The Free Mind Entrepreneur Network
Case Study
Fellow: Maggie Tyndall
Team: Annie Minaglia, Chris Kline, Grace D’amico, Isabella Colina Hidalgo
The Community Partner
Our partner is Stacey Torrance, a formerly incarcerated individual and entrepreneur. He founded the Free Mind Entrepreneur Network as a networking platform for formerly incarcerated individuals to share who they are, what they do, and to network freely. The goal of this organization is to create a place that allows individuals to have equality in terms of their working opportunities. This project benefits returning citizens and/or entrepreneurs. It also benefits businesses who are seeking employees no matter what their criminal background might be. The kind of impact the project had on the community was the contribution to opportunity for those individuals who need it the most. This later has a much bigger impact when it comes to lowering recidivism rates. This project took place in person at the Saint Joseph’s University campus in the Annex of Bronstein Hall. The project began in August 2021 and will be continuing after this semester ends. Our relationship with our community partner has developed greatly over time. He has expressed his gratitude towards us and the work we have done with and for the Free Mind Entrepreneur Network. Stacey is very pleased with how the site, social media channels, overall design, and ideas have played out. Stacey is also eager to share the final site with his friends and individuals who were formerly incarcerated.
The Challenge
Our guiding design/research question for our project was: How can we create a network to help returning citizens? How can we provide representation? Later, the challenge grew, as we were tasked with branding the organization and creating an effective social media presence; not just creating the online network. The research and design process began by looking closely at similar organizations’ branding and designs. After our community partner directed us towards several of his favorite organizations, we looked for what we liked and didn’t like and made rough sketches of what we thought would work well.
The Free Mind team at work in the Bronstein Annex
Strategic Thinking
We researched the various methods of promotion and design on social media platforms. Once we put together a comparative analysis of three different organizations that have a mission similar to ours, we were able to analyze their levels of engagement throughout their platforms and apply it to our social channels. We all contributed to the design persona and executed our ideas. In terms of content creation, we decided that keeping a consistent color scheme would be beneficial in terms of the relevance to the topics we cover throughout. Everyone in the group found statistics and designed social media posts as well as contributed to the pages and outline of the website. Our goal was to pull in followers and give them information that they would find to be useful in their lives. Therefore, we were able to research statistics and insights regarding employment rates of the formerly incarcerated as well as insights regarding entrepreneurship. We were able to acquire resources from our partner that we could highlight in the future and also put in our entrepreneur section of the website.
Results
This project's deliverables included logos, fonts, colors, business cards, and a website that serves as the home for the network. We also created an email account and social media channels for the organization full of content, which is showcased on the website too. Next semester, Beautiful Social plans to continue this collaboration with Stacey to further grow and develop Free Mind's web presence and continue to make an impact on the community to support local entrepreneurs and formerly incarcerated individuals.