In an ongoing effort to interact with the community of schools around us, we have another special event to share.
Since January, Industrial Brothers has been participating as a Client in this semester’s ‘Storyworks’ course, as part of the Children’s Media Program at Centennial College. We at IB are a big fan of this particular program because we’ve hired a number of graduates and interns of it who are now great team members.
What is Storyworks?
Storyworks is a course in the Children’s Media Program that provides students with practical experience in the communication, media, arts, and design industries. Lead by instructor Liz Marshall, the course gives students the opportunity to work on introductory level projects with real clients that simulate work they will undertake as new practitioners in their field.
It’s a great opportunity for the students to learn more about a particular industry, while working on professional portfolio content for the student and practical project experience.
Our particular project was a deep dive of our social media platforms and pages to develop a strategy for us to increate engagement. We were introduced to our group of students early in the year, and over the next few months we worked together on building out a social media strategy for IB.
They assisted us with ideation and post planning suggestions, as well as design and text recommendations. Always enthusiastic and full of ideas, it was a pleasure to work with these students: they helped us to gain new followers (over 100 on Instagram, and over 150 on LinkedIn in 2 months) and we learned more about our existing followers/audience and how best to interact with them. We built out a social media calendar to plan out our posts in advance, and IB would share the post metrics with the students for review afterwards.
On April 17th, the course wrapped up, and we attended the students’ final presentation of their project to us – the Clients.
In addition to going over our work together since January, looking at some posts that performed well vs. those that didn’t, the group of students also presented us with some suggestions and recommendations for how best to continue.
It was great to meet the students in person, after having been communicating with them virtually for so many weeks; they were just as friendly and enthusiastic in real life. And, we got to take a photo together!
It was a real pleasure to mentor this group of bright students, and gain some valuable insight into our social media at the same time.
We look forward on working together next year on a new Storyworks project, with a new group of students!
A big thank you to Professor Liz Marshall for connecting with us, and making this happen.