Best of CASE District VII Award
 

Institution: University of California, Davis

Title of entry: Representation Matters: Creating Identity Conscious Content for Social Media

About this entry: Nationally, there are demands by audiences for the acknowledgement of heritage and identity moments, such as National Coming Out Day, Lunar New Year, Black History/Futures Month and others. Traditionally, Higher Education brands have either taken the social media approach to not acknowledge any of these moments from an institutional level due to the complexity of the issues, or conversely, taken the approach to post on social media is inauthentic and often performative or tokenizing.

Representation matters, especially in higher education since the origins of higher education are rooted in whiteness. In an effort to change the way the UC Davis brand approached social media around identity and heritage moments, the team embarked on a new content strategy to collaboratively shine a spotlight on the various identities that make up our campus community. Together with our campus partners, suites of content were co-authored to raise awareness and point to resources so that our identity based communications are not performative.

By actively engaging with our campus partners and providing them the platform of the flagship university channels, we are able to elevate these communities, resources and spaces to the highest levels without tokenizing our community members. Making conscious efforts in how to best represent our various identities in a meaningful way is no easy feat — it takes a lot of relationship building over time and gaining trust.