The Messenger made marketing a primary goal to increase readership, engagement, and funding this past school year. As the Managing/Multimedia Editor, I oversaw many of these actions, such as posting articles, promoting social media posts, and working with additional staffers to publicize our publication. This past year, the Messenger staff worked together and also ventured into new marketing plans to achieve our objectives.

The Messenger attends many school events to take pictures to post them on social media, and occasionally the website if we have an abundant amount of pictures. 

Our Football pictures links (click on the image to view the page)

This covers the student life at Northview High School. This increases the students interactions on our social media page and website. The purpose of this is to improve the recognition of the Messenger.

A new marketing plan that our Public Relations team developed this year was promotional videos. We created and posted a promotional video for every digital issue that was published this year on our social media. 

For the Banned issue, the PR team filmed an interview-style video on our article. We received 5,968 shares, over 10 hours of watch time, and reached 1,943 accounts.

We also made a recruitment video. We received 4,980 views, over 5 hours of watch time, and reached 1,567 accounts. This won a Georgia Scholastic Press Association award.

During the 2023-2024 school year, we published multiple important issues on our website and our digital issues. This involved an article such as Fire alarms send students into freezing downpour. This was a breaking news article that the Co-EICs and I worked closely to publish the day the school evacuations happened. Traffic to our websites increased 90.5% (326 visits to 621 visits) from the previous week to the week this article was posted on the website and our social media pages. This shows that timely articles and social media promotion work to increase views.

Analytics from Squarespace for the week of Jan. 1 - 6.

Final Thoughts

The Messenger uses the money to print out our senior issue, scholastic memberships, the New York CSPA trip to allow our underclassmen staffers to learn new skills, and more. To fund this and our publication, staffers normally reach out to local businesses to receive sponsors. The ads prices range from $10 to $75, and sales are varied each month.

Additionally, we sell uniquely staff-designed sweatshirts to the public. We take pictures and advertise them online. We received $460 from the sweatshirt sales sales.

This year, the Messenger decided to hold a fundraiser. We were able to do this through Snap!, a mobile app that helps raise fundraisers for schools. Every staff member filled out the following form, listing 20 emails to send our campaign to.

Over the course of a few weeks, the Messenger group raised a total of $6,054, exceeding our $5,000 goal by over $1,000.

The flyer we used to file out the 20 emails.

In efforts to further increase our recognition, the Messenger attended International Night. International Night is one of the biggest events held at Northview High School and is looked forward to by students, teachers, and families.  Our photographers took pictures and our entire staff team edited and watermarked them. We intended to sell the pictures to the performers’ family and friends. The editors and I uploaded them to our website. We also posted this announcement on our social media pages.

We were able to earn $45 dollars, but most importantly, our website reached a high of 1,743 visitors. Our Instagram post received 529 likes, 67 shares, and reached 553 accounts.

We received our highest visitors the day we posted our International Night pictures on our website and social media pages. Analytics from Squarespace.

This past year we implemented many new marketing skills. As a group, we learned to work together and each do our part to promote the Messenger. For myself, I learned the hard work that goes on behind the scenes. For a school publication, it is important to have a good social media presence so that we can grow.  However, it is not always shown to the public the amount of thoughts that goes on behind the scenes. As the Managing/Multimedia Editor, I was able to see that. I definitely learned a lot on the importance of marketing, such as covering important issues, funding our publication, and timely posts.