Audience

Our project “Welcome to the digital garden” wishes to explore and engage an audience in community gardens by digital means. By mapping different data we are creating first hand visuals for the user who wishes to explore what a community garden is in New York City by bringing in different perspectives. Furthermore we are opening up the possibility to explore and interact by asking questions and crossing different datasets. We wish to aim the project towards the people who are engaged in community gardens and want to learn more about them on a broader scale through a digital humanities perspective, both to highlight strength and weakness in the work being done across New York City. When considering our intended audience we found it important to analyze who could potentially benefit and be interested in our project. There could be many different actors in the field of community gardens since we are exploring different aspects of them. It could be on a political, educational and academic level. However, to narrow down the scope of who we wish to target specifically we believe we would be most helpful and relevant to those already engaged in community garden work. This accounts for organizations and academics as well. In other words we are targeting volunteers, coordinators and scholars who wish to strengthen the effort done around community garden work.

Communication channels and tone

Through the project we will get a better understanding of the intended audience and their needs and resources, but our main communication will be online through our website and outreach channels. We are additionally gonna present our project to the gardens who we are in contact with through our small ethnographic research. To understand our audience’s use of SoMe we mapped out what platforms the “official” gardens use (not volunteers). Few of them have a website and twitter but most have a facebook and/or an instagram, albeit with little activity

With our project we wish to create a website that is informative whilst showing different important perspectives. The tone for communicating will be educational, inspiring and enlightening. We hope to create a trust in our work that is legit and worth considering and exploring further. Therefore our main choice of social media is twitter. This for two main reasons. Firstly twitter corresponds with our wish for communication between different individuals and communities. The comment section on Twitter encourages discourse within those who find the tweet engrossing. We hope through this outlet those who are interested in community gardening will find a way to link and connect with those already involved or are looking to be involved. Furthermore, the weblink tweeted on our profile should ideally lead to more traffic on our website through likes and shares. In addition we are also considering starting a Facebook page. In many cases it works well for communities of shared interest in groups, which could become relevant for us to share our work. However this will only happen if our research shows us that our audience uses the platform actively.

Social media strategy

One of our goals with this project is to create awareness about community gardens and therefore we will be working on social media alongside our project. The main purpose of our twitter will be to get people to visit our website and engage with the content. We will share the responsibility of posting and engaging with our twitter accounts, so one person is in charge each week. Firstly we will follow relevant people and organizations in the field of community gardens, secondly we will develop content that will revolve around topics directly related to our project. Our content will be news and research shared from others, our own findings and perspectives and lastly a more personal approach with updates on our progress concerning the website. Each post will include a link to our website and we will use different relevant hashtags together with tagging different organizations. Since our audience is a specific group of interested people we don’t aim for a lot of followers or a lot of engagement in our posts but we are hoping to reach at least some people working with community gardens to visit our social media accounts and site.

Website and outreach

Our final product is a website so we will not be working on an additional one as a promotion site. Instead our twitter account will serve as our means of communicating the progress of our website. We will test it before launching and get a review from outside individuals before making final adjustments. After the website is done we will share it and publish in relevant networks to spread the word.