Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation
Fellow: Casey Wood
Team: Kate Engel, Chris Shuman, and Nora Thomas
Community Partner
Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation, or LCP Foundation, is a non-profit organization that endeavors to facilitate philosophical conversation and teachings at an approachable level for people of all backgrounds. Through informational videos, webinars, an original academy and short-form content, LCP Foundation seeks to connect the history of philosophy with contemporary social issues in a way that is more digestible than the often exclusive academic rhetoric. The word “philosophy”’s Greek origin influences the basis of LCP Foundation, instilling a love of wisdom in everyone that interacts with them.
Design Question
LCP Foundation’s goal to reach a broad demographic requires the ability to access various avenues of communication. However, the fundamental factor of accomplishing LCP Foundation’s goal is to garner interest. The easiest way to garner interest is to eliminate the imposed boundaries of a subject, inviting more people to experience said subject. Thus, our design question was created: What prevents people from pursuing an interest in philosophy and how can we garner interest through social media resulting in inclusive and accessible philosophical discussion? The design question addressed both how to better demonstrate the benefits of philosophical discussion as well as extending LCP Foundation’s social media presence evenly across various platforms.
Strategic Thinking
Due to the fact that our efforts for the LCP Foundation center around developing a growing community through the use of social media, we thought it best to research both trending and long-lasting social media accounts. These social media accounts are known in this case as “Mentor accounts” and serve to further our understanding of how to develop a following on the certain platform they can be found on. The three accounts we chose to examine as mentor accounts were; Khan Academy, Hank Green, and The Philosophy Quote. These different accounts, though on different social media platforms, take advantage of platform-specific tactics such as taking advantage of current trends and maintaining a consistent posting schedule and content in order to appeal to and grow their own niche community. After noticing these tactics we chose to emulate the same types of posting schedules in the hopes of finding a level of consistency that will also provide a sense of convenience for our community partner. As LCP Foundation continues to find itself within social media, maintaining consistency in all facets will be both crucial and beneficial to the LCP Foundation’s digital outreach.
Co-Creation
We met with our partner in multiple feedback sessions to facilitate co-creation. Initially, we met with Keli, LCP Foundation’s Philosopher in Chief, to talk about our ideas for a social media campaign. Ourselves and the folks at LCP Foundation had pretty similar ideas that we agreed upon off the bat, so our group got to work on creating content based on our initial ideas. After we had a bit of content created, we met again with Keli to get some feedback. This second feedback session really kick-started the co-creation process. Our content up to this point reflected the standard, academic and sophisticated aesthetic commonly seen in online philosophy content. Keli approved of the work we had done so far and voiced a desire to show the more spunky side of LCP Foundation, to communicate that the organization is a knowledgeable and legitimate philosophical source, but they like to have fun with it at the same time. We took this feedback and integrated it into the plans for the content we had already established, combining our graphic design skills with Keli’s refined vision to produce high-quality graphics that reflect the academic, but playful nature of LCP Foundation.
Results
There was a slight increase in LCP Foundation’s social media following, but we anticipate more in the future. Only two of our graphics have been posted on LCP Foundation’s Instagram since we started our project because it took until the tail end of our project to really compile a good amount of content but now we have a sizable bank of graphics and videos that have a cohesive branding. Branding wasn’t something that we initially set out to work on but it sort of evolved when we combined our digital knowledge with Keli’s art skills to create a high quality black and white version of the LCP Foundation logo that we could put on graphics and videos. We created an alternate version of the logo inside of a green blob, reflecting the dichotomy of LCP Founation through two distinct logos.
Keep up with the Lawn Chair Philosophy Foundation:
Follow LCP Foundation on Instagram: @501c3lcp
Follow LCP Foundation on Facebook: lcpfoundation
Check out our Community Partner Report
LCP Foundation Community Partner Report
View some of the graphics we created below!
