Month: December 2016

To cure food allergies. For lasting peace. To explore the moon. To protect the innocent. For better cancer detection. For our veterans.

These are the things we fought for at Notre Dame this football season – the ‘What Would You Fight For?’ campaign’s 10th.

You’ve probably seen the spots. Every home football game at halftime Dan Hicks (and a few times this year, Mike Tirico) cues up two minutes highlighting a component of the academic mission of the University. And while this is aired to the millions of people watching at home, we’re not naive enough to think that everyone is glued to their television sets when there are bathroom breaks to take, halftime snacks to eat and an entire internet to peruse before the second half kicks off.

Enter: Social Media.

Since 2013, we’ve shared the ‘Fighting For’ spots across our Facebook and Twitter accounts to great success, but in 2016 we blew success out of the water.

3721% out of the water.

That’s the percentage increase in views in the 2016 campaign over the 2014 campaign across social media (we saw a 190% increase over the 2015 campaign). We also saw a 1247% increase in organic reach on Facebook over the same time period.

While a lot of this can be attributed to the outstanding team of Notre Dame and NBC professionals who work tirelessly for most of the year to concept and produce the spots (and they have some great stories which they chronicled in Notre Dame Magazine a few years back), we’ve also spent four years – especially the last two with the advent of Strategic Content (the official name of those of us behind ND Stories) – building our social media brand as a robust outlet that rewards those who click on our content with visually compelling, well-written pieces.

The ‘Fighting For’ spots are compelling in themselves. They tell a story and always feature a resolution to a problem, but oftentimes you can’t tell the whole story in two-minutes. That’s where we upped our game this year. Each spot was accompanied by a long form written piece which went in-depth into what problems our professors, graduate students and alumni are attempting to solve in the world.

Because we had this extra piece of content this year, we approach social media with a two-pronged attack – on Friday, we published the video component on FightingFor.nd.edu, Facebook and Youtube and launched the piece on Twitter. This allowed people the chance to watch the video at their leisure even if they were heading to campus for the game on Saturday. Then, we published posts linking directly to the long form piece on fightingfor.nd.edu without mentioning that the piece was a Fighting For or had a video component on Monday. Some readers commented “I saw this on Saturday during the game” on the Monday post, but quite often those who commented on Monday came to the piece cold and learned about our research completely removed from a football or Fighting For context.

After 10 years, the question of whether or not a campaign has reached the end of its self-life is inevitably asked. I think this response to our 10-year Anniversary spot, which aired during the Notre Dame-Virginia Tech match up on November 19 show us that we should be Fighting For things for years to come:

 

Our story profiling the ND-SMC Irish Dance Team’s trip to compete in the All Ireland dance competition was a change of pace for Strategic Content in a few ways. First, it focuses on an aspect of student experience at the University, something that we do not often cover. (Though when it is, the stories typically perform well. A Transformative Journey remains one of the top-10 most viewed StratCon stories of the past 2 years.)

In some ways, it’s one of the most involved pieces Strategic Content has done to date. Some tidbits:

• 2 videography shoots – one at a normal rehearsal, one at a staged dress rehearsal at ND’s Washington Hall.
• 1 photography shoot.
• A web designer visiting a dance team rehearsal.
• A StratCon team member traveling with the team to Dublin and Belfast, acting as both chaperone and brand journalist on the trip. (And he brought back iPhone video that was used in the package included in the story – a first for StratCon, for what it’s worth.)

The resulting story is a look at a small part of the student experience at Notre Dame and St. Mary’s. It’s also a brief recounting of the history of Irish dance in the context of Irish history. It’s a story about chapters of life amid the passage of time, and in a certain way, an interesting commentary on age. Irish dancers rarely compete on this stage once they reach 21 or 22 – the age of the team members who made the trip – as usually injuries or studies or both take their toll. The ND-SMC team competed in the “senior” division, if that’s any indication.

The design of the feature takes cues from The Book of Kells, and rightfully so, as explained in the story. We tried several video takes using the OrcaVue platform to capture some of the dancers’ footwork, though it proved difficult.

We called the story “Steps in Time,” a nod to the importance of music time signature in Irish dance and also an allusion to the chapter in life it represented for these students. It published December 22, and occupied the main feature block on nd.edu starting January 3. Thanks for reading!