5 Essentials for an Educational Web Campaign
Every year, Hueman Studio works with HomeAid on their Homelessness Awareness Month campaign. This nationwide digital campaign aims to raise awareness about homelessness in America. The primary focus for this month is to educate using the same or similar content as previous years, not necessarily fundraise or present novel concepts. We just wrapped up our third campaign, and have outlined 5 essentials for planning and executing an educational campaign.
Compelling Video Content
Regardless if your campaign has a social media component or not, video content is a great way to add pathos and a human touch to whatever story you are trying to educate visitors on. By utilizing first or third person testimonials, informative speakers, or bite sized facts repurposed into video content, it helps add not only visual pizazz to a website, but taps into powerful and humanistic storytelling.
This year, we pursued two types of video content: discussing the need and importance of the goals of our campaign using informative speakers, and illustrative animations presenting understandable facts and myths.
Resources Organized Cohesively
You probably can’t fit every piece of information needed to fully understand everything about your campaign in one campaign. References to in depth resources like studies or articles should be incorporated to supplement educational content, but need to not overwhelm the user. Some ways we avoid this is by having a dedicated journal for articles, while also featuring important research or external references in the appropriate sections. Similar to how you would cite your sources, present external resources where relevant or a user would naturally feel guided to “explore more”.
Community Buy In
While your organization may very well be the experts in the campaign, there is power in a community. By engaging the community throughout your campaign, you increase motivation and broaden engagement. The more people feel part of your mission, the more impact it will have.
For the Homelessness Awareness Month campaign, we engaged affiliates across the country via guest blog posts and engaged the general community through podcast episodes.
Long Lasting CTA’s
When the goal is to get educated, planning call to actions can be difficult. Aside from reading or educating themselves, what else do we what an engager to do? These can be micro call-to-action’s, and by using them sparingly, they create more impact. Micro call-to-action’s could include purchasing merchandise, donating, finding volunteer opportunities, sharing content, etc.
Actionable Storytelling
Finally, why should someone care what you have to say? Why should they care about being engaged and educated via your campaign? Once they go through your campaign, how can you make sure that it doesn’t just go in one ear and out the other? By focusing the content used in a storytelling framework, it makes information make sense and more digestible. This will lead to a lasting impact on the engager. When planning and reviewing your content outline, ask yourself if someone would be able to recall any quantitive or qualitative information from the campaign ~ “I learned this from last year’s campaign!”
