The Engage Social Media Community
While conducting focus groups at one of IRA’s Conventions, I learned that many of our members felt isolated in terms of professional development support in their school. That’s why they loved coming to our Convention, for the support and collaborative opportunities the Convention afforded as much as the content. I wanted to replicate the energy and the supportive atmosphere of the Convention throughout the year for our members. So, I initiated and worked with a cross-functional team to develop Engage–a social media community site for literacy professionals.
This community offered IRA’s widespread membership a lifeline to support and collaboration opportunities with other professionals anytime, from anywhere in the world. The heart of the site was the Engage/Teacher to Teacher community. I managed the content for this community which offered a weekday blog, a weekly podcast series, professional book discussion groups, topic-based collaborative communities, and resource sharing.
The Engage/Teacher to Teacher blog offered a variety of informative and entertaining weekly and monthly features for IRA audiences including weekly guest blog posts and short interviews with literacy “superstars” and bestselling children’s literature authors. Teachers and literacy experts provided teaching tips, book reviews, and cross-curricular resources. And our weekly podcast offered entertaining interviews with some of the biggest names in children’s literature and in the literacy field. We posted over 400 blog posts a year. Engage also revitalized our public social media sites through posts and comments about Engage content and the education issues that were discussed in Engage communities.
Please check out hyperlinks below, or use the submenus for this page, to view:
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Samples of the various features of the blog.*
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A podcast page for sample podcasts.
*Please Note: Several digital samples are not responsive or optimized for mobile because they pre-date responsive design and the dominance of mobile viewing that there is today. My more recent projects have been optimized for mobile. Also, I linked to summaries and PDFs of blogs and other Engage content because IRA—now International Literacy Association—did a complete rebranding and with that a redesign and upgrade of their website a couple of years ago. The Engage site (which was hosted on Higher Logic) was retired and the Engage/Teacher to Teacher blog and other aspects of Engage were merged into the new, main ILA website. If you go to IRA’s current Literacy Daily blog and review blogs from 2012 and earlier, you will find many of the blogs I produced still on their site under the categories 5 Questions With…, Teaching Tips, In Other Words, Putting Books to Work, and Anita’s Picks.
IRA Social Media
Before Engage and Members Only (an exclusive content area I developed for the IRA website), IRA’s public social media sites featured only announcements and product promotions. There was little conversation or engagement with audiences. I used the content from Engage and Members Only as discussion starters on that content and on other, related education topics to revitalize the public social media outlets.
The results were dramatic.
We used content from the Engage blog, Members Only articles, and issues from other online education discussions to spark daily discussions on Facebook. The daily blog post, Question of the Week, and other content-based posts facilitated discussions. Plus, Facebook users could easily discover who had been chosen as Member of the Month on IRA’s Facebook page.
The result of this daily push of content and discussion starters was an impressive increase in audience and engagement on the page. The community doubled in size in a few months (from 6,000 to over 14,000), and likes, shares and commenting dramatically increased.
Prior to Engage and Members Only, IRA had only a very small following on Twitter. As with Facebook, we used content from those sites to enhance engagement in our Twitter community. We tweeted about new blog posts and articles, referencing the content’s author and author’s book publisher in the tweet. This led the authors and publishers to retweet the content to their own audiences.
We gained over 2500 new followers (more than doubling our prior following) in the first few months and received exposure to a much broader audience through retweets by authors and publishers.
Today, IRA continues to use professional development article series and regular blog features that I developed to continue to grow their social media following.
Please Note: These screenshots are from back around 2008-2009 timeframe when I was first working at IRA before these social sites allowed the personalization that can be done today.
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