My Role

Project Director

Project Duration

10 Weeks

Problem

Students were challenged with developing, branding and prototyping an event that encouraged friendship and fellowship among new resident 20-somethings to the City of Savannah, and to introduce them to their new community.

Solution

Scrolling through Facebook you are bound to recognize a current photographic trend—incidental snapshots of last night’s meal, pets wearing sunglasses, friends in the park passed through an array of high contrast filters. The app is Instagram, and its one-touch editing platform has taken the world of social media by storm. Now that our friends are all hip to this trendy aesthetic, it’s about time they put it to good use and provide us with an entertaining photostream!

Cue Savannigans: an Instagram Scavenger Hunt event developed by Savannah College of Art and Design’s Spring 2012 Graphic Design & Social Awareness class. Designed as a social gathering for local 20-somethings, Savannigans encourages teams to interact and explore the city in a way they never have before. For a small $5 entry fee, participants were given 2 hours and a list of photo challenges to be uploaded to their Instagram accounts (tracked by the #Savannigans tag). As with a typical scavenger hunt, the list items are allotted points based on difficulty, and the money collected from entry fees was used to award a final cash prize to the highest scoring team.

Savannah is an interesting town in that its entire historic downtown serves as a year-round tourist destination. This creates two distinct groups within the city: an equal amount of locals and visitors interacting on a daily basis. Horse drawn carriages are ubiquitous around the city squares, and locals are regularly exposed to the flash of cameras from a passing trolley tour. Targeted towards 21–29 year old new residents, Savannigans played off that interaction, spinning the event as an opportunity for locals to turn the tables and take back the city. 

Fliers with the headline “This is not a tourist trap” helped establish that friendly divide and others reading “Next round’s on us” helped encourage the social bar-crawl type attitude of the brand while creating a draw with promise of a cash prize. The unapologetic language of our third headline (“The stupid shit you do always ends up online. This time there’s a cash prize”) served to further hone the brand attitude, again adding hype with the award. By keeping the entry fee low ($5 is the average price of a single drink downtown), we were able to plan for an immediate turnaround with the cash prize. This meant that the more friends teams could encourage to participate, the higher the final reward. 

The event took place on Friday, May 19 starting in Forsyth Park and ending in Savannah’s City Market (conveniently just in time for happy hour!) While participation was lower than expected, we were able to gather enough 2-person teams to comfortably prototype the event. After setting the teams loose on the town, we were happy to see the level of creativity popping up on the #Savannigans photo stream. Because participants were using their personal Instagram accounts, they took ownership of the list we provided, staging photos and remaining conscious of aesthetics. Some teams even took it upon themselves to tag photos of non-list items they discovered while exploring the city. By utilizing social media, participants effectively became ambassadors to the brand, providing us with content that exceeded our expectations--which would only be compounded with higher participation.

Within the two-hour event timeframe, we found that our list was perfectly executable. Apparently it’s easier to find an autographed photo of Paula Deen than expected! With some additional creative effort, the list could easily be expanded in difficulty to accommodate for future events. We also encountered a few instances of “cheating;” Google image search screen shots and pre-existing photos being tagged to fulfill the more challenging requirements. This could also easily be resolved with a more detailed set of participation instructions.

Given additional time and resources allocated to advertising and promotion, Savannigans could easily be successfully repeated. The low-cost, high-revenue structure makes it an ideal potential event for local non-profit organizations. List items could direct participants to local businesses, opening the door to sponsorship opportunities. The established brand voice, design, and social media integration hone in on a key demographic, and the logistics are such that the event practically runs itself.