Executive Board:
MEET THE REST OF THE TEAM!!!
Project Description:
Compassion Through Conversation is an initiative that provides college students with resources to fight the discrimination that happens on college campuses. Compassion Through Conversation is a campaign to convey the importance of having conversations with groups of people who have different experiences from one another. Compassion Through Conversation aims to lower the racism that Asians and Asian Americans have faced due to the coronavirus pandemic. Our goal is to educate and inform individuals, whether in person or virtually. We want everyone to feel included by bringing awareness by advocating for a community that has experienced hate-based violence worldwide. We want college students and other audiences to become inspired by our work and help stop racism that stems from a pandemic so that we can unite.
Target Audience:
Our target audience is Quinnipiac University undergraduate students. More than 7,000 undergraduate students are enrolled in eight professional schools, including the College of Arts and Sciences. Compassion Through Conversation is targeting all types of people, both male, and female. Many of the Quinnipiac University students come from different backgrounds and are unique from one another. The geographic distribution in percentages of states and territories is 26% of students are from New York, 24% are from Connecticut, 20% are from New Jersey, 18% are from Massachusetts, 12% are from 27 out of the 31 states, and 2.48% are international students coming from 28 different countries.” (Quinnipiac University Quick Facts) Since Quinnipiac University’s community is many large students come from financial backgrounds as well. “The family income that makes less than $50,000 is 19%, 19% of families are earning between $50,000-$100,000, families earning between $100,000-$150,000 is 20%, and 42% have earned more than $150,000 not having to apply for financial aid. (Quinnipiac University Quick Facts) Compassion Through Conversation ensures our Quinnipiac community that we are here to make a change and learn from everyone. No matter the differences, we want to inform, educate, and provide our community with accurate information they can tell their friends, family, and peers about.
Compassion Through Conversation aims to make a call to action on Quinnipiac University's campus to inform our public on the issues of hate-based violence towards Asians and Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. Asians and Asian Americans have endured a history of discrimination and racism in the United States. Our goal is to recognize the importance of equality for Asian and Asian American community members on campus.
We want to be sure the Quinnipiac community listens and continues to spread our message through our social media content, research, and various other tactics. In particular, we target people who may not have much prior knowledge on the subject, as we feel it is not covered in the news as much as it should be. By targeting this demographic, we can analyze how successful we are on our own campus, with the future opportunity in mind of expanding to other campuses as well.
Project Goals:
The goal of our campaign centers around three key words: awareness, attitude, and action. The first step of the campaign was to build awareness around the issue of hate-based violence towards Asians and Asian-Americans during the coronavirus pandemic. Through building this awareness around our campaign, we strived to then change people's attitudes towards this issue. We wanted our content and survey tactics to especially resonate with people in order to display to them the magnitude of this form of hate-based violence. Once we were able to build awareness and change our target audience’s attitudes, we strived to take action and encourage students on campus to do so as well. A primary goal of this campaign is to convey the importance of having real conversations about the prevalent issue of hate-based violence against Asian and Asian Americans during the coronavirus pandemic and for the future as well. We feel we demonstrated this through our podcast, which we will dive into more in the Tactics section. Overall, awareness, attitude, and action are three of the main pillars that inspired the tactics that we decided to implement.
Research/Rationale:
Compassion Through Conversation has done a significant amount of research to ensure that our information is both trustworthy and educational. Secondary research that our team conducted is what inspired our idea for this campaign, as public records indicate 2,583 anti-Asian American hate incidents have occured between March-August, as Stop AAPI Hate released this data. There have been significant economic impacts for Asian Americans during the pandemic, as Asian American unemployment spiked to record highs, moving from just 2.5% to 10.7%, according to Stop AAPI Hate data. Asian owned businesses have struggled to get back on their feet, and an outsized impact is being felt on these communities.
Other secondary research and data was released on our campus as well, with the Asian Student Alliance at Quinnipiac releasing data collected from a survey that they conducted. According to the study, 56.7% of the students said they had experienced racism on campus, and 60% said they experienced discrimination off-campus. We builded on this concept, creating a survey related explicitly to hate-based violence towards Asian Americans during COVID-19.
A third way to gather research was our survey that gave us insight to this issue specifically on Quinnipiac University’s campus. This survey featured 25 questions and generated 142 responses from Quinnipiac students. The survey began by asking students about their opinions on hate based violence and whether it is something that they fear. Our findings included that 68.1% of people surveyed fear hate-based violence and a majority of people, at 50%, strongly agree that hate-based violence is a major issue in the U.S.
Our survey then changed its course, to ask more specific questions about hate-based violence in terms of Asians and Asian Americans due to the coronavirus pandemic. We asked questions regarding opinions on this topic, as well as asking where they have seen hate-based violence under this circumstance and what they have or would do to take action. 71.6% of Quinnipiac students state in our survey that they believe hate-based violence against Asians or Asian Americans have increased since the start of the pandemic. Another important part of our survey has to do with students taking action if they see hate-based violence occur; 35% state they would report the incident to law enforcement, whereas the remaining amount of participants would share this with family, friends, teachers and sadly some reported, no one - something that we hope to change with our campaign through providing resources for this very circumstance.
Additional key insights from our survey include:
74.6% of students surveyed believe they could play a role in preventing hate-based violence.
48.5% of participants strongly agree that Asians and Asian Americans have endured an increase of negative stereotypes since the beginning of the pandemic
46.5% of students surveyed strongly agreed that Asian and Asian-Americans have endured negative stereotypes since COVID-19.
38.6% of Quinnipiac students strongly agree that there is more the university can do to address the inclusivity of Asian students on campus.
84.5% of the population surveyed believes that people need to be accountable for their actions, as something that college campuses can do to ensure that Asian and Asian Americans are not targets of hate-based violence.
69% of students believe a hotline/portal should be implemented to report hate-based violence and inappropriate behavior.
57.7% of students believe there should be training for students faculty and staff addressing hate-based violence and teaching ways to stand up to it.
Our results were encouraging to see that people are willing to become a part of the solution to avoid such a significant issue. We were also able to see how people on our campus are aware that hate-based violence towards Asians has increased during the COVID19 pandemic.
Tactics:
Our group has developed a series of tactics that we feel have been integral to making our campaign as strong as possible.
One of the main tactics we used to enhance our campaign is our podcast. We brainstormed ways we could create a platform for conversations around our topic. A podcast immediately struck us as a great opportunity, especially during the pandemic, where personal contact was limited. We have had guests such as the Asian American Student Alliance president, the Student Government Association president, and our research team throughout our podcast. This has been an essential part of our campaign that has allowed us to reach many people on our campus. Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular, especially with college students. This was a great way to be true to our name, “Compassion Through Conversation,” by having real in-depth conversations about hate-based violence. The podcast empowers our audience to take action and change their behavior by spreading awareness and encouraging and facilitating a conversation. Our podcast will help make our audience aware of Asian American hate-based violence due to the coronavirus. This podcast has allowed our audience to become further educated on these topics. After becoming aware and educated about these issues, the audience can feel empowered to go out into their community and encourage more people to do the same.
Compassion Through Conversations' second focus was Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. We began identifying long term social media strategies and setting goals. We wanted to increase brand awareness, increase community engagement, educate and inform our targeted audiences, and increase traffic by hosting giveaways. As we planned our social media content, we made sure we were consistent and informative. We created infographics, graphic designs, logos, partnered with student organizations, and posted research insights as well. With our budget, we have promoted all of our social media platforms and have advertised our content. We regularly post engaging stories that lead to conversation and engagement. Social media platforms Instagram and Twitter were used to post polls, surveys, and giveaways by connecting with our target audience and building strong relationships. We encourage our followers to engage in our conversations by asking them to tag, share, and comment using our hashtag, #CompassionThroughConversation. This has increased our following and has helped our campaign grow. We use YouTube to post our podcast, which is recorded and filmed every week. We used Instagram and Twitter to post stories and advertise our episodes. Posting these podcasts on YouTube has given us the freedom to create and discuss hate-based violence against Asian-Americans due to the coronavirus.
Creating a website for Compassion Through Conversation has allowed us to have a presence online where we could target any audience and reach more consumers. Our website shows professionalism and has drawn people to our social media, and vice versa. The website we created is essential to our campaign because it is another crucial way for people to find us. There is no time window of when you get more engagement on a website. It's another way to show our campaign's perception and allows our audience to view Compassion Through Conversation as a trustworthy and established source.
Additionally, our campaign's social media presence was strong and reached our desired audiences. As we promoted and advertised each of our posts that mention our podcast, guest speakers, or research, we gained significant interactions and outreach. Each post varied in engagement, reaching more than 90% from promoted posts on Instagram. On Twitter, we were able to gain 500-600 impressions on each picture through promoted posts. Utilizing these social media platforms has allowed us to establish connections with our audience and has brought attention to our podcasts on YouTube.
Our research team provided our social media platforms information from a survey that our campaign sent out to Quinnipiac students. The conducted research allowed us to have conversations with individuals about opinions, thoughts, ideas, and experiences. This survey allowed us to explore and educate our audience about Asian-American hate-based violence and created great awareness on campus.
Strengths:
One strength of the campaign was the support we received from Quinnipiac University Community. The partnership we created with the Asian Student Alliance was very beneficial to both parties, as we shared each other's content, created a meaningful dialogue with our group and some of their leaders, and more. The Asian Student Alliance, as well as many other clubs and organizations on campus, were very complimentary of our campaign throughout the process, as they too felt we picked an issue very relevant on campus and in society overall.
The various research methods utilized throughout the campaign are another main strength, as it gave us some very intriguing insights while giving us good information to use on social media. to give us information and insight on this issue, explicitly hearing from Quinnipiac students. This research consisted of almost 150 responses to our survey, a focus group with ten Quinnipiac students, and a post-research survey as well. Collecting data was a crucial part of our campaign, and doing it through both quantitative and qualitative mediums was very beneficial for our campaign.
A third strength within our campaign is our social media presence. For this campaign, we created Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube accounts. These accounts have allowed us to reach so many people, both organically and through the aid of our budget utilized to promote posts. We have also spotlighted students all across our campus, sharing their stories and allowing their voices to be heard. This has been done through individual posts, and our weekly podcast posted to Compassion Through Conversation's YouTube channel. Utilizing social media lets us have a direct communication line with Quinnipiac students and share all aspects of our campaign by posting content and engaging with our audience.
Opportunities to Improve:
First and foremost, this semester has been drastically affected by the coronavirus pandemic. With frequent and often unexpected changes in health and safety restrictions, a collaborative environment was hard to maintain. Nevertheless, our team was resilient and hard-working and was able to work with one another virtually. The Compassion Through Conversations budget team found it challenging to work with PayPal because they had frozen our account. Due to our account being frozen, we could not spend our budget for a couple of days. Students did not want to use their money on the campaign because they did not feel they could wait until our campaign was finished to get reimbursed. Our team had to contact PayPal so they could help us fix the problem. Once PayPal fixed our account, we were able to spend and implement our budget on promotion, advertisements, and giveaways.
An additional challenge our team faced was the verification process. The verification process took a while, leaving our budget team to plan and think about where the money was going for weeks in advance. Since we had to wait for our budget to process, it gave us little to no time to implement our promotion, advertisements, and giveaways. We received our budget a week before our campaign. Our finance team quickly spent our money on what we planned on doing for half the semester. Only having a week to spend the money was stressful and challenging because we were spending large amounts of money at once. Some of our social media platform promotions weren’t going through, leading us to more challenges. Towards the middle of the week, we started using the budget for giveaways to attract more of an audience. Our campaign could improve our organization and time management by working in Excel. Excel would have been useful because we could have organized the large amounts of money we spent on our social media platforms and giveaways. Due to our campaign being virtual, we could have also improved reaching more college students. Our campaign was useful because it provided education and awareness, leading to the conversations we hope to help facilitate.
Measures of Effectiveness:
Throughout our campaign, we created and distributed surveys through Google Forms and sent them to Quinnipiac students. We informed our audience about our social media platforms and podcast. We sent out the podcast to organizations and random students. The purpose of creating a survey was to bring awareness to Asian and Asian American hate-based violence. Our goal for the survey was to get students to think about how this hate-based violence due to the coronavirus affects other individuals mentally and physically.
The survey that was sent out to Quinnipiac University students was completed by 142 respondents. We collected the data from each result and created infographics and statistics posted on our social media platforms to showcase impactful answers that would help our research. The data we collected brought awareness to our campus and informed our target audience that these problems are happening worldwide and on our campus. The responses we gained from our survey, lead us to set up a focus group involving Quinnipiac students conducting a more in-depth conversation. Lastly, with the use of Statista, we were able to draw sufficient information that helped with education, research, and resources for Compassion Through Conversation’s campaign.
We began to focus on creating a podcast that consisted of new perspectives. The podcast episodes revolved around the survey and focus group which further educated and informed our community. The podcasts are posted on the Compassion Through Conversation social media platforms. An IGTV podcast post on Instagram shows that the post reached over 68 views before the promotion was considered. The social media team checks the website and its social traffic, as this is how we gauge our impact overall. Furthermore, the hashtag “#CompassionThroughConversation” is a way to facilitate conversation. As it’s directly correlated to our campaign name. Our campaign aims for our publics to use the hashtag and expand our message on all our social media groups. Compassion Through Conversation wants our audience to engage in our topics and make a change in their communities.
Lastly, our social media team and research team indicated that our social media, podcast, and research impacted our campaign and drew larger audiences than expected. Out of all our social media platforms, Instagram was the most popular and utilized more to advertise our podcast and other social media. We got the most outreach and traction to Instagram, and it benefited our campaigns work significantly.
Opportunities to Sustain and Scale:
There are opportunities for our team to sustain and scale our campaign. Our podcast is one of these opportunities; it has been able to grow and gain more traction on campus. With anyone being able to access the podcast via Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, it can expand to other schools as well. For example, we had the idea to grow our podcast by having more guests on the podcast from other schools. We have focused on amplifying Asian student voices through our podcast, and we would love to connect with students in similar roles at other institutions.
An opportunity we have thought of moving forward is to involve the Asian and Asian American communities at other schools. This could be done by starting a chapter or helping people set up a branch at another school. The Asian Student Alliance at Quinnipiac has continued to grow and gain more support on our campus, so we feel the same could be done at other universities as well.
We have reached out to the following schools with organizations similar to Quinnipiac’s Asian Student Alliance: Yale University, Fairfield University, University of New Haven, University of Hartford, Trinity College, Boston University, Boston College, Emerson University, Tufts University, Stony Brook University and New York University. Our goal is to connect with these organizations through social media and add their voices to our project across universities. By reaching out to other universities, the campaign’s impact will reach beyond Quinnipiac’s campus.
Social media has been key to the implementation of our campaign. The sustainability of movements relies on social media immensely. Other groups looking to complete a similar campaign should be advised to invest their resources into their social media presence.
Budget:
Our budget for this campaign was $1,000 dollars to help promote Compassion Through Conversation through spreading awareness, changing attitudes, and being a catalyst for change. With our budget, we utilized it in three ways, one, by paying for advertisements for social media, specifically our Instagram, Twitter, and Youtube accounts. A second way we used our budget was through having giveaways for our followers who participated in facilitating conversations with us and those who helped to spread our message. If they did this, through our social media, they had the opportunity to be rewarded with a gift card. We also used part of our budget to create a website for Compassion Through Conversation. In total we spent the amount of $885.87 for this campaign. $212 went to social media which can be seen in the graph, $593.02 went to giveaways, and $80.85 went into website development. For our campaign, these giveaways had great success in terms of reaching a larger scale, not just within the Quinnipiac community and allowed more people to have conversations about this type of hate based violence on their own. By strategically using our budget, we have noticed change and a start in conversation about Asian American discrimination in light of COVID-19.
Appendix A: Sample Posts
This Instagram post is crucial in recognizing that Asian-Americans should not be discriminated against due to their race. COVID-19, which originated in Wuhan, China, has left Asian American's hopeless because of their heritage. Since the pandemic began in Asia, Asians felt discriminated against and judged due to their race. This post is based on a survey we have sent out to Quinnipiac University students. Our research team sent out a survey consisting of 25 questions, and we received information and feedback on how racism due to COVID-19 impacts our community. Our survey shows that 32% of Quinnipiac students don't often see racists posts or comments on social media from students. Our second graph states, 38% of students agree that Quinnipiac University needs to address inclusivity to Asian Americans on campus.
Appendix B: Additional Social Media Content
Appendix C: YouTube Content
Appendix D: Additional Research
