Reform the Norm Campaign
Role: Branding, Graphic Design, Social Media Strategy, Community Management
In the Spring of 2020, I ran for Student Body President at the University of North Texas. I knew something had to change, so I ran – I ran to reform the norm. While our campaign lost by only 300 votes, the issues sparked conversations and the solutions we proposed layed the ground work for tangible change.
For the first time in UNT’s history, we lead a 100% digital campaign to meet students where they were in the midst of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Alongside my amazing running mate Bakhtawar Yasir and over the course of months of planning and just 11 days of campaigning, here’s how we reformed the norm.
The Platform
Our campaign stood on the idea that student government should advocate for real solutions for the real problems our student body faces. The platform was bold and backed by the experience that could get the job done. But most of all, it layed the groundwork for the work that is yet to be done.
Branding
Reforming the Norm is a bold idea. An idea that calls for our community to come together, to stand as one, to advocate for our voices. An idea that wasn’t going to be accomplished in one year or under one administration. An idea that represented the hope and resiliency of the UNT student body. And our brand aimed to represent all of those things.
Instagram allowed us to dive deeper into our platform policies and highlight our amazing campaign team, all wrapped up in an on-brand aesthetic feed. We also used the stories feature for takeovers and Q&A’s with the candidates, feature our endorsements, and provide shareable templates to our supporters.
Despite recurring technical errors of the platform blocking our account, our strategy and content lead to 28,974 impressions reaching 18,396 accounts.
Twitter served as our primary platform to make the case for our campaign, while also gaining support from our followers. Through engaging and interactive content we were able to gain 94,700 impressions, 8,986 profile visits, 334 followers in just 11 days of the campaign.
Facebook was our hub for engaging with alumni and the broader UNT community. We posted more long-form versions of our content and were able to share to larger UNT related Facebook groups while running targeted ads. Over the 11 day campaign, our video content received 647 minutes of watch time and our posts reached 9,246 people with an engagement rate of 13.64%.
TikTok
At the core of our campaign was meeting students where they were at, and it was clear they were on TikTok. This platform allowed everyone from our campaign team to create videos based on trends and reform the way SGA is perceived. Through our fun and personal content, we gained 2,473 views with an engagement rate of 67.67%.
Spotify
We wanted to bring the human side to our campaign through showing off our favorite music. Each campaign team member created a Spotify playlist titled “Reform x …” which we shared on our Instagram stories and website bios.
Website
Our website was the focal point of all things Reform the Norm. Providing students with in depth information on our platform while introducing ourselfs and our team.
Noah Hutchinson 