"The Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School hosted me as a summer graduate fellow to develop a comprehensive social media strategy, recommend a 12-month editorial calendar, and design branded visual assets to raise awareness among MBA students, alumni, donors, social entrepreneurs, responsible business leaders, and nonprofit leaders.

The center is a premier force for social enterprise, offering unique programs, a wide selection of elective courses, and clubs and conferences for students. Considering the center’s strong position, I developed a social media strategy to accomplish three goals:

• Position the center as the academic and professional powerhouse in social enterprise focused on social justice and environmental issues.
• Promote center events, courses, experiential learning, research opportunities, social venture funding, clubs and conferences, loan assistance, awards and fellowships, and cross-campus events at Columbia University.
• Create opportunities to elevate thought leadership by students, alumni, faculty, and advisory board members engaging with nonprofits, influencing public policies, leveraging social finance, leading corporate citizenship, innovating, and participating in impact investing.

The final social media strategy, editorial calendar, and branded visual assets use Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter to highlight how the center carries out its mission — to “educate leaders to use business tools, entrepreneurial skills, and management skills to address social and environmental challenges.”

My work as a master of public administration (MPA) student at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) enhanced my capacity to help the center spotlight business’s evolving social responsibilities. I am pursuing my MPA so that I can effectively identify and harness synergies between public entities — such as federal, state, or local government and nonprofit organizations — and private entities — such as for-profit enterprises — to close gaps in access to health care and wealth creation. This lens, coupled with six years of professional experience in agency communications, pushed me to think critically about the types of stories the center is in the best position to share.

To design an effective social media strategy, I had to benchmark how the center was leveraging its Columbia Business School affiliation and performing on its own, compared to competing centers at equivalent universities. Accordingly, it was important to review content based on public details like post period, post topic, degree of follower engagement per post, frequently used functions (e.g., IGTV, Instagram Stories, Instagram Highlights), and frequently used hashtags. This was challenging, given the volume of content business schools and social enterprise initiatives posted across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter in the last year. At the same time, I wanted to make sure the social media strategy reflected how staff at the center viewed their work and their brand. Ultimately, and in partnership with my internship supervisor, I addressed these challenges in two ways. I carried out a three-phased research approach to develop the social media strategy. It was designed to produce comprehensive, targeted, and actionable insights based on demographic trends related to global social media use; a robust competitive analysis; and, an audit of the center’s own social media presence. I also engaged center staff in a brainstorming exercise at our off-site retreat to uncover our social media identity and editorial content drivers.

My experience as a graduate fellow at the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise this summer offered many lessons; I’ll reflect here on just a few: 1) The most effective strategy is developed in service of a clear end result. 2) Combined, professional and academic experience can be used to make a positive impact with an organization over a short period of time. 3) Often, the biggest effort is in identifying and carrying out the most effective workflow. Embrace it!"