Preparing for the Exploratorium's involvement in April 2017's March For Science in San Francisco, as a non-profit organization, we wanted to creatively and effectively communicate our vision statement through all of our social channels. For nearly 50 years, the Exploratorium has valued lifelong learning and teaching, curiosity and inquiry, our community, iteration and evidence, integrity and authenticity, sustainability, and inclusion and respect — all more important than ever given our current political climate in the US.
We (the Marketing Department) did not expect to have this video be as successful as it was in the end. Although we knew that our social channel audiences would enjoy seeing the Trike Writer* because of its novelty, we were still not quite sure how the vision statement content would "perform." As an institution, we knew that we had to get our vision/mission out to the masses (without a budget) prior to the March For Science to remind people:
1) Why we exist as a non-profit cultural institution
2) The importance of science, critical thinking and asking questions
In the end, we know that content is king. We know that the concept is simple and the strategy was straight forward, but it really came down to delivering the right message, in the right way at the right time. We think we hit it out of the ballpark in terms of ROI and achieving our objectives.
This video and some other messages using the Trike Writer were filmed and produced by our in-house Moving Images department.
*The Trike Writer uses water to temporarily write on the pavement — inspired by the art of Chinese water calligraphy. This was important information to some of our audience members who are passionate about our "green" initiatives. They appreciated that the message simply evaporated and left no waste behind.
The numbers speak for themselves between the 2 organic posts for this video on Instagram. In addition to these incredible numbers for Instagram, we also reached more than 400,000 users on Facebook and Twitter with the same video content. We wanted to reach the masses with this video, and it worked!
Post 1: https://www.instagram.com/p/BS
• 6,230 likes
• 59 comments
• 923 saved (the number of unique accounts that saved the post)
• 325k impressions (total number of times the post was seen)
• 296k reach (the number of unique accounts who saw your post)
• 7,212 engagements (the number of unique accounts that liked, saved, or commented)
Post 2: https://www.instagram.com/p
20,131 likes
46 comments
4,461 saves
627k impressions
592k reach
24.8k engagement
