingFutures.pdf

Shift 2014 ‘Studies Confirm the Power of Visuals to Engage Your Audience in eLearning’, Shift e-Learning, viewed 26 May 2021, https://www.shiftelearning.com/blog/bid/350326/studies-confirm-the-power-of-visuals-in-elearning#:~:text=As%2065%20percent%20of%20the,based%20explanations%20or%20only%20audios