In the course of seven weeks, I pitched my passion project, conducted more than 100 hours in research, read dozens of articles, blogs and journals, watched YouTube videos, discovered new books, created content and wrote about my findings at the end of each week.
I planned and executed my bike safety campaign, where I had the opportunity to plan and execute a podcast, video series and social media campaign through to the end. I challenged myself by learning a brand new editing software, planned out content weeks in advance and learned so much more than I anticipated about how countries throughout the world are implementing safe bike infrastructure.
The following is a summary of my findings and process throughout this two month journey.
The Proposal
Corresponding blog: Pitching a passion project
It’s easy to jump into a project you’re excited for unprepared. You have dozens of ideas swirling around in your head and you feel like you have the energy to tackle everything all at once. But the best way to start a project— big or small— is with a plan. Detailed plans are vital to projects because they not only help with thorough organization, but if done properly, you’re able to create a final product that looks extremely close to what you were picturing in your head.
Because this is a content-heavy project, it isn’t as simple as “record video then post said video.” The first step involves fleshing out all of my ideas and mapping out what is actually possible to create within that timeline. I did this by creating a project proposal for my bike safety campaign that included a backstory and a list of deliverable artifacts to ensure I remained on course.
Even with meticulous planning, things rarely go 100 percent according to plan, as I learned throughout the last few weeks. Roadblocks crept up and I dealt with them as they came, which means my initial program looks a tad different from my final project. View the full proposal here:
Project Management
Corresponding blog: Finding Success Through Project Management
Because this project required extensive research, the pre-production, production, and post-production process, finding interviewees, going on location to record footage and publishing on several different mediums and social media platforms, a project management tool like Trello was crucial for helping me stay on top of my objectives and due dates.
Organizing my tasks on a week-by-week basis not only helped me visualize this long-term project through achievable checklists and action items, but also made the seven weeks less overwhelming. I also wanted to be realistic with my planning, which is why I created a board in a way that allowed the lists to be flexible and easy to adjust or altar as the weeks progress.
View the full plan here:
Pre-Production
Corresponding blog: Diving Into Pre-Production
The pre-production process is crucial to the success of a project because it helps the production and post-production processes run smoother. So, before diving into the video and podcast elements of the project, I wanted a way to visually see the overall issue I was trying to cover. I found that the best way to do that was through an infographic. I began researching and read about a dozen articles so I could confirm the information I wanted to convey was accurate, then work on consolidating it. It was on this step that I discovered how truly concerning this issue was.
Because I understood the video element would be the most time consuming part of this project, I knew I had to dedicate a lot of my time during pre-production to prepare for the following weeks. I took a few hours at this time to hand-draw a storyboard to help me visualize what I wanted to get across to the audience.
Production Week One: Creating Social Media Content
Corresponding blog: Establishing tactics for a successful social media campaign
This marked the start of my production process, which meant starting the process of creating content. I understood that the social media campaign would be the simplest part of this project, but also extremely time consuming, which is why I reserved an entire week solely to create the content for my social media campaign.
After establishing my strategy, I spent about 10 hours creating more than 15 graphics that offered several opportunities for engagement from my target audience. My goal with each graphic was to create an educational post that would either terrify users or inform them of something that could help them or someone they know.
The following are a few of the graphics I designed during this week.
Production Week Two: Podcast Episode One
Corresponding blog: Every number tells a story
I went into week five of my bike safety campaign wanting to focus on audio. Because this is the introduction to my entire bike safety project, I knew there was a lot I needed to talk through to lay out the groundwork and offer a baseline of facts, statistics and background information. The key, however, was being able to do so without overwhelming the listener with too many numbers.
Throughout the course of the week, I used articles, podcasts and videos from my bibliography to research everything I could about practices and laws currently in place, statistics from different states and cities across the country and looked to Europe as an example of where the United States should strive to get to one day.
The final version of my script ended up at about 1,300 words and about 30 minutes of raw audio. After scrubbing through it to get the best takes, I was able to edit it down to just over seven minutes.
Check out the first episode below.
What is Safe Bike Infrastructure?
Post-Production Week One: Scheduling Social Media Content
Corresponding blog: Timing is everything
Throughout the course of this post-production week, I wrote a total of 20 social media posts. The posts consisted of 15 different graphics I created during week four, in addition to three posts that linked to my two podcast episodes and my video. I found that it made it a lot easier to write the post descriptions this week because the content had already been created.
After writing the posts, I scheduled the graphics throughout the month of July on the social media management platform Hootsuite. I read dozens of articles about how each social media platform has its own benefits depending on content type and audience, KPIs and goals.
Another thing to keep in mind was the length of each post. Because Twitter has a character limit, there were several times I had to remove entire sentences or edit down posts to the word to ensure I was able to keep the overall theme of the post.
Check out all my social media posts here:
The Final Stretch
Corresponding blog: Wrapping up a passion project
It was a very busy, very stressful two months, but I am beyond proud of what I accomplished.
My final project turned out to be a video sandwiched between two podcast episodes with a month-long social media campaign sprinkled in between. After uploading my video to YouTube, I created a playlist titled Chain Reaction where described the purpose of this project.
You can watch my final video here:
My podcast playlist on Soundcloud consists of three tracks; the introduction to this project, the interview and the wrap up. I organized it this way so that listeners could listen to it all the way through and get a beginning, middle and end.
The following is my final Podcast playlist on Soundcloud:
After a very stressful seven weeks and terrifying thoughts of “Will I actually be able to finish a podcast, video and social media campaign?” I feel pleased with the way everything turned out and am excited for my bike safety campaign to be released to the public.
Thank you for following along, I hope you were able to learn more about bike safety practices along the way!