"I'm A Professional Too" Campaign
Designing a social media campaign to discuss systemic issues of safety, accountability, and ethics in the Indian Arts space
Background
CAREspaces and SNS Arts Consultancy are two organizations with a mission to assist the Indian Arts community to identify actionable, realistic, and socially/culturally conscious professional practices. In the Indian Arts space, there is a notion that formalizing workspaces through contracts and boundary setting can hinder free-flowing creativity and can sever relationships. “I’m a professional too” (IAPT), is a five-part series of events hosted by the organizations to address how stakeholders can practically formalize their workspaces without compromising on their practice and relationships
It was important that this series was done in collaboration with the community rather than as a lecture series. To create space for that interaction and dialogue, we decided to use social media to hear from and highlight the voices and perspectives of stakeholders in the space. In this team effort, I was responsible for designing the posters and social media posts, editing the films, designing presentations, and writing some of the post-event summaries
Illustrations
Each workshop emphasized the importance of formalizing workplaces in Indian Arts to make the profession accessible to everybody. To illustrate this idea, I combined symbols of accountability with symbols of the art practice showing how the two elements belong in tandem. I used positive and negative spaces to illuminate the main objective of the sessions, paring details on the essential elements. Each of these vectors was used as an icon for the five sessions.
#imaprofessionaltoo in Social media
Before each live event, we used our Instagram feed to share stories of how stakeholders of this space practiced professionalism. Dancers and musicians discussed challenges in obtaining pay, makeup artists talked about how they dealt with uncertainty, and teachers discussed setting boundaries with students and parents...
We heard how all these artists worked intentionally to change negative cultural behaviors compassionately. We used Instagram stories to understand our audience’s comprehension of the issues we planned to tackle in the sessions. This information was used to finalize the talking points of the event. The events were relayed on Youtube, and we opened up live chat to engage with the audience and take questions and address comments live. The main lessons from the sessions were summarized and published in Medium.
Learning and Reflection
Considering the fact that we are a very new organization, it was heartening to see so much interest and engagement from the community. We had key learning moments in this campaign: videos and posts that featured practicing artists in the space were viewed more than text posts or videos featuring subject-matter-experts. Topics that were less technical and were based on anecdotes had a higher retention rate (ex: Know your rights have much less viewership than Value Your Work) but had more live audience participation and questions during these technical workshops. There was a dip in viewership and participation after session three because of a hiatus in the series after several members were ill from COVID - we had lost the momentum we built in the first three sessions.