Regeneration of communities through performing arts is at the heart of the Thomas Frederick Willetts Foundation. Their current aim is to launch ‘The Light Project’ in October, a project which focuses on building an arts centre in Treharris, a disadvantaged community, to bring revenue back into the community as well as a providing a place where the community can come together to carry out performing arts projects. To sustain this they are opening ice cream cafes, art exhibitons from the Tate Britain and even manufacturing their own regional beer the ‘Taf-Valley’. The regeneration of Treharris will hopefully act as a microcosm to apply to other disadvantaged communities in the UK and across the world.
This is the part where my internship begins; we want to create a social media campaign which builds up to this launch day, bringing forward the idea of passing on the tools for regenerating communities using performing arts. As this is the first week, the concept is still in its early developments, but an initial idea is ‘passing on the light’ or ‘passing on the lantern’ using a physical tag which can be passed throughout social media. Obviously trying to get something to go viral is a mean feat, and is the core of any marketing campaign, but we can try!
With regards to the internship itself, I have moved well and truly out of my comfort zone. First of all, my team consists of me and one other intern Theo, neither of us has extensive prior knowledge in social media campaigns nor knows the charity in depth. And secondly, we have been left with the open ended project of ‘a social media campaign which builds up to a day and encompasses The Light Project’. This does provide us with a wide scope for creativity and leaves us to explore whichever avenue we wish the direction of the campaign to go, but does make narrowing down what we want to do a challenge. Therefore research was our key aim this week; I compiled a portfolio of successful social media campaigns, such as the #nomakeupselfie and movember, highlighting why they were successful, what they perhaps could have done to improve, and what we can draw from them to apply to our own campaign. Further research was required on the charity itself to help us establish what they’ve done, what they’re going to do and what specific values they want us to portray in the campaign.
Finally, today was the compilation of all the research into a power point presentation which Theo and I pitched to the CEO of the charity along with the brief aims of the campaign as a whole and our action plan for next week.
I am looking forward executing our action plan for next week and hopefully bringing the light project social media campaign to fruition.