The First Social Media Marketing Agency Run By Highschool Students

For the past 6 months, NFBD’s staff has been creating a curriculum, recruiting students, and working with partner organizations to ensure that the first full summer program of Vlog University would be a huge success. For the past 4 weeks the VlogU students have been focused on working with clients and preparing marketing materials to showcase what they can offer as well as how they can improve the social media presence of businesses and organizations.

As with any first day of school or a job, the students were nervous and shy. However, When i told them “their job would consist of being on social media all day” their heads lifted up and they instantly wanted to learn more. Even though this involves something that they like doing, this program isn’t easy. The students are challenged everyday and the goal of VLogU has and will always be to accelerate the students mindsets and skill sets to become independent thinkers and advanced communicators. They would also have the skills to go out and obtain a career in digital marketing right away.

I’ve always had big ambitions with this program to be a win for everyone involved. By partnering with One Northside, we are able to accomplish just that. Nonprofits are now more than ever seeing the need to digitize their impact and amplify their messaging through social media. However, their social media pages are managed by program managers and case managers who still are able to do a great job while at the same time focusing on all of their other tasks at hand. A consistent marketing presence is important, though. That’s why those who constantly have a phone in their hand scrolling the newsfeeds are the perfect addition to ramp up marketing efforts.

VlogU is partnering with One Northside to provide social media content for websites and social media pages. We are also providing content for Learn & Earn. This means 6 groups of students have created their own agencies. They have names, mission statements and logos. They created pitch decks and held brand discovery meetings for their clients. Now the next few weeks will be spent creating the content and then one final presentation to showcase all of their work. Nonprofits receive marketing + Students are provided with real world career experience = Everybody wins.

The students were also gifted their cameras to start building their own social media pages. VLogU places a large focus on digitizing youth voice by teaching the students to build their own online movements and have solution based conversations online.

Thank you to the Buhl Foundation, Hillman Foundation, and Grable foundations for making all of this possible. I will be sending out an invite this week for our presentation day on August 1st 12 PM at Colab18.