Campus Activities Board
The Campus Activities Board is a student-run organization at the University of San Francisco that hosts the largest events on campus. Such events include Movie Nights, Late Nights LIVE w/ KUSF, Donaroo Spring Concert, Dons Night Out Fall Concert, Holiday Roller Rink, Fright Night, and the Spring Carnival.
I spent 4 years working in CAB, starting as a freshmen committee member and working my way up to the President of the organization. The position I have held include President, Vice President of Marketing and Communications and Marketing Committee Member.
For more information about the CAB:
Project Pieces Include:
WEBSITE
Marketing
As VPMC, I was in charge of all things marketing, promotional, and communication-oriented. When marketing the events it's important to understand who’s our target audience. CAB events are targeted at anyone in the USF community: undergraduate students, graduate students, Alumni, and Staff/Faculty. However, our focus is on undergraduate USF students, particularly those living on campus, which tends to be freshmen. Knowing this, our posts and content are adjusted to reach new students. This is done by directing students to find out more information on our website, considering that most of them may not have attended our events before. We also make sure to hang posters and flyers near freshman dorm rooms in order to get their attention.
The way I managed to stay on top of all the marketing for CAB is by creating a marketing timeline as shown here. I used Google sheets to keep track of social media content and campaigns that were going to be posted as well as deadlines for my committee members to meet.
Campaigns are another way I chose to market certain events or pieces of information to certain students. Leading up to USF’s Involvement Fair or club day, I began a “Why CAB?” campaign on our Instagram. I would post stories that included our past members, events, and behind the scenes footage as a way to convince students of how interesting and fun our organization can be. This led to an 80% increase in membership for the 2019 - 2020 school year and 60% increase in brand awareness on campus.
Another way I worked to market CAB was through Tabling Events. Tabling is when members of our organization would set up a table around campus to engage in-person with other students. I would help select times and locations for the tabling events. I usually tried to pick the areas near the cafeteria and freshman dorm rooms because our target audience tended to spend the most amount of time at those locations, usually around lunchtime from 11 AM to 2 PM and dinner time around 6 PM to 8 PM.
Our most effective way of marketing has been Social Media Marketing. Instagram has been the best platform for us to use, because it's the most popular app amongst our target audience. We also have a Facebook page where we use the event feature to estimate how many people were planning to attend our events. CAB’s Twitter was used to update students on any event changes day off, and to retweet student experiences. This past year, under my leadership we launched CAB’s TikTok account; a platform that allows us to create casual content to engage with our audience in a silly way.
Another platform we use for marketing and communication is the CAB website (cabdons.com). On the site, I made sure to include our organization's mission statement and information about why & how to get involved. Other pages I made sure to include on the website were a CAB Senior Recognition and Club History pages.
This role made me a liaison between CAB and the USF community, I focussed on communicating all event information as well as rules and regulations with our audience in a transparent manner. I used CAB’s website, social media, and Youtube Channel’s analytics to track improvements and set metrics regarding audience engagement rates and event attendance. As a result, I increased our audience engagement by 40% and sold out all of our events. During this learning process, I was able to use my detail-oriented and problem-solving skills to take on a wide range of projects and meet daily deadlines in addition to being a full-time student.
Communications
In order to communicate with full transparency, I made sure to create a Slack channel for CAB in order to keep all of our members up to date about meetings and project deadlines. When working with my committee of 15 students, I had us use a shared Google account, where everyone would have access to all marketing materials, project information and space to upload their work. To make sure everyone knew when meetings were taking place, I made Google Calendar appointments with reminders, letting members know of the meeting in advance.
Data & Analytics
CAB’s Instagram is linked to the Facebook page, so when we wanted to collect information on how well our posts were doing Facebook’s analytics helped us understand how effectively we were using Organic Posts versus Paid Posts. Paid Post are posts that have been turned into an advertisement by paying for it to show up more accounts that may not even be following ours. Organic Posts are posts that only our followers are likely to see. As shown below, we only used Paid Post during certain points throughout the year, mainly during our larger events like during October for Halloween event Fright Night, December S for our DJ Competition Sign Up promotion, and in February for our Spring Concert Donaroo, and the last event was for a virtual rave event we were promoting doing the pandemic called Dons Night In. Paid Posts significantly outperform our organic post and are helpful when we are trying to sell out our events.
My goal when it came to using Facebook analytics was to look at the total reach or views the page was getting. This table shows how many views on Facebook came from July 2018 to July 2019 and then July 2019 to July 2020. Definitely see and increase in views, particular during February and March, which is when the Spring Concert.
When reviewing Instagram Analytics, I like to compare Engagement or posts to the Reach of the posts. By doing this I found that posts featuring students or photographs of actual people perform better than posts with just text or drawing on them.
When looking at the Audience portion of the data, I find it helpful to look at the times during the day when our audience is mainly active with our content and then I plan to post accordingly.
Website
My goal is to drive as much traffic to the CAB website as possible. Comparing the past view years since I’ve taken over in managing shows that the traffic increases every year. I believe this is a result of adding the website link on social media accounts and directing people to find more information on our website in the captions of the posts. Another helpful data piece to look at it Visits by Source, which shows how people access the website. The square apace data shows that most of the people accessing the website directly know to type in cabdons.com or @cabdons. This means we are doing a good job at branding the website properly on all platforms, apparel, and promotional items.
Event Planning
While serving as president from 2018 to 2019, I was in charge of overseeing CAB’s two largest events: the Fall Concert called Dons Night Out and the Spring Concert called Donaroo. I was lead on artist selection, production lay out, theme/concept selection, and organizing Day of Show details. When selecting an artist I made sure to look over budget to create a list of portent talent to bring to campus. I got to work closely with our off site production team, called BLAP Productions, who helped book talent and set up the stage, music, and layout of the event. So essentially they would take my ideas or blueprints and make them a reality.
Here’s more pieces of my working when it comes to event planning and production for CAB.
Leadership
I’ve served one year as president and two years as Vice President of Marketing and Communications (VPMC). While I was president I was leading the executive which consisted of 7 board members. While in my role as VPMC I led a committee of 10 to 15 students who I would marketing concepts to and improve CAB promotions with.
A leader for me is someone that means keeping everyone on track, making communication transparent, delegating tasks so everyone feels involved, providing those on your team with opportunities whether that be internships or jobs and being a supportive and motivating member to your team.
I truly believe that a good leader is someone who encourages others around to become leaders as well. That’s what I always tried to embody and successfully did while serving my time on CAB’s executive team Many of my committee members later went on to take over in executive positions in other clubs as well as in CAB.
Through my dedication and passion throards improving USF’s community, I received the Senior Leadership Award. This award will be given to three graduating seniors who have consistently worked and succeeded in enriching and impacting student life and is committed to the values of Student Life throughout their career at USF. Selected individuals have contributed to making a positive impact on the campus climate and has demonstrated committed involvement in clubs, organizations, programs, or other area of campus involvement.These individuals act as an inspiration to others, modeling the way for a more just and humane world and is committed to working with and for others.
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