PHS Harvest 2020

Challenge

At the start of the COVID-19 crisis, the Greater Philadelphia region was feeling the pressure from local shutdowns. Even before the pandemic, 1 in 5 Philadelphia residents did not have access to three meals a day, and that was expected to increase. That’s why the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (PHS) began their Harvest 2020 initiative: to mobilize thousands of people to grow, share, and donate to their neighbors. They engaged with Slice Communications to develop and execute a social media strategy that focused on engaging a newer audience and keeping Harvest 2020 top-of-mind.

Insight

For any communications campaign, a strategic roadmap is key. We worked quickly with PHS to start developing their Harvest-focused social media strategy. To start, we hosted our First Cut Session, where we delved deeper into their target audiences, competition, and the overall goals of Harvest. This campaign was unique in that while PHS has a substantial following, this campaign’s targets veered off from their standard demographic since it was focused more on hands-on gardening.

For Harvest, a key goal was to do more than just post resources. Their current following was very invested in their other campaigns, but to bring them into Harvest, we focused on developing social content that would drive deeper engagements, like conversations, event registrations, and content sharing. To encourage these conversations, we created posts that not only encouraged followers to read articles and resources, but also to respond and share their insights. Additionally, we also focused heavily on amplifying user-generated content. This content, while not as refined or as “picture-perfect” as branded photography, is more relatable and encourages followers to share their own images and experiences.

Success

By the end of the campaign, there were over 10,000 people who participated in Harvest, and over 26,000 pounds of food that was donated to the community. Even competing with two other long-standing campaigns, Google Analytics reported that 34.5% of traffic driven to the Harvest homepage was from social media. On social, Harvest-focused content had over 490,000 social media impressions and over 13,700 engagements.