In September 2019, I was hired into the Marketing & Events Team at Michigan Medicine's Adolescent Health Initiative (AHI) as their Marketing & Communications Assistant. AHI is a nonprofit extension of Community Health Services that works towards transforming the health care landscape for adolescent patients by providing practice changes to health clinics and health care professionals. 

Through this position, I maintain their 4 social media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram) by curating and creating content. 

While AHI has an established follower base, I have strived towards building their brand pillars and creating more dynamic, sharable content. 

Building an authentic brand

The key to curating content that resonates with your audience is to understand and maintain your brand's tone so you can deliver consistent, *** content.

​​AHI's tone is evidence-based, inclusive, youth-centered, and politically neutral. As an organization, they use jargon-free language with call-to-actions, informal, while speaking from a human perspective. They address topics that can be controversial, and strive to communicate complicated ideas with respect to all parties involved, while above all, encourage the agency of adolescents.

AHI's Core Values: 

The content I develop for AHI centers around the organization's core values, as listed below: 
  • Collaboration
  • Diversity and Inclusion
  • Expertise
  • Innovation
  • Responsiveness
  • Quality
Below is a video I created with Adobe Spark to wrap up the year for our Teen Advisory Council (TAC TAC), who informs all of the programs at AHI as well as helps co-plan the Annual Conference on Adolescent Health. I collaborated with TAC TAC's facilitators and the Marketing & Events Team for feedback and to shape the video.
Copy: Yesterday was TAC TAC's last meeting of the year! Thank you to our Teen Advisory Council for all of their hardwork. Learn more about TAC TAC here: bit.ly/AHITACTAC. #AmplifyYouthVoice

Content curation

Social media, if utilized correctly, should tell your brand's story in a visual way that encourages action among your target audience. Below is some of the content I developed to build AHI's brand.
Copy: One way to be inclusive of adolescents of all genders is to respect and use the pronouns that they use for themselves. During #LGBTHAW20, check out our Spark training, Inclusive Language: Patient-Centered Care for LGBTQ+ Youth: http://bit.ly/AHI_Spark.

Positioning Expertise

For promotion of AHI's 2020 Annual Conference on Adolescent Health, we held a Twitter Chat on Supporting Adolescent Health in Rural Communities. Twitter Chats are an excellent way for communities to share resources, research, knowledge, and, more generally speaking, build stronger relationships

AHI co-hosted the event with Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Northwest and Great Hawaiian Islands and Teen Health Mississippi, both of which were scheduled to present at the Annual Conference.

If you haven’t participated in one before, a Twitter Chat is a live event on Twitter where an organization poses questions to the Twitter community, and other organizations and individuals answer the questions. Essentially, it is a public conversation centered on a unique hashtag.

Below is the Twitter Chat guide I curated and sent to our outreach list, which contains the questions as well as some additional information about the event.

Testimonials

"Rachel was my digital strategist for a year. I'm incredibly pleased with her innovation, work ethic, persistence, diplomacy, and creativity. She does more than sit back and let me dictate to her. She jumps in as a valued collaborator.  If needed, she has learned a new skill and pursued formal education to assist in any task I ask. If you have the opportunity to work with Rachel DO IT, she's like a whole team in one person,"
- Pamela Stewart, author.

"Rachel approaches all projects with heart and a lot of passion. She envelopes herself in the subject matter of her work, and she strives for perfection. She's not afraid to reach out when she needs help, wants to do more, or is looking for another perspective on things. Rachel is someone I would turn to for projects that need a creative lens or greater sensitivity. She is encouraging -- both personally and professionally -- and cheers for all to succeed. She's sure to bring an aura of positivity wherever she goes,"
- Caitlin Taylor, former Editor-in-Chief of Her Campus-Michigan State University, current reporter for the Monroe News.

"Rachel has gone above and beyond for Project LETS-MSU. She has brought many incredible ideas to the table and has never failed to execute them. Her creativity and passion is definitely noticeable in her work,"
- Sonali Solanki, former President of Project LETS-MSU. 

"Your writing is great -- voice, vocabulary, sentence structure -- all of it,"
- Joannna Bosse, Associate Dean for Academic Programs & Associate Professor for Michigan State University's Residential College in the Arts and Humanities.