Urban Alliance Detroit has a well established LinkedIn presence and is just starting to build their Instagram and potentially their Facebook. There is a lot of untapped potential for outreach and increasing engagement, which makes establishing a cohesive content creation strategy essential. This status led into our team’s design question: How might we maximize UA Detroit’s social media presence to effectively share about the program’s impact and engage various stakeholders? In order to approach this question, our group needed to understand a couple key aspects.
- Urban Alliance’s main messaging goals and the stories they wanted to tell.
- What Urban Alliance’s current and expected capacity was for content creation and social media production.
- How Urban Alliance’s audiences and content may vary by platform.
The need for this information guided us into our interviews, where we wanted to gain a better idea of this information.
Through our interviews, we had the privilege of speaking with Urban Alliance staff who exemplified their passion for shaping and advocating for the future for young people. One key connection that emerged from these interviews was Andrei Nichols, Internship Program Lead Specialist. Andrei works directly with youth in the program, guiding them through the pre-work and internship process. His leadership ensures that students gain not only technical skills but also confidence and community connections. Andrei shared a powerful insight:
“Storytelling is a focal point for how social media can be impactful in highlighting UA’s overall impact, but how can we do it cohesively without losing sight of the main theme? We want to show all the different sides of our work with the staff, mentors, partners, and students, but as parts of a whole.”
This quote reflects Andrei’s passion and commitment. It’s not just about internships, it’s about collaboration, essential skill-building, and authentic community engagement. From these interview insights, we wanted to make sure our deliverables helped guide Urban Alliance staff “to and through” the content creation and storytelling process. We wanted to craft deliverables that gave Urban Alliance all relevant information for using social media, from tutorials to process guides to lead in content collection and posting. We also wanted to provide a system for execution, providing relevant campaign ideas that can be easily tailored and scheduled. All in all, our interviews guided our deliverable creations, as our goal was to create a clear plan for establishing storytelling on social media and provide Urban Alliance staff with the logistics to get there.
After interviewing staff, it was clear they wanted simple, accessible resources that made social posting feel less overwhelming. This led us to establishing our three deliverables:
Social Media One-Pager, Posting Playbook
Social Media 101 One Pager: A one stop shop for all things UA Social Media, providing them with tutorials and a content collection and organization process.
Posting Playbook: In depth coverage of different social media platforms, what audiences they target, and the types of posts that get the most engagement on each. This also included advice for writing captions across platforms and recommendations for future social media decisions such as building out a TikTok platform.
Content Calendar: A streamlined content calendar system with clear content categories, and easy-to-use graphic templates designed to elevate the look and feel of UA’s posts without adding extra work.
These pieces work together to guide staff to a shared baseline and then support them through ongoing content creation, helping them show up online with clarity, intention, and pride in the work they do.
The social media team is incredibly grateful toward the Urban Alliance Detroit team for their trust and guidance throughout the entire engagement. We are particularly grateful to Alphonso, Jazmine, Tamia, Victor, Keisha, Andrei and Rashad for their support in stakeholder interviews and providing feedback on our deliverables throughout the Design Thinking process. We greatly appreciate this team for trusting us to tackle such an important challenge on behalf of their organization.
For our fall project we partnered with Urban Alliance Detroit, the local arm of Urban Alliance (UA), a national nonprofit creating pathways for young people to achieve economic independence through skills training, mentorship, and meaningful paid work experiences. Our project was focused on capturing and sharing UA Detroit’s impact through storytelling to expand opportunities for Detroit youth. Teams of Fellows worked alongside the UA Detroit’s team – Alphonso Amos, Victor Robinson, Keisha Powell-Young, Tamia Cooper, Jazmine Banks, Andrei Nichols, McKenzie Reed, Rashad Dudley – as well as engaged with stakeholders, including UA Detroit’s advisory board, students, employer partners, school partners and a parent.
See other team blogs about our project with Urban Alliance here.