Husker Dialogues

Husker Dialogues is an annual event that facilitates discussion on diversity and inclusiveness between UNL first-year students.

Challenge: Raising student awareness and staff, faculty and volunteer involvement even as Husker Dialogues was shifted online due to the global pandemic.

Solution: There were two phases to the campaign. Phase 1 was to raise awareness of Husker Dialogues with the spirit of “Challenge What You Know” to encourage honest conversation. Phase 2 is the engagement and post-event follow up to “Continue the Conversation.” The campaign was launched primarily on email, social media posts, and blogs in coordination with UCOMM. Graphics and visuals that would resonate with first-year students were heavily used.

Target Audience: The primary audience is Freshman students/Gen Zers and the secondary audience is older students and staff. Online research discovered that Gen Zers tend to “express individual truths”. They are open and accepting while easily connecting with people. Concluded overall message from research should be Gen Zers strength and individaulity, emphasizing their desire to bring change to the world.

Planning:Creating visuals and multimedia deliverable will resonate well with the target audience. Using diversity as a driving factor in showing that it can be in many different shows the strength of unity. The tactic of creating atagline like “challenge what you know” creates a call to action towards the target audience in encouraging them to participate in the conversation.

Implementation: (Phase 1) This summer, we focused on Phase 1 promotion which was Awareness for first-year students about the Husker Dialogues event as well as increasing awareness among current students and faculty/staff regarding the conversation guide volunteer opportunity. (Phase 2) Regarding the fall semester, Jacht wanted to continue promotion and event plans post-Husker Dialogues but we were entirely aware of what that will look like. The focal point of phase 2 was to “continue the conversation”. In the overarching marketing plan, we wanted phase 2 to represent engagement, more specifically engagement post-event. During this phase, students attending the event—every first-year student is assigned a time and date—are encouraged to actually commit and attend the event. This phase occurred roughly August 17-September 10. Jacht focused on helping create any last-minute engagement graphics as well as identifying partnerships among faculty and staff who can directly encourage attendance to their first-year students. Implementation of the campaign was primarily through email, social media posts, and blogs. Graphics and visuals were heavily used. Coordination with UCOMM on all social media conversations and the blog post helped with promoting the event. The production timeline for phase 2 was roughly August 17-September 10.

This write up is from the Account Executive assigned to the client and reflects the student work on strategy.