MARKETING AND AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT
On Verde, we are always working to expand our audience. In pre-pandemic times, we would walk around campus and hand out magazines to students and teachers. In quarantine, we instead send copies of the magazine home to each student's house. While our articles are often targeted towards that high school audience, much of our work engages with larger community concerns. The conversations and engagement with the wider Palo Alto community is central to our work on Verde. Whether we're selling ads to local businesses, interviewing City Council members or covering a new art gallery downtown, our work is intertwined with the city. As a result, our product should be as well.
Business and Fundraising
Each issue of Verde includes around 5-8 pages of advertisements which students sell to businesses around town. Initially the ad sale process terrified me. I hated the idea of going from business to business trying to convince strangers to buy ads. But that's exactly what I did. With each pitch to store managers going into Verde's readership and the ad options, I built my confidence. I learned rejection wasn't that bad at all and it taught me to be persistent, following up with businesses over email.
In the pandemic, the door to door style of ad sales is not feasible. We worked with our business managers to redesign the process, having staffers pitch businesses to contact in a spreadsheet (seen right) and requiring that they include justification for why this would be a good business to reach out to especially given the challenging times. The business managers later assigned student representatives to each business who were responsible for contacting that company. We also modernized the purchase process by streamlining it into a google form.
While this new process allowed us to maintain our business process in the virtual environment, the economic situation resulting from the pandemic led to diminished ad sales. In order to make up for the lost funds, we started incorporating sponsorships. We had Verde staff members contact family and friends requesting sponsorships which brought in a boost of funds to keep us on track for our profit goals.
ADAPTING FOR COVID-19
SPREADING STORIES
In an attempt to further disseminate our work, we have story writers contact organizations that deal with topics discussed in our articles to see if they are interested in posting our stories on their website. Below is an example from a story I wrote on Scrubs Against the Firearm Epidemic where we followed up with our sources and they posted our story on their website and shared it with others.
SOCIAL MEDIA
As discussed in the Web and Social Media section, Verde posts across various platforms for each individual story we publish as well as for more general publicity like announcing when a new issue is released. A great part of social media is we are able to engage with our audience through polls or other interactive story posts. We also can spark online discussion. For example, a February post about a protest for schools to reopen had 45 comments as people shared their opinions on the matter or their experiences with distance learning.
In addition to our official social media presence, our staff including myself often use our personal accounts to share our stories further and engage a wider audience. Below are some examples of posts I have made on my personal Instagram story with that goal in mind.
