Learn about how our consultants helped Invisible People increase youth engagement. As a homelessness advocacy nonprofit, reaching a younger and increasingly politically active audience was a primary organizational goal.
Problem Statement
Invisible people has about a million YouTube subscribers and equally successful TikTok Facebook and Instagram accounts. They were also one of the first nonprofits to embrace YouTube and video content. However most of their viewers were in their 30s, and youth engagement was severely lacking. Thus, we were tasked to help develop a social media and college program strategy aimed at involving a younger audience.
About Invisible People
Invisible people pushes for homelessness regulation change. They are a progressive nonprofit which condemns the criminalization of homelessness and wants to spread that message to more people. In general, their mission is to educate more people about the lives of homeless individuals. The main way they do so is through engaging videos and short films. The videos which are usually interviews of homeless individuals from around the world seek an emotional response from the audience.
Project Agenda & Objectives
Our objective was to increase invisible people’s reach among people younger than 25 years of age. We broke down our problem solving into three main steps:
Content Research: created a study on invisible people’s current content using analytics data provided by the client
Literature Review: reviewed research papers on how optimize content for youth engagement
Research College Programs & Create Documentation: do the groundwork to establish an invisible people club chapter program
1) Content Research In More Depth
This research allowed us to isolate content which resonated more with younger audiences. It helped us analyze trends and form hypotheses to guide the rest of our project. We honed in on short form content and documentary style content as the best types in terms of youth engagement. This helped us provide recommendations on how to create more suitable content in the future and double down on these successful videos.
2) Literature Review In More Depth
We did a deep dive into literature on youth marketing by looking at the ideal length of content, analyzing the effectiveness of various persuasion techniques, and researching different platforms and their effectiveness for youth advocacy. This helped us provide a more research-backed set of recommendations and supplemented our data analysis. We picked recommendations that were in line with findings from both workstreams and presented it in our client presentations.
3) Creating A College Program In More Depth
To supplement the social media strategy workstreams, we also worked on a club chapter program for invisible people. This will give the nonprofit more active grassroots participation from high school and university students. The first step was to look at other successful chapter programs. We looked at colleges against cancer, American constitution association among other non profits which have hundred of college clubs/chapters. Using the best of all these program we created a internal guide for invisible people. To supplement that, we also created external documentation and plans for invisible people clubs to use. These included guides on marketing recruiting for invisible people affiliated clubs were made.
The Impact of 180DC's Work
On the last call with Mark Horvath the CEO of invisible people, he informed us that he is completely revamping the budget for 2023 using our suggestions. He plans to direct more money into the content we recommended. Additionally, the nonprofit will earmark funds to grow a club chapter program. Using our suggestions and contacts, USC might be a good first club location to come in the next few months. This will result in more youth engagement, which in turn will help catalyze legislative change.
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