The topic I choose to tell a story about was St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. As an avid supporter of St. Jude, upon issuance of this project this non-profit immediately came to mind. The goal of this story, or the action I wish to incite, is to donate to St. Jude and at the very least be aware of the good they do. The target audience is broad, but it aimed at anyone with some disposable income to donate, anyone who is or knows anyone affected by cancer, and parents or grandparents who may have young children or grandchildren. I choose to use Instagram because I believed the best way to tell this story was through photography. I believe the photos used, especially of the patients can draw an image to mind. When you can see the actual child or family that is impacted by the St. Jude does, it becomes so much more real.

 

I thought Instagram was the best way to showcase these stories. On Instagram, you can click into a link from photos and be directed to a larger page with more information. This allows me to theoretically link to donation pages or patient stories. The language I choose to use was as casual as possible. I tried to appeal to the common Instagram user, and nothing is overly pushy in my posts. I tried to keep the tone as positive as possible, as St. Jude tends to focus on saving lives rather than the children they cannot save. I occasionally used a hashtag, but in general my audience has disposable income so they are most likely older. Hashtags tend to appeal to a younger audience, and a more tech savvy individual. I wanted my stories to be as accessible and easy to understand as possible, so I did not focus it around a hashtag campaign. Instead, I decided to intersperse the idea of donation every so often by appealing to people’s pathos.  

 

I mostly concentrated on emotions and a call to action to make this story affective. I wanted the posts to stand alone, but follow the idea together. While the posts don’t directly tell a story broken up into each post, each post gives a snippet into St. Jude’s history or a patients story. When a post does not do this, it focuses on the aspect of donation, which is the goal of the story. These posts could be used in a campaign to increase donations and awareness, yet act alone as stand-alone ideas. I didn’t want my posts to be dependent on each other, because realistically social media users do not see every post from an organization. Therefore, I wanted my posts to give a broad idea of what St. Jude does and for each to contain a compelling piece of information to cause a user to either donate or want to find out more. It was important to me that these posts were able to be functionally used independently of each other, yet still incite an emotional response in the reader.