I have decided that my online community will be based around Sustainable Living and Fashion. This subject is highly on trend with current environmental and financial issues facing the world today. This online community will be sort after as people are educating themselves further on these topics currently and  what they can adapt in their daily lives to make relevant changes. The page will include upcycling tips for clothes, ethical recipes, interviews with businesses that support sustainable living and eco-conscious fashion designers, as well as giveaways to up engagement. The aesthetic of the page will be designed to draw a younger demographic in to suit the digital format.

For promoting the page, I'm partaking in sustainable fashion communities, to take steps in integrating further to promote my own page. I will involve my immediate touch points; friends, family and followers of my creative pages, as there are key links between my artwork and the sustainable fashion element in terms of my page. Regarding the sustainable living element of the page, I will develop new relationships with zero waste organisations and individuals to post informative content on the page and attempt cross promotional activity. I will aim to produce content the resonates with many demographics to make the page have maximum engagement potential.

I’ve managed to gain an immediate following of family and friends, I’ve focused on branching out and joining other sustainable groups to share my page and message as seen in the image below.

From last week, the most popular posts I’ve found were the ones that involved immediate shares, such as the interview with Mollie and Eli, and my up-cycling challenge video and prompts.

The least successful posts were the informative quotes and memes. I’m planning to continue with them in the meantime, and to create a meme only day to put this to the test but if low engagement persists, I will find replacement content.

Through out Easter I continued posting, trying to make the content more engaging using more aesthetic imagery and prompts for special YouTube content created, as well as the most eye-catching imagery for the interview thumbnails.

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More people were engaging with the content and I also received links of relevant content that people thought would be great for posting on the timeline.

With the audience of the page slowly growing, I was worried the page's branding seeing monotonous, and felt that the audience were engaging most with the content that had strong aesthetic to draw them in.

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With this insight, I decided to put more work into the imagery that went alongside the interviews, pulling away from the pale green branding and making them more colourful and interesting.

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Doing this enabled me to share the interviews on my art platforms which has a stronger following, and promoted the page well.

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With the final week in mind I started joining more environmental groups to promote my page whilst engaging in their communities.

My current content plan to post at ten examples per week of the content involving:
 

Entertain
-Including videos of how I personally up-cycle clothes.
-Outfit builds with sustainable fashion influencers.
 

Inform
-Interviews with sustainable living mothers, eco-friendly fashion designers and zero-waste shop owners.

Educate
-Creating illustrations with quotes and facts about our impact on the environment.
-Sharing relevant external content of sustainable topics.

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Inspire
-Photo-shoots of my up-cycled clothes, inspiring possible styling options.

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Support
-Selling the up-cycled clothes in aid of charities.

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Convince
-Giveaways of up-cycled fashion as engagement incentives.

For the content calendar, I tried to balance the posts between the 6 categories of content; inform, inspire, educate, convince, entertain, support.

I’ve created a very brief calendar, in order to add additional posts as and when times change and there is more relevant news available, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic.

For my current content plan, I’ve currently produced relevant humourous memes, a 12 week long YouTube series of the 12 Week Up-Cycle challenge, where I up-cycle secondhand clothes and sell for charity, and have weekly interview spots for people in my around and beyond that live/work sustainably.

This week has been more clear on what content formats aren't working, I've decided to not continue with the informative quote posts, and continue minimally with the memes.

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To fill the gaps I have included more articles from relevant sources, with relevant subjects (i.e. Corona) as well as more interviews, as I have branched out to sustainable fashion groups and started dialogue with designers active within those digital communities.

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As I have a list of people that would like to be interviewed, I've ranked them in terms of most interest and have decided to post in ascending order enabling longevity on interest from people who follow.

Becoming more involved with Sustainability groups, I noticed a lot of similar content circling that was popular between the groups, so I took advantage of the clear popularity of these posts and shared them to my own page (without taking credit) which had some immediate positive results with more shares and likes.

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These posts in between my self made content has definitely brought in a lighter feel to the page, and also a bit more cheerful. As the quote images and linked articles had a more negative affect, as I look back through the posts.

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​If I were to do this page all over again, I would definitely make more effort in making the content more cheerful and the branding more personable and colourful.

As this was the final week and I had stronger content, I started sharing the posts on my personal accounts, enabling friends who didn't follow in the beginning to see there's strong content enabling a lot of new followers.

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I also gained a couple from my promotion attempts on the now sustainable groups I joined last week.

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I must say I'm really proud of the content I released in the final week, I managed to create and edit two relevant YouTube videos, two interviews with strong branding with the Marine Conservation Society and a local Zero-Waste shop that is really popular with my community, as one last push to get some engagement.