True Bruin Welcome
@ucla Instagram Story Takeovers
The Brief
Share the UCLA welcome week experience with the world through a series of well-produced Instagram Stories.
The Outcome
Record-breaking viewership on Instagram, a new creative outlet for the graphic design community, and stronger cross-campus partnerships.
The Team
Paul Mendoza, Director & Producer
Jessica Borchardt & Stacy Aneke, Hosts
Double Major, Designers
Jesse Herring, Candice Lawson, Matthew Geddert, Danny Slatkin, and Lori Vogelgesang, Program Advisors
La’Tonya Rease Miles, Carmen Garcia-Shushtari, Josh O’Connor, Event Producers
My Roles
Creative Direction, Community Management, Video Production.
Research & Strategy
The UCLA community needs an onboarding experience driven by affirmation and purpose.
I was the first in-house graphic designer and copywriter ever hired by UCLA Residential Life, and my first charge right out of the gate was to deliver an ambitious rebrand of True Bruin Welcome, the signature “welcome week” of programming on campus.
My work was largely informed by a series of facilitated design thinking workshops with all student-facing programmers in attendance. The prompt was to identify moments in the first-year onboarding process where students felt the most included, welcomed, and moved, and we landed on three modes: finding a shared purpose; guided community onboarding, and giving and receiving affirmation.
While our revamped look and feel for print, digital, and outdoor applications proved critical to supporting these three modes, we knew we had to take our brand strategy further in the social media spaces our students felt most at home. Our play was to invest in Instagram Stories as a multi-year play for evergreen content, guiding audiences through multiple facets of True Bruin Welcome 15 seconds at a time that would eventually generate a robust video library of well-vetted and authentically voiced orientation materials.
Prototypes & Outputs
Planning for the unplanned with pre-taped segments and graphics.
I’ve lived a lot of creative lives in LA. My UCLA team knows me primarily as a designer, but my secret advantage here is that I also worked in TV for many years, so I’m well versed in the complexities of scripts, shoots, and production. These lessons served me well as a producer for True Bruin Welcome’s Instagram Stories, as I was able to adapt a lot of TV’s best practices to build our Instagram Stories.
Good documentation was the foundation for everything: storyboards, callsheets, shooting schedules, production reports, you name it. I approached IG with the seriousness of a live single-camera shoot, which made our teams more responsive to programming changes and emerging opportunities, the best of what we’ve come to expect from Instagram.
We also played with time a lot for these videos. We’d shoot live on Day 1, then post it at the exact same time on Day 2 of the same event, to simulate a sense of live happening even though the content was pre-taped and heavily edited. And thanks to my design team, Double Major, we had a lot of animated GIF content and pre-taped segments ready to go when we needed a break to post a chunk of stories all in one go.
Insights & Futures
Record-high viewership with a surprising influx of alumni nostalgia.
The main thing I learned for myself was how much I enjoyed the scrappy small-team nature of the field production work. It was a genuine thrill to work with my two incredible hosts, Jess and Stacy, who had brilliant on-screen chemistry and brought a lot of great ideas to each shoot. Knowing that our work was surpassing viewership benchmarks for the official @ucla accounts was highly rewarding, and it gave us the purpose and affirmation we needed to then pass on to our audiences.
The feedback loops we experienced met and exceeded our expectations, as students and stakeholders were excited about the stories in a way that wasn’t typical on Instagram period, let alone for UCLA. The one set of responses that we didn’t plan for was the love we received from alumni on the main @ucla account. We received so many comments from followers who shared their own memories of moving in and starting their UCLA journey, which points to an untapped alumni perspective that would definitely be worth featuring in future True Bruin Welcomes.
Established campus departments, Strategic Communications especially, weren’t always sure how to work with us, as we took more risks with our messaging and would always choose student-voiced authenticity over the safety of the “blue and gold” brand. The future work here is to shift the culture internally to embrace more playful student perspectives in all marketing and communications work, not just social media.
