Ignatian Volunteer Corps
Fellow: Casey Wood
Team: Charlotte Ashley, Grace D'Amico, Jason Kuzmick, John Coppa, Keely Gallagher, and Megan Gullotta
Community Partner
IVC is a nonprofit organization that provides men and women ages 50 and older the opportunity to get involved in the community and give back in a different way than other volunteer organizations. These volunteers are able to use their knowledge from their lives and past careers to continue to give back. IVC allows their clients to work and serve those who are in need to create a society that allows them to grow deeper in their Christian faith by actively practicing in Ignatian traditions and values.
Design Question
Our overreaching design question for this project was “How can we increase the number of volunteers for the Ignatian Volunteer Corps through social media, by creating value-driven content that is strategically designed to target a 50+ age group?” This question was our driving force for the campaign as John Green, Volunteer, wanted to boost involvement post-pandemic. Older generations may believe they are not capable of contributing to service, so our main goal was to highlight active participants through social media. The stakeholders in this campaign were IVC as a whole as we aimed to boost their volunteer numbers, and the potential new volunteers to encourage them to sign up and get involved in their community.
Strategic Thinking
IVC has a broad range of service opportunities, so our focus was identifying what the related factors were. In class, we discussed two different theories that emphasized focused design questions and organizational storytelling. Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle focuses on the “why” behind an organization’s actions in order to make a service or product more appealing. Our Golden Circle analysis allowed us to identify the motivations of IVC, which improved our ability to create content that appealed to potential service members across all service fields. Additionally, we created an Organizational Story-Arc in order to identify what the main contributing factors were to IVC’s previous success and what elements going forward could contribute to success.
With a better understanding of IVC’s service opportunities, we used “Mentor Accounts” to inform our social media graphic production. We searched for successful accounts that aligned with IVC’s values to figure out what they were doing to appeal to our target demographic. We found accounts with a consistent design language were most effective in gaining user interaction. Additionally, we used Canva’s tips on non-profit reporting in order to make a clear and informative Community Partner Report. The focus of the report was to maintain reader interest through creative visual elements while remaining professional and informative.
Co-Creation
Our collaboration with our partner was very strong. There was constant communication between our partner and our group, ensuring that we were always on the same page throughout the semester. John Green, the director of IVC in this area, provided us with design guidelines and other important information about IVC. We then took this valuable information and created designs and templates for our partner to use. Our partner, John, then approved our creations, sharing opinions about what he liked and did not like. He kept us updated with what he needed from us and we kept him updated on our progress. We worked together to come up with the best designs and content possible for IVC.
Results
Overall, we saw a positive outcome from our collaborative recruitment campaign. Our social media graphics were utilized to promote an IVC information session that was hosted on Zoom. According to data collected from our community partner John, 15% of the information session registration came from CAPS outreach. CAPS outreach stands for Currie Alumni Partnership for Service, which is a way for Jesuit university alumni to continue with their Ignatian involvement. Of this CAPS partner data, Saint Joseph’s University accounted for 20% of the involvement. This may be accredited to the social media graphics that our group created to communicate IVC’s message quickly and effectively which proved to attract people to IVC and help their communities.
Our social media graphics also led us to have a larger community outreach that also proved to be successful. In IVC’s “information session registration,” a graphic was displayed with all of the sources used to bring more people to IVC and promote community involvement. From the information session metrics, 13% of the people registered for the information session via social media. This was a great statistic to see because of the work that we have put into our social media campaign for IVC. Our graphics proved to be successful and effective. Our IVC social media graphics have the power to create an increase in community assets and inform people to serve their communities through IVC.
Keep up with the Ignatian Volunteer Corps:
Follow IVC on Instagram: @ignatian_volunteer_corps
Follow IVC on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/IgnatianVolunteerCorps
Check out our Community Partner Report
IVC Community Partner Report
View some of the graphics we created below!
