The Challenge

Yes, students go to college to earn a degree, but they also go to make lifelong friends, explore their interests, and become adults. Stunting any aspiration of normalcy in the fall of 2020 was the long shadow of Covid-19. Retention efforts for students went into high gear to make the best of a tough semester, and that included communicating clear safety guardrails to prevent viral spread.

For social media messaging, our goal became clear. Drive authentic student engagement with critical health, safety, and campus involvement protocols during a highly fragmented and volatile period. Top-down institutional messaging would not cut it. We needed peer pressure for good.

Enter the Impact Crew.

Eleven high-impact student leaders were chosen to execute an organic influencer team. Rather than deploying static, authoritative assets, I established a weekly prompt engine, armed the student network with creative best practices, and set them loose on Instagram Stories under the unified hashtags #ImpactCrew and #HealthyAtBU.