The Campus as a Living Laboratory (Living Lab) program is an FSU Sustainable Campus initiative that pairs courses with community partners to give students practical and hands-on experience through multidisciplinary learning and applied research projects. Having a community partner to conduct research for and present final products to is beneficial on both ends, as evident through the Social Media Campaigns course this past fall. 

The Social Media Campaigns course (COM 5565) offers students a hands-on approach to learning the ever-changing medium that is online social media platforms. Throughout the semester, students craft a social media campaign across multiple platforms for a community partner, including creating template social media posts, captions, timelines, and more. The students gain practical experience while the client gains better insights into how to improve their social media, as well as receive content that can be posted online. 

In Fall 2023, the Social Media Campaigns course was paired with the Coastal Plains Institute (CPI), a local nonprofit whose mission is to preserve the biotic diversity of the Coastal Plain of the southeastern United States. To build campaigns, students were split into groups of 4 to 5, and assigned a topic selected by CPI. This included promoting the CPI internship program, the CPI membership program,

professional networking events, the Adopt-A-Pond program, eco-tour promotion, and ephemeral wetlands.  Each group created 30 pieces of content for CPI, in addition to general proposals on how CPI could improve their online communication based on background research about the client’s social media presence that the students had conducted. 

“When I was in the social media campaigns class, we worked with CPI where I was assigned to the Ecotour group. Our group worked on promoting and increasing the number of participants on the tours CPI offers. I learned so much working with an outside client, like completing a social media audit, or how to tailor social media to the overall message and brand of a company” said Sarah Purcell, a master's student in the School of Communication. 

Students met with CPI representatives once a month throughout the semester, providing time to receive feedback on their ideas and ask questions. Having the regular meetings allowed for students to develop their professional communication skills in turn, learning how to understand what a community partner wants and turn that into a successful final product. 

“Working with a real-world client was extremely beneficial for me, and I think also for the team I was a part of in the class, because often when we take classes we get so caught up in the theory of things. We rarely get the opportunity to apply that theory in a real-world setting which ultimately ends up making a difference in how you end up approaching your career after you leave university. So any class that incorporates a real-life client is helpful for students because it teaches you how things work out in the world and teaches you to grab that knowledge from the classroom and actually apply it” said Alessandra Noli, a current doctoral student in the School of Communication who was a part of the internship campaign in the fall.  

As online communication platforms continue to evolve, and more people turn to using them every year to gain information, students in this industry must learn how to communicate effectively to reach a target audience online. The same is true for sustainable and environmental communication, as to be effective in communicating messages to reach a wider audience, one must know how to differ their communicative approach across platforms. While the students did gain a deeper knowledge of the environmental topics that they were creating campaigns for, all learned an essential lesson in communicating environmental information in a manner that is easy to understand and connects with their target audience.