This fall marks the one-year anniversary of having a fully staffed Team Social here at CSU. We seem to check all of the boxes of a dynamic social and digital team fully equipped with:

• Creativity:
• Graphic design skills:
• Video production experience:
• Photography skills:
• Social wordsmithing:
• Strategic planning and implementation:
• Analytics tracking and translation:
• Keeping it real and having fun:

But, something was missing.

We couldn’t quite put our finger on it.

We work for a university and college campuses are filled with…

Students.

That’s right. The missing ingredient on our team: Students.

An authentic perspective and voice of current Colorado State University students is what we needed to achieve a couple of key things.

1. Be our eyes around campus. The student experience is much different than the professional staff experience on campus. One of the best things about our student-run Instagram account is that it gives an unadulterated glimpse of what life is like at Colorado State as a CSU student.

2. We’re always looking for fun ways to tell stories on Snapchat and Vine but often time need people to star in these videos.

Voila. The idea of the street team was born.

We would recruit a core group of students who would help us create social media content for CSU in front of AND behind the camera.

This short video sums it up (click on the image to watch).

How it works

This is not a campus job. Or an internship. Or even a club/student org. Our philosophy with managing the Street Team is to keep is super simple and casual. Each week we touch base with the team to give them a heads up about campus events/activities that are happening that they may want to cover. We encourage the students to simply tag Instagram photos with #CSUStreetTeam if they’d like us to see it. From there, we may share a Street Teamer’s image on CSU’s channels.

We’ll also reach out to the Street Team to see if anyone wants to star in short videos that we produce for social. Just like this one promoting our #PinkOut games.

 

The team has been on the job for less than a month and is already producing some amazing work.

Stay tuned for more updates about the CSU Street Team!