Overview:

COVID-19 continues to effect our business. During 2020, our store had to remain agile with closures, regulations, and safety at the top of every ones minds. With a business that strived on personal interaction, how do we keep our brand in the forefront of peoples minds when you can’t meet in person?

The Problem:

We feared that we may loose out on our tight knit community after we where able to open up and run events safely. We had a couple avenues to reach out to people online, but those communities felt stagnant. How can we reach individuals, and give people a place to gather virtually?

The Solution:

Create a Discord community for each of our stores. This would give us the ability to reach our core audience, and give the community a place to gather virtually. We could also run virtual events to try and give people a small escape during a rough time.

The Campaign:

To build a community from scratch on a new platform can be challenging. We had to educate our stakeholders on the platform, create the structure of each Discord, encourage people to join, and continually engage the community.

We where able to print physical posters and bookmarks to include in orders, post on our existing platforms, and use word-of-mouth to get people on our Discord.

My contribution:

I helped spearhead the idea with our team in Portland, and work together with them to create the first structure. Once approved, I helped create training documentation, and expectations for other roles. I created the social campaign to reach our digital audience, and would post to try and encourage engagement. I currently moderate our Bellevue location, but was responsible for all 3 locations during the worst of COVID lockdowns until we where able to hire more Sales and Marketing associates for our other locations. Here are a couple example posts and events we’ve been able to run.

The results:

We now have over 1,300 users on our Discord in Bellevue, and over 1,000 users in our other stores Discords. We are able to see when people plan to meet up, have a pulse on our community, see what people are excited about, and can run events that where not possible before. We are also able to gather valuable insights to use in our current social role-outs, and present findings to other stakeholders within the company.