Company Name: Paws 4 Kids 4 Paws (P4K4P)

Mission, Vision, Values, or other unique aspects of your company: 

Our mission is to provide animal-assisted experiences for youth to develop their strengths by helping rescue animals become more adoptable.

Paws 4 Kids 4 Paws inspires and motivates youth learners who struggle with academic or social settings. By developing youth strengths beyond traditional academics, our unique learning experiences promote thoughtful, meaningful connections to animals and others. Youth learn they are capable, strong, and compassionate leaders who can advocate for themselves, others, and animals.

Project Title: Social Media Plan and Map

Project Goal: 

The main goal of this project is to develop a strategy and plan to increase awareness of P4K4P programs through social media.

We expect learners to:

• Create personas for key audiences (To include Parents of Middle school and High School youth, School teachers & Administrators, Potential facilitators/volunteers such as vet techs, Rescues/shelters, grantmakers)
• Identify platforms that those persons use and engage with
• Develop an overall strategy for all platforms
• Identify platform-specific needs or preferences for use/posting
• Develop a system for monitoring and tracking results
• Provide a standard timeline or calendar for postings (when, how many, how often, what formats...)

Project Deliverables:

The overall deliverable is a comprehensive social media plan that reflects the current environment and trends in social media usage for our target audiences.

At the end of the project, learners are expected to submit the following:

1. Personas for about 5 audiences (We are open to consolidation or dividing the audiences as appropriate.)
2. Report on platform usage by persona and emerging platforms.
3. Calendar or timeline for postings
4. Overall strategy for increasing visibility and awareness of P4K4P with our target audiences.
5. Recommendations for ongoing monitoring and tracking results.
6. Recommendations for tools to support implementation and resources for ongoing learning and updating of the plan.

Project Expectations & Skills Required: 

Learners will complete the above deliverables and tasks to provide an effective plan and achieve the project goal:

• Main Deliverable: A comprehensive social media plan.
• Skills Required: Understanding of social media platforms, creating personas, marketing research, written and oral communication, project management

Project Details & Milestones: 

Week 1: Project Kick-off and Onboarding: 

• Meet with nonprofit leaders to review scope and access needs.
• Review past social media plans and current postings/social accounts.
• Familiarize team members with existing data and access to our Microsoft Teams system, including documents and assets.

Week 2: Continued Onboarding, Demonstrated Competencies, & Initial Tasks 

• Review proposed audiences and identify which are distinct and where there is overlap (research as needed).
• Create a written persona for each key audience, with visuals where they help define the persona.
• Where will we find these audiences?
• What social media platforms are they using?
• What types of content engage the personas, and in what formats (text /video/image...)

Week 3: Early Project Work & Initial Milestones 

• Define an overall strategy for increasing awareness and engagement
• Set specific measurable goals for each platform &/or persona)
• Outline key messages/themes per platform (if different)
• Identify the types of content to be shared (e.g., images, videos, articles)
• Determine the frequency of posts on each platform
• Approach for engagement beyond reading/viewing content

Week 4: Mid-Project Progress & Review  

• Evaluate affordable, user-friendly tools for managing content 
• Propose resources & references for ongoing learning (trends, interests, changes in platforms etc.)
• Outline the social media plan.
• Start creating a content calendar to plan out posts in advance
• Include plug and play content for fundraising, events, programs (upcoming and successes), overall organization awareness.

Week 5: Final Project Work & Pre-Submission 

• Draft social media plan and content calendar.
• Review with nonprofit leaders 

Week 6: Final Project Submission & Wrap Up

• Finalize plan and present to nonprofit leaders.

Learner Support

Paws 4 Kids 4 Paws will provide as much support as needed and encourages questions and active joint problem-solving.

• Weekly Meetings: Our leadership team meets on Monday mornings and can provide time to the team on Mondays for reviews of plans, reports, presentations, key decisions that need input of more than one leader, review and support related to specific migration transitions that require changes in how we access data. We have set aside Mondays for our nonprofit work, limiting other work on that day. (Our leaders do have other commitments, jobs, and projects that are on-going.)

• Mentorship Hours: The project leader, Henry Van Nostrand, The project leader will be available Mondays and evenings after 6 p.m. Eastern time as much as possible.
• The co-founder, Tricia Sutton, will support the project where needed. She is relatively flexible during workdays, especially 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. US Central time on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, with Thursday through 3 p.m. usually. Fridays are less flexible but may be possible when needed. Evenings and weekends are less preferred, though also possible with advance scheduling.  

• Support Channels: Communications using Teams Chat are the most effective. Meetings will generally be held using the Teams meeting function. Text and phone calls can also be used as needed for urgent matters. Email is OK, though, emails should NEVER be used for urgent requests.

Learner Benefits:

• Skills Development: marketing personas, strategic thinking, market research, social media skills.
• Industry Exposure: Understanding of the special needs and budget constraints of (small) nonprofits.
• Letters of reference on request.