Last semester, we gave you a look behind Unsung Heroes, learning from Febin Bellamy what inspired him to create the organization and the mission behind it. In the second part of our interview, we dig a little deeper into how Unsung Heroes works, and the planning process that goes behind the viral posts.
What is the relationship between Unsung Hoyas and Unsung Heroes?
Unsung Heroes is the umbrella organization. We plan on expanding to other campuses within the next few months and each school will have its own unique page which will highlight the workers of their specific school. For example, University of Pennsylvania’s chapter will be Unsung Quakers, Harvard University’s chapter will be Unsung Crimsons, etc. Unsung Hoyas is Georgetown’s specific chapter of Unsung Heroes.
What is your approach to marketing Unsung Heroes?
Throughout last semester, we typically posted every two or three days so that people can really soak in each unique story. We believe that each story has a lot of significance and we want to give people time to read the story and appreciate each one individually. Our strategy for Facebook is to typically boost the post after a day or two so that the story remains on people’s timelines a little longer incase they missed it the first day. A lot of times, students won’t see the post until the second or the third day. If we share multiple stories a day, it almost takes away some of the impact of each story. Also, through trial and error, we have learned when to post, when not to post, how long each story should be, what kind of photo works best with the theme of the story, etc. We mainly rely on social media and local press to share the stories and get the word out. Although we aren’t currently doing any physical marketing, we are definitely interested in highlight these workers and sharing their stories by creating posters, fliers, stickers, and posting them around the campus.
How are you leveraging the different social platforms?
We use Facebook and Instagram as our main avenues for disseminating the stories of the workers to undergrads. We found that undergrad students are not as active on Twitter as they are on the other social media platforms. Rather, MBA students, alums, professors, and administrators tend to use Twitter and LinkedIn. We like to keep the quotes from the interviews short & concise when sharing to this market.
Tell me more about the process of getting interviews.
Throughout last year we did a lot of trial and error to figure out the best way to learn how to conduct interviews with the workers. When we first started interviewing, we would approach workers who didn’t know us at all, and we would ask them if we could interview them. You can imagine some of their responses! Many of the workers were afraid that sharing certain things would get them into trouble. Due to the intimacy of the questions we would ask, many workers were hesitatant to open to us at first – which is completely understandable. We had to show a direct benefit that bridged the gap between workers telling their stories and the purpose of revealing these events. Once they saw the stories of some of their co-workers and all the love and appreciation that they were getting from the students, many of them became much more receptive to the interviews.
We also try to take our time when interviewing the workers. If one of our team members or the worker is in a hurry, we often just reschedule. The last thing we want to do is rush or interrupt a worker who is sharing something personal about themselves and genuinely want to have a conversation with us. We aren’t just there to get a quote and leave. Many of the members of our team have become very close with the workers. Even well after the interview has been conducted, we keep in touch with them.
And we do our best to help them and share their voices to the rest of the GU community.
Are you going to publish the full transcripts of interviews?
As of now we are keeping it short when we post Facebook and Instagram. This is because most people tend to skim through the different posts on their timeline. In order to engage people, we tend to keep the stories brief and to the point – and tie it in with a good visual. However, we are definitely thinking about posting the longer stories. Once our website launches, we may post the longer story there, and share the link to the full story at the bottom of each story that we share on social media.
Has Georgetown featured Unsung Heroes yet?
Georgetown has been extremely supportive of Unsung Heroes! We’ve gotten a few shares on Facebook from the Georgetown Alumni page, and through the publicity that we got via Clinton Global Initiative University, we were mentioned in a few articles including one that made it on to the homepage. We’ve also been mentioned on the McDonough School of Business website. The communications departments at GU has been very helpful in getting the word out to alumni, prospective students, and the greater GU community.
What are some of the future plans for the organization?
In the spring, we focused heavily on sharing the stories of the Facilities Management workers and Food & Service Workers at Leo’s. Although we will continue to highlight workers in these departments, moving forward we will put an emphasis on featuring different departments within Georgetown that we haven’t previously highlighted.
We plan on establishing other chapters at different universities around the country, starting with schools in DC such as American University, and GW. Students within these universities have already expressed interest in establishing their own chapters.
As mentioned in the first part of the interview, Unsung Heroes seeks to promote awareness and appreciation for workers who do so much for our campus behind-the-scenes, but often go unrecognized and unappreciated. Each of these individuals’ backgrounds are as unique as their fingerprints. After sharing their stories, we began to foster awareness by letting students see their humanity. Many of the students who followed our social media pages actually went out of their way to email/text/meet us to learn more about Unsung Heroes and how they can get involved. Many of them mentioned that they tend to look at workers a bit differently now, instead of walking past an unsung hero in the hallway to class, they actually smile or say hello and thank them for their hard work. By sharing the stories, we have started to raise awareness to the issue.
Moving forward, we really want to focus on promoting appreciation for the workers. For example, once a student learns more about the story of an unsung hero, how do they give back to them? How can we show our appreciation, other than just sharing the story on social media? We will be collaborating with multiples entities within the Georgetown community, like GIVES and the Corp, to help spread the message of Unsung Heroes to the broader community, and actually engage the students to give back to the workers for all of their dedication and service to us. Below is an example of what’s to come.