Marketing and Audience Engagement

Marketing provides opportunities to create and communicate a message, idea, or product with a target audience to foster interaction, awareness, a relationship, advocacy, or brand loyalty. RNE-TV Live airs commercials, promotional videos, or school events daily to communicate with our school community and promote engagement. While the focus of our journalism program targets local issues and our school, we market local activities and events that are happening in our school and surrounding community.

In this section, I have included examples of work that I have completed as philanthropic work to help non-profits or school organizations promote events or ideas. Many of the examples included have had a large reach with the videos on the importance of secure gun storage being distributed to over 70,000 families in the Midlands of South Carolina. I have been honored to have organizations in my community ask me to help create content for them to promote local initiatives.

The state lead from Everytown for Gun Safety asked me to attend a press conference at the statehouse and create a video that could be used for advocacy in South Carolina. Organizations and legislators were working to add funding for CVIs to the state budget. The video explains what CVIs are and highlights their importance in local communities. The Richland County Coroner, a state representative, and a leader from a nonprofit were interviewed. I also created a separate video on CVIs that aired on the news show at my school so that I could make the information relevant for my school community.

I helped to begin, design, and co-edit the Midlands Be SMART Quarterly Newsletter. This newsletter is designed to be printed and distributed, highlighting the activities, volunteers, and partnerships of the organization. Information about secure firearm storage, volunteer opportunities, trainings, and events are included. The newsletter is sent out to volunteers and community partners.

Youth gun violence has severely impacted my school and local community. After students from my school were killed, I wanted to find a way to get involved to reduce youth accessing firearms. I became a volunteer with Be SMART, an organization that educates the community about the importance of securing firearms. With the skills I learned in my journalism class, I designed an educational campaign that six school districts in the Midlands of South Carolina participated in, covering five counties. The district superintendents, their respective sheriffs, a local pediatrician, a Be SMART volunteer, and a well-known and well-respected local news anchor participated in the videos that were shared with over 70,000 families throughout the Midlands. 

The Decker Collective was launched in 2023 by Serve & Connect to improve community togetherness in the Decker Boulevard area of Columbia, S.C. The launch took place at my high school, Richland Northeast. This video was created to inform my school community about this community-driven effort. The goals of the Decker Collective are to build bridges between the different community groups along the Decker corridor, increase community pride, and establish safe spaces for youth to gather.  For this video, I interviewed the Founder and CEO of Serve & Connect and the Superintendent of Richland School District Two about the importance of supporting this community effort.

Run Forest, Run is a 10K, 5K, and 1-mile Fun Run hosted by the Forest Lake Educational Foundation at a local elementary school, Forest Lake Elementary. I was recruited by the foundation’s leadership to make several promotional videos for the event that were shared with the community to encourage participation. To help communicate why the community should attend the event, I asked the principal and a student to share their experiences and make it more personal.

Our journalism program, CavPlex, is a magnet program and receives funding directly from our school district. While I have been in the program, there has not been a tradition of fundraising for the program. Within the last few months, the topic of funding and the program's budget has been introduced to students as something to fundraise for. We recently held our first fundraiser and sold Domino's Pizza discount cards.

A segment for announcements airs on each episode of RNE-TV Live and is an important tool to keep the school community informed about events, deadlines, and pertinent information. School administrators, teachers, and staff are sent a link to the Announcement Form. The form is also part of the journalism teachers' email tag line for quick access. The Announcement Form is a Google Form that links to a Google spreadsheet. A staff member goes through the form every day, and puts the announcements that are running into the script. An announcement can run for no more than two weeks to help keep the content timely and the audience engaged.

Each year, our school hosts a sock drive to collect socks for community members in need. This fun video was designed to have a trendy, upbeat vibe to draw attention to the drive and encourage student participation. The style was modeled on a social media trend.

At the beginning of the school year, a cheerful video was created to introduce students to the administration team. This video was intended to set a positive tone for the new year.