SERVE Volleyball Club
Brief
Leveraging branding and digital media to facilitate the growth of SERVE and foster connections within the University of Waterloo’s volleyball community.
Project Details
Role: Promo Team Lead (September 2022 - Present)
Toolkit: Brand Strategy, Graphic Design, Campaign Creation, Video Editing, Social Media
Social Media Team: Olivia Zhang, Saera Chung
About
The Waterloo Warriors SERVE Volleyball Club is a student-run community of volleyball enthusiasts who run drop-in sessions, tournaments, socials and clinics throughout the school terms year-round.
The club is officially affiliated with the University of Waterloo’s Athletics and Recreation department. As an executive, I led all external-facing initiatives to support the goal of growing the club’s presence on campus to spread the joys of volleyball to the student community at the University of Waterloo.
Approach
A three-step user-centric approach was employed to ensure effectiveness in SERVE’s campaigns and external facing communications.
The approach was naturally split into (1) research, (2) design, and (3) outreach, where the research conducted informed the design and outreach choices that were made for the campaigns. The approach became an iterative cycle where feedback would be collected on the existing designs as time went on to further inform the next cycle of promotions and campaigns.
Research
The research was segmented into (1) motive and (2) reach components to get a holistic understanding of SERVE’s target audience.
This framework would enable SERVE to gain an understanding of the University of Waterloo (UW) student community on their intrinsic motivations regarding participation in student clubs to how to best reach them with club initiatives.
Methodology: Informal user interviews were conducted with members of the UW community. All 6 faculties at UW and both undergraduate & masters students were represented in these informal interviews.
The key findings are summarized in the table below:
Motive
People join clubs to meet new people & make friends
People are initially hesitant to join a club where they do not know anyone
The most people get involved with club through friends
Reach
People do not use Facebook anymore to stay up to date with university events
Instagram and Discord are much more popular
People spend a significant amount of time observing short-form video content
Design
The one guiding principle for all design work was to showcase the club as an approachable, warm, and friendly community!
The guiding principle was determined from the research conducted on the student body. This resulted in core changes to SERVE’s graphic design and content direction.
Graphic Design
The goal was for every individual graphic to be viewed as a personalized invitation to partake in SERVE programming and activities.
With the guiding principle in mind, the design of SERVE’s graphics shifted towards showcasing the faces within SERVE’s student community.
The main element accompanying each graphic created from Jan. 2023 to Aug. 2023 was a cutout of the members within SERVE’s community from photos taken during the semester. A few other design choices were made, which are further elaborated upon below.
Colour: As SERVE is a club under the University of Waterloo - Athletics & Recreation, a black and gold colour scheme was chosen to be consistent with the parent university. While SERVE was under no obligation to stick with the black and gold colour scheme, the colours allowed for viewers to quickly and easily recognize this was for University of Waterloo students.
Font & Elements: Similarly to the rationale behind how the colour scheme chosen, the font and elements were chosen to be consistent with the University of Waterloo’s recreation Instagram page (@wloorec).
Layout: The design focus for the graphics in terms of layout was brevity. As it was learned through the research conducted that there was a shift to short-form video (due to shrinking attention spans), the layout of SERVE’s graphics crafted in a manner that enabled pithy communication through the title and at max, two lines of sub-text to communicate key information.
Content Direction
A push towards short-form video content and Instagram stories were made to optimize reach to SERVE’s target audience.
As SERVE has previously only put out posters to communicate with their student community, there was great potential for SERVE to tap into different mediums of content to work towards the goal of the guiding principle. This included short-form video content and Instagram stories in addition to the existing graphics.
Highlights (& funny moments)
Session Recaps
With highlights (& funny moments) and session recaps, SERVE is able to showcase the people that make up the SERVE community! This gives the viewer the opportunity to feel included within the community as they are able to celebrate a point or laugh with their fellow members!
Note that a majority of highlights were submitted by members!
Outreach
The channels utilized to communicate to SERVE members were modified to adapt to new communication trends within the university community.
SERVE has switched over to Discord from Facebook and maintained Instagram as the new generation of university students have adopted Discord for university life while gravitating away from using Facebook as a platform.
SERVE has also created a new TikTok account for short-form video content.
Outcomes
SERVE has grown to become the largest club under UW Athletics with record high levels of engagement within the club!
SERVE has grown their following nearly 115% (from 700 to 1500 over 7 months!). SERVE also reached a record-high in memberships with 350+ members in the Winter 2023 term and averaged 24,596 engagements on Instagram and Discord posts each month since January 2023.
This resulted in the University of Waterloo giving the club 8 additional hours of gym time to satiate demand as sessions were filling up within seconds of them being released.
Below is a testimonial from a member on the SERVE’s Discord server:
It is easier to get Taylor Swift concert tickets than sign up for a SERVE session
Closing Thoughts
Being involved with SERVE is one of the best things I have ever done!
Being a part of the SERVE Volleyball Club during my time at the University of Waterloo is one of my most cherished experiences as it has fundamentally shaped my undergraduate experience. When I look back on my volleyball journey—in particular, how I got started in the sport halfway through my junior year (3rd year)—I thank SERVE for creating the most incredible opportunities to make friends and spread the joys of volleyball!
