For our case study we chose a local organization, Attention Homes, who are dedicated to helping at risk youth. Attention Homes’ website is loaded with information and different levels of investment. On their site they offer the ability to donate to the organization, sign up for newsletters, volunteer for the organization, read and explore stories about their accomplishments and youth, as well as even getting help yourself. The website seems to be targeted towards a younger audience and has a direct link to their Facebook page, which doesn’t have many followers, yet they post multiple times a day and seem to continue a strong velocity and frequency of posts. Most of the organization’s posts are attempting to bring awareness of fundraising opportunities and at risk youth, rather than posting information on the facts of homelessness.
Attention Homes had similar goals and mission to our group’s. Our goal to transform our space into an occupied space with an interactive engaged community coming together over the awareness and issue of homelessness, was similar to that of Attention Homes. The main difference in approach that we took was that Attention Homes was meant to be more about activism as it relied on strong ties and high investment out of its audience. Attention Homes used many different forms of Electracy in their sites to gain audience attention and posed many opportunities for engagement, through different hashtags, memes and videos. They were able to create a participating community and gave many opportunities to do more than just click “like” through polls and asking questions or thought provoking comments.
In my own attempt with our group’s site, I tried to resemble some of the things that I noticed from Attention Homes that were successful. When Attention Homes showed some kind of personality it definitely gained more attention then other posts. Some examples of this that I noticed were when Attention Homes left comments on their posts, some of them questions they ask their audience and others were what seemed to be their own beliefs and opinions on the subject. These posts that I wanted to resemble to successfully transform our space into an occupied space that is thought provoking and can infiltrate the audience past the screen. I tried to connect to people through different connections of personality, some of my posts I wanted to be funny, others I intended to be a little more serious and though provoking. I used examples of remix and other forms of participatory culture to try and communicate our goals and concerns of our group on homelessness.
It was definitely useful using Attention Homes as our group’s case study as it was able to reveal to us which posts were successful and which ones tended to not get as much attention from their audience. Being able to have a case study and primary source to witness definitely helped lead me to post more things of Electracy nature rather than Literacy such as articles and other scholarly papers. I did however post a few articles as I thought it would be better to be as diverse as possible and connect to all different backgrounds of people. If you offer something for everyone than there is the possibility for a great virtual community space to be generated.
Dylan Cromwell 