Last year, long before Covid-19, Artful Journeys contracted with Riipen, a facilitator that brings companies and students together, to work together on a project to expand our social media presence. Riipen brings industry and academia together, with real company projects that are facilitated by instructors and embedded directly into the curriculum.
We teamed up with five students from the Schulich School of Business in Toronto, Canada. Their task was to identify a new customer segment, develop a strategy to target this group and implement that strategy. We had a series of meetings to introduce ourselves, then to button down the task, and to detail the progress made. This hard-working group of students, expertly led by Andrea Ascarrunz Becerra, organized our social media presence into 4 categories (educational, trips, reminiscence, and customer connection). They consistently published on FaceBook and Instagram various posts revolving around these 4 topics, finding lots of new information, and using great photos. Other online ads were also posted. Their goal was to increase media presence by 100%, and they certainly did that.
We want to commend Andrea, Naziza, Ivy, Logan, and Manpreet for their exceptional organization, persistence, and patience with me, who doesn’t deal with social media very well. It is always good to have an outside perspective, especially when the group can put us on the straight and narrow and clean up our act!
Also, more recently, we took on a virtual intern through Riipen. Allyshia Tran is at the RMIT University in Australia. Under Carla’s tutelage, Allyshia has been writing our Constant Contact posts, which you might have noticed, have had a younger point of view and voice in recent weeks. Allyshia will also be spiffing up copy on our website and helping with the forthcoming poetry anthology. The time difference of 11 or 14 hours is the only problem we encounter with this internship arrangement: it’s almost impossible to find a time when we can meet together!
Our Client Success Associate, Christy Jermias, is our perceptive and astute adviser for all our projects. She is always well informed, understands our situations immediately, and is creative with ideas to approach any problem differently. We highly recommend Riipen if you’d like to pair up with students to help you out or if your business needs some fresh insight. We have found this collaborative approach extremely beneficial. You can find out more about Riipen here: https://www.riipen.com. Many thanks to them.
Written by
Joan Hill, Artful Journeys Director and
Carla Bohnett, Artful Journeys Co-Director