With a monumental election taking place this year, it was a University priority to inform our student body about how to vote and encourage voting participation.
In collaboration with the Undergraduate Student Government, UConn PIRG, and Off-Campus and Commuter Student Services, the UConn social team put together a robust social media campaign that provided information and resources for students to exercise their right to vote.
The campaign had two primary goals: to encourage participation from students and to give them the tools and information they needed in a way that was easily digestible.
We designed a set of graphic assets to make this content stand out as well as tie the whole campaign together. We also used the hashtag #UConnVotes and encouraged others to tag their posts to aggregate this content and make it easily searchable. Some of our topics included: how to register to vote, how to vote absentee, reasons to vote, and important Election Day information about getting to the polls and voting safely during a pandemic.
During the seven-week long campaign, we shared a total of 69 pieces of content across UConn’s Instagram, Twitter and Facebook accounts, which included a video created by our USG/PIRG students. Here are some quick stats to recap the campaign results:
• 582.1K impressions
• 475.7K people reached
• 8.1K engagements
The @uconn Instagram story was the main avenue for sharing our content since we know this is where we get in front of the most students. We utilized the question sticker for a Q&A to help drive our strategy on which specific topics students wanted more information about. Overall, we shared 50 Instagram stories that garnered over 357K impressions, with an average reach of 6.2K per post.
A few of our top posts from the campaign included:
• Instagram – Jonathan Election Day
• Twitter – Mansfield Polling Stations
• Facebook – Voter Registration Day
While it’s impossible to measure the full impact our campaign had on student voter turnout, based on data from the Town of Mansfield, we know that 1,787 on-campus students registered to vote and 560 of them voted in-person in Mansfield on Election Day.
To see more of our content from the campaign, search for #UConnVotes.