How Beautiful Social and AnaOno are Uplifting Women.

With Women’s History Month coming to a close, it’s time to reflect on women’s accomplishments and how women are continuing to make a difference. The Beautiful Social Research Collaborative itself is a woman-founded organization. Our very own Aimée Knight, Communications and Media Studies Professor at Saint Joseph’s University, founded Beautiful Social in 2010. Beautiful Social is a non-profit organization and class at Saint Joseph’s University that fosters collaboration between organizations enacting transformative change in their communities and communications students. These students utilize skills ranging from media production to social media management to graphic design to help organizations in the Philadelphia area and beyond.

This semester, fellow Carsen Vespe has been leading students Grace Brennan, Marissa Marchese, Taylor Olson, Kaylie Porcello, and Sophia Tatonetti in collaboration with AnaOno, a woman-run company that manufactures bras with chest inclusivity and sustainability in mind.

I sat down with the all-woman group of students collaborating with AnaOno to learn more about their experience.

What community partner have you been paired up with and what is the ultimate goal of the partnership?

Carsen: AnaOno is a lingerie company that specializes in creating lingerie products for women after breast cancer surgery, and our main goal this semester is creating a TikTok strategy that stays loyal to the AnaOno current audience while expanding out to other potential audiences.

How have you been planning or pacing yourselves to complete the end goal?

Kaylie: I think doing the assignments helps.

Carsen: Definitely just staying on top of the assignments and scheduling meetings with our community partner to keep her up to date and to see if she has any other recommendations or strategies for us to follow.

Grace: And we made those popsicle stick prototypes kind of showing week for week of planning what we can do.

Kaylie: Also staying organized. Carsen has a folder of like every single assignment and they’re all in order too so it’s easy to go back and refer to them

Could you explain the popsicle stick prototypes?

Carsen: So, when we were doing the prototyping activity we used popsicle sticks to kind of map out a potential campaign strategy. So we used the color red, for example, to focus on inclusivity and the other communities that AnaOno could reach out to or try to brand towards. So we said like, the transgender community or people with chronic illnesses and pain who can’t strap a bra correctly or something like that.

Carsen: Yeah, and we had colors dedicated to surgery recovery stories and related women experiences, things like that.

Taylor: And also definitely keeping everything organized and consistent. That's really important.

Who have you been in contact with?

Carsen: We have been in contact with a girl named Marisa, I believe she’s within the marketing department. The original girl that we were supposed to be working with was– her name is Allison. She’s a Saint Joe’s grad and when she was [a student] here she participated in Beautiful Social. But another opportunity came up for her right when our partnership started so we switched over to talk more with Marisa. I’ve also been in contact with the CEO, Dana Donofree.

What progress have you made so far and how did you go about it?

Grace: I feel like that hardest part for us was sort of nailing down what language to use. So that kind of took a good majority of the beginning but after [Marisa] kind of broke down what was the proper way to talk about things we kind of built a better strategy plan around that.

Kaylie: I guess for the first few weeks before we were able to meet with Marisa we would end up having a lot of brainstorming conversations and that would lead to a lot of questions. So we had a running list of questions and once we met with Marisa it was like finally…you know everything was so much clearer and now we have such a better idea of what we’re doing and like [Grace] said, what language to use and everything.

Questions Included:

What language / topics should we avoid? What language / topics should we focus on?

What are 1-2 specific goals you have for us to complete this semester?
Can you describe your design aesthetic in 3 words?

Taylor: Like at first, it was very hard to figure out what we wanted to say. Like, what should we say? What should we not say? So, in the beginning it was a little challenging but after meeting with Marisa we got a better concept and an idea of what we wanted to do.

Kaylie: When you’re working with social media or communications, just knowing about the company is probably one of the most important places to start and it was- we could do our own research but it was difficult to you know really understand how we talk to somebody.

Carsen: Mhm. Absolutely.

Marissa: I think that all just goes into like, understanding the AnaOno brand. This is the first time that B:Social is working with a for-profit company, so they’re very established and they have a really clear mission and a really clear brand, so we just wanted to make sure that we fully understood that before we started strategizing.

What have your experiences been like working together as a group?

Carsen: I think we get along very well as a group. At the beginning of the semester we devised roles on themes. So I, as the fellow, oversee everything. And then we have note-taker roles, data-analyst roles, organizer roles… that’s kind of how we keep on track.

Grace: I also feel like it makes a huge difference tackling a project that is very feminine-experienced as an all-female group.

Carsen: So true.

Grace: Like I think that totally changes our perspective and how we work together, so…

Taylor: Yeah, like we can all relate to it even if, though we may not have breast cancer or know about it… it’s just something we can all relate to like, when we get older we realize like, how we have to get screenings.

Grace: It’s easy to talk about as an all female group.

Sophia: I feel like if there were a guy in [our group] it would be less comfortable

Kaylie: We don’t have any boundaries if we’re talking about it with each other which is nice.

Sophia: We’re all comfortable with each other and everything.

Taylor: Because as an all female group it’s something we can all relate to.

Grace: Mhm, makes it easier to step into the shoes of the brand for sure.

Do you think Aimée [our founder] intentionally chose an all-girl group for this?

All: Yeah [laugh].

Grace: She kept saying we needed a very sensitive, emotionally-mature group.

Kaylie: Honestly, let’s be real, I don’t know if any guys…

Grace: They probably didn’t put this [down as one of their choices for community partners to work with this semester].

Kaylie: Honestly, just because they probably understood like, it’s more of an all-female type of thing…I’m pretty sure the company is all-female, right?

Carsen: Yeah. Mhm. And with this group, with this project, comes a sort of emotional-intelligence towards it, an emotional level of sensitivity. So I think everyone in this group truly understood that coming into it.

What challenges have you all faced in this project?

Kaylie: The original girl [we were supposed to work with, Alyson] knew what B:Social was. [She was a former B:Social consultant]. She wanted to work with us; They were on the waitlist for, what? Like, two years? But then of course when she left and somebody else was in charge I don’t think she [Marisa] really like, understood what this was in full detail so that also made it harder for her to like, you know, communicate with us the way we would expect.

Carsen: Yeah, and I think that because there was a switch from Alyson to Marisa, the best case scenario is just keeping Marissa up to date even if it’s just via email and if she can’t make a meeting, just keeping her up to date with the projects we’ve been completing and making sure we’re going on the right track, correctly representing the AnaOno brand and making sure that there is something to provide her when we did meet with her. Like we had a set of questions, and there were things that we were able to show her when she came like we’ve been working on a google sheet that has like potential influencers we can reach out to and potential TikTok ideas so that lack of communication doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily going to stop providing work or creating for them.

How has the experience of collaborating/communicating with your community partner been?

Carsen: I would say overall it’s been positive. Just as much learning as it is on their end, it’s on our end as well. They’re learning about us and we’re learning about them, so it’s definitely this shared collaboration that has to come from both of us in order for it to be successful.

What have you learned from being a part of B:Social? Have you seen an improvement in any skills or learned anything new?

Marissa: I think definitely, for sure. This is my second semester doing B:Social. I’m a senior right now and I’m in my capstone class and I kind of wanted to center my capstone class similar to how the structure of B:Social is with co-creation. So I’m working with a client and I’ve really taken a lot of the ideas and strategies that I’ve learned in B:Social about how to communicate with a community partner and what co-creation is and I’ve been trying to implement that in my project for this semester.

Kaylie: Something about taking B:Social, this is also my second semester doing it, it’s very different from my internship experience. Since I’ve been interning for a tech company and everything is internal and everything’s like, very serious. I do really enjoy doing this and it opened me up to a new area in communications which I would like to pursue hopefully, because I can allow myself to be creative and also the teamwork is a great aspect of it. Oh, and being in this class has definitely helped me in my role of director of philanthropy because I work with nonprofits. So I’ve been using a lot of these skills.

Carsen: I think right now, Beautiful Social is helping me with a lot of job interviews because I’m able to talk about the experiences I’ve had all within a college class, which is extremely unlikely for most students to do. The other biggest thing about Beautiful Social that makes it so amazing is the hands-on experience with real companies within a classroom setting, and I think it’s really what you make of the experience and how much you’re willing to do.

How has being a part of B:Social impacted you personally, academically, or professionally?

Carsen: I think professionally, I would say it’s given me a lot of resources and skills that I otherwise would not have gained at this level. For example, I worked with the Greater Freedom Think Tank my first time in Beautiful Social and we worked on inclusive web design and that was before I had taken Web Design [as a class] so that really helped me understand Web Design when I was taking it. And then, last semester, I did a social media campaign for Water is Life Kenya and that opened me up to campaigning and digital campaigns, marketing, all that stuff, which I otherwise would not have learned.

Kaylie: This goes for all majors, but you really – like yes, as much as they teach you in your college courses – the most you will ever learn is getting hands-on experience, which is why it’s so important to get an internship or do something like this. So I’m really grateful that Saint Joe’s offers this because there are probably many other Coms departments that don’t.

Marissa: Yeah, I talked about my B:Social project from my previous semester with all of the internship interviews that I got this past summer. They would ask me about a time where there was a challenge I needed to overcome or to talk about an experience with a program and I would bring up my B:Social project. I could use my project in B:Social and just apply it to these questions.

Kaylie: Also, Aimée, at the end of the semester, gave us these interview questions. she was like “You’ll most likely be asked [these questions]” for a lot of jobs. So that was a big help because I feel like not many professors will prepare you in that way.

Carina Seabra interviewed Carsen Vespe, Grace Brennan, Marissa Marchese, Taylor Olson, Kaylie Porcello, and Sophia Tatonetti in person on February 28, 2024. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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Carina Seabra