Apr 02

WIR’ED Businesses, Students Refine Work

Students continue to develop business marketing plans

CLEVELAND – Students, shopkeepers, and marketing professionals gathered online to continue their work on the WIR’ED initiative, a program pairing students and marketing professionals with business owners to improve the businesses’ online presence during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Kayla Brown, a senior at Facing History New Tech High School who is paired with Ashley Cramer a freshman at the Rhodes School of Environmental Studies, and Navaeh Hagens, a sophomore at Shaw High School, discussed her team’s work on behalf of the Northeast Ohio Alliance for Hope (NOAH).

“Now we have a really strong sense of what NOAH is and what we need to get out there onto social media,” Brown said. “We’re going to incorporate that in this week’s work and try to build ways to produce templates so that the business can use those templates to make the posts it needs, and can continue to post even after we finish helping.”

Todd Franko, director of local sustainability and development for Report for America and the NOAH team’s volunteer marketing professional, emphasized the students’ roles company representatives.

“If you’re he media gatherer for your organization, it is a license to be in the front row, to almost be on stage,” Franko said. “So when you’re at your meetings, don’t hesitate, if you’re the media gatherer, get your iPhone, get your camera right up in there.”

Shiane Clark, a freshman at James Ford Rhodes High School who is teamed with JDL Treat and Flower Shoppe, revisited the previous meeting’s instruction on hashtag use and ritetag.com.

“I searched the hashtag ‘flower,’ and then you see how many people tweet [with that hashtag] per hour, how many unique tweets there are per hour, how many people read tweets per hour, and how many people see it,” Clark said. “You want one with a lot of viewers, but not too many because then it looks generic.”

WIR’ED teams will continue to meet weekly through March, with the next meeting scheduled for March 15.

For more information, contact Alyssa Lenhoff-Briggs at alyssabriggs@tiesteach.org.

Meeting date: March 8, 2021