BCIT Student Association
Role: Creative Design Strategist
BCIT Student Association (or ‘SA’) is a non-profit student service and advocacy organization at BCIT with a mandate to enhance student life. The programs and services benefit and support all 48,500+ full-time and part-time students across BCIT’s five campuses.
Burnaby Campus
Downtown Vancouver Campus
Aerospace Technology Campus
Marine Campus
Annacis Island Campus
Students lead our organization and govern the affairs of the BCITSA. Their Board of Directors comprises 12 elected Student Executives and Student Councillors from each of the different Schools at BCIT.
2022-23 Food Support Hub Project
The Food Support Hub was created in 2022 and includes a collection of resources from a physical Food Pantry to an online Community Food Network that lists out food support services around the BCIT Burnaby campus. The purpose of this project came from when students were voicing out their needs for nutritional foods during the period when inflation was constantly increasing in B.C.
My responsibility as the Design lead was to develop the overarching branding. This included creating the logo and deciding on the appropriate font, colours, and illustrations. The challenge with this project was to combat the negative stigma that is usually associated with food support services, so I opted for a clean design with fresh, inviting colours to connotate culturally diverse and fresh foods.
Along with creating guidelines for the overarching design, I was also responsible for creating various digital and print materials such as:
Printed posters
How-to-use guides (for users/ students)
Social media posts
Fridge wrap design & industrial fridge signage
Food pantry signage & tags
Through our registration process, we gathered that in just one year of opening the Food Pantry, we’ve had over 1,931 students visit, and 3,687 visits from January 2023 to October 2023.
Aside from students, we also garnered attention from our BCIT partners and multiple organizations who reached out wanting to create partnerships with us, such as Acuitas Therapeutics, Burnaby Primary Care Networks, and Second Harvest.
Social Media
In addition to creating a wide range of digital and print visual communication materials, I also manage our three primary social media platforms: Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Collaborating with the Marketing Manager, I developed a new strategy in the summer of 2024, focusing on showcasing campus life more authentically. Our aim was to highlight student experiences, feature key campus events, and promote various campus spaces—especially to new students unfamiliar with our facilities and services.
Key initiatives I launched for the 2024 fiscal year included:
Social Media Calendar: Developed a comprehensive content calendar to strategically promote over 100 events, services, and campaigns across all channels
Platform Optimization: Recommended and initiated the a new social media management platform, AgoraPulse, to improve tracking, reporting, and scheduling efficiency
New Content Series: Planned three distinct content series: (a) campus photo features showcasing different locations, (b) a career services video series, and (c) giveaway campaigns to engage our audience
Since shifting our social media strategy, we've seen an average 4% growth in followers between July and September, along with a 30% increase in engagement.
2022 Virtual Career Fair
The 2022 Virtual Career Fair was a two-day event to provide BCIT students in the Business + Technology and Construction + Engineering programs tailored opportunities to meet with employers within their industries.
My responsibility as the Creative Design strategist was to work with the Marketing team to develop a package of promotional materials and strategically create excitement for another virtual event. The challenge we had was to engage with the students when they were already visually exhausted from all the online courses and/or presentations.
Our branding was aimed at creating an abstract story that still aligned with the existing branding of our Career Services team. By implementing diverse characters into the materials, we wanted to provide a welcoming yet professional outlook to interested students.
Through Google Analytics and Simplicity’s tracking tools, we gathered insight that engagement was fairly high even with the challenges that the pandemic brought. We saw 3235 visits to the webpage, and higher engagement on our LinkedIn channel compared to Instagram or Facebook.
For the Business + Technology Session on January 26th, we were able to invite 27 employers and 176 students out of the 284 registered attended.
The Construction + Engineering Session on February 2nd had 41 employers and 163 out of the 219 students registered, actually attended the virtual fair.
