As part of his public relations senior project, Brenden and a team of students partnered with the Oregon Social Learning Center, a non-profit multidisciplinary research center dedicated to increasing the scientific understanding of social and psychological processes related to healthy development and family functioning.

The main goal of the campaign was to improve awareness of OSLC’s programs, increase engagement with the public, and drive traffic to their new website.

While deeply connected with social and psychological research professionals, OSLC was lacking a dialogue with everyday people in the community.

Within the timeline of a ten week term, it was decided that social media outreach would have the greatest impact on achieving these goals.

Throughout the campaign, Brenden served as team leader and primary contact for email correspondence and client meetings with OSLC’s Chief Operating Officer Rick Varnum and Social Media manager Zanne Miller.

His team did analysis and research to identify internal/external communication weaknesses and opportunities. They put together a strategic plan to implement via social media which combined storytelling, targeted advertisements, photos, links to research findings and open ended questions directed at the community.

Afterwards they reported post campaign results and evaluation in a formal presentation.

The results clearly showed that Brenden’s team successfully made an impact on increasing community awareness and created new opportunities for dialogue via Facebook.

They increased page likes and engagement by 60% within four weeks. Internally, they demonstrated the value of social media as an engagement tool and imprinted a set of strategies that are still being implemented today.

Since the campaign OSLC has nearly doubled it’s Facebook following.