Describe your project. What did you do? How did you do it?

I was a member of the social media team. We ran the Instagram account. We circulated any posts that people from the school wanted to share. We also featured some non-advertising posts that showed off the school such as sports team updates.

What problems did you run into? Were you able to solve these challenges? How did you solve these challenges? Is there anything you would do differently?

We struggled with implementing our brand-new ideas this year. One of the biggest issues being time. We had to balance all our goals with how much time we could afford to spend on the account each day while still maintaining quality.  We implemented the newsletter this year but there were some communication errors that made it so we didn’t update every week like we wanted to.  We wanted to include more posts that showcased the people of riverside.  Our struggle was finding content. We got over the initial struggle by reaching out in our own circle, but we’d like to further improve the system, so we don’t have to be constantly personally reaching out to groups to have them featured. If we could find a system that makes it easy for people to directly share with rapidevent, it would make things a lot more efficient.

What did you learn? Were you able to learn new skills or strengthen previous ones?

I learned a lot more about the different Instagram tools outside of regular posts. I learned new ways to use the featured/saved stories (ie the newsletter) and we how we could be more interactive in our stories through polls.

Impact: How might your project positively impact the social and emotional well being of students/our school? What can be done to increase the impact of this idea on the school?

Rapidevent is a way to keep the school connected. We keep students aware of what’s going on around the school. We can increase school pride by showing our feats and by keeping them up to date they can be less stressed. They aren’t searching for information or panicking since they didn’t know about something earlier. I think we can tap into more of the pride aspect. We can make rapidevent a place where people can look through our feed and have a sense of pride and feel happy.

Desirability: What could you change to make your project more desirable to students, teachers, administrators, parents or the community?

I think we can always find ways to make us more accessible. The teachers and the big student clubs are familiar with working with the Instagram, but the newer clubs usually don’t know. I think we can also find ways to appeal to the parents a bit more as well, especially seeing that more and more of them have social media. We could this by featuring more content that they would be interested in seeing. This could be important school notices but also snapshots of what’s happening in the school in  general such as spirit week.

Integratability: What would you change to make this idea easier to integrate into a school setting?

Making the account more efficient and consistent. We already have a strong following within the school, but I’d still like to increase it’s presence a bit more. I think once we fine tune our mini projects such as the newsletter, we can make the Instagram seem more fluent with the school rather than a separate entity.

Feasibility: Looking back what would you change what would you keep?

I would’ve cut down some of the ideas we first discussed so we could really focus on one or two instead. We didn’t start the actual actions until closer to the spring which made the fine-tuning process a lot harder. I’d still keep most of our progress though. I am proud we have such a stable and high follower account and I’m happy with what we were able to integrate into the account this year.

What did you learn from being a part of this project?

I learned a lot about social media. I got to see some of its affects and how it can be used in a positive and beneficial way. I also learned a bit more about community as well. By helping document some of the events in the school, I got to be more involved with all the groups and more aware of what was happening outside of my own activities.