During my Spring 2021 semester at The College of New Jersey, I was assigned to work on a social media campaign with three other students in the New Media and Health Communication Course (COM 345). For the project, Prof. Ileana Balcu assigned us to work with Dr. Laura Marcial of RTI International and Daniel Van Leeuwen of healthhats.com on a social media campaign on Instagram about using new media health tools. The result of this was Care Against Covid, an Instagram-based campaign which promoted using these tools to live safe living during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Working on this project was not without its challenges. For example, one of the hurdles my group faced was figuring out a good post schedule. During the first week, I was making account posts on a daily basis. However, my group members thought that posting that frequently would get overwhelming. As such, I posted much less frequently during the second week. During this week, my group members also focused on making story posts on a daily basis. However, this proved to be detrimental to our interactions, as we saw a 92.5% decrease on April 20, 2021, the day that our third campaign week started. The next day, we decided to have a more formal schedule. With it, I was designated to make normal posts every other day. My group members also decided that on days where I would not be making normal posts, they would make story posts for the campaign. We followed this schedule for the remainder of the campaign, and it has allowed us to receive a 36.8% increase in content interactions on May 1, 2021.

My main task for the campaign was researching new media health tools related to COVID-19, and making Instagram posts about them and how they can help one live during the COVID-19 pandemic. To make them, I used the website Canva to assist me. One such example of my works is the Care Against COVID logo (pictured above). This is a graphic I designed in Canva early on in the campaign, and I am incredibly proud of the final result. While there may be better platforms than Canva to create social media posts with, my experiences with Canva allowed me to gain a stronger sense of knowledge on graphic design. Moreover, this knowledge I gained while working on Care Against COVID feels like a natural progression from the work I did for The Adventures of Meg and Duffy.

At the end of the campaign, I received an A for the assignment.

For more information about the process of running Care Against COVID, I have provided a player for the Health Hats Podcast episode where Mr. Van Leeuwen interviews us about managing the campaign. You can also access the campaign's Instagram page here.