The Free Mind Entrepreneur Network - Spring 2022
Fellow: Maggie Tyndall
Team: Anna Dorneman, Arianna Markatos, Brigid Bonner, Regan Larkin, Sean Fagan
Community Partner
Free Mind’s Story began when Stacey Torrance was sentenced to life without parole at 14. The punishment did not fit the crime, especially at his young age. After 30 years in prison, Stacey was released and became an entrepreneur. Many people who are released from prison face a struggle with finding work, leading to solid recidivism rates. As an entrepreneur, Stacey realized that a support system is highly beneficial. He found that this is something that formerly incarcerated individuals were lacking in business and professional relationships. Because of this, Stacey started The Free Mind Entrepreneur Network, a Philadelphia-based organization that provides networking and resources for individuals who dared to take the risk of entrepreneurship.
Founded in 2021, Free Mind is just getting started. Stacey plans to grow Free Mind’s reach geographically and add more entrepreneurs to the Network and help formerly incarcerated individuals land back on their feet. This is the second Beautiulf Social team to collaborate with Free Mind, and we are grateful to be a part of this growth, collaborating to spread Free Mind's reach and mission.
Challenge
Our goal became apparent when we came up with our design question: How do we co-create more engaging content with our entrepreneurs to tell their stories and expand the network via multiple social media platforms? We planned to create a video that discussed entrepreneurship and recidivism. We wanted to engage our audience with the stories, advice, and passions of some of the Free Mind member’s experiences. We were able to execute this by coordinating with the entrepreneurs with specific film dates and times, while also delegating tasks as a group within those days. Additionally, we reached outside of our group for help with the video equipment.
Stacey’s idea for the video came from the desire to tell a story and further build the Free Mind community. Overall, our challenge was to create content that drew people to the Free Mind story which would help expand their community and bring awareness to recidivism as it relates to entrepreneurship.
Strategic Thinking
When we started thinking about how we wanted to approach our project we knew we needed to change something to increase engagement for Free Mind as a whole. We also discussed the difference in social media engagement for videos as compared to that of static posts. As we started to dive deeper into Free Mind’s Instagram and branding we noticed that there wasn’t much of a real face behind Free Mind; it was just an Instagram page full of quotes.
A video seemed like it could be the perfect solution to add a face and a deeper meaning behind Free Mind for everyone to see.
We have conducted multiple interviews with people within the Free Mind Network and with similar stories to help get across the true meaning of the Free Mind Entrepreneur Network. To do this we had to do a lot of co-creating. We conducted the interviews, but we were not in charge of the stories and lessons that came out of them, that was all our interviewees’ doing. During our Friday meetings, we typically interviewed two people at a time by dividing up into groups and using monitors, headphones, microphones, etc. to make the highest quality of video possible.
Results
We are proud of the work we have done throughout the semester. First, we filmed multiple interviews with Free Mind Entrepreneurs and Stacey for a future video about the organization. These video interviews will be used next semester in a longer video form, yet we plan on posting short clips of the interview to Free Mind’s social media pages. We believe that these videos will bring the mission of Free Mind alive, for it will personify what the Network is all about from stories from Free Mind members. Second, we enhanced Free Mind’s social media presence throughout the semester. We launched a LinkedIn for Free Mind. We also diversified the types of posts on the social media pages, expanding from posts focusing on motivational quotes to posts centering upon statistics, and information about Free Mind.
As of April 20th, we officially posted 28 different times throughout our platforms. Our social media posts had an average of about 30 impressions, and we plan to continue increasing our presence next semester. On Instagram, we have gained 10 followers, and we have increased the number of likes on each social platform. All in all, through our work we hope that we shined a light on the amazing mission and purpose of the Free Mind Entrepreneur Network. We look forward to the continuation of this partnership next semester, where a new group of BSocial students will continue improving Free Mind’s social media while also developing a longer video consisting of testimonies from Free Mind network members.
