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Narrative:

Context

Each semester, one of the most important jobs of the PWR Social Media Intern is to advertise the PWR classes that will be taught in upcoming terms, primarily for students who are undecided about what classes to take or who want to know more about the PWR program as a whole before committing to a major or minor. I made a few of these course ads during the spring semester, but I was only able to post about the Fall 2020 courses on social media as students had already left campus due to the COVID-19 pandemic by the time the offerings were announced. However, I had a second channel for advertising available to me during the fall semester: putting posters in the hallways of academic buildings, which had been an effective way of attracting students who did not know much about the PWR program in the past, according to my supervisor. So, I used Canva to make Winter/Spring 2021 course ads for social media first, and then I used the “Resize” feature to make copies of each ad that could be printed on letter-sized paper. I did this for each of the seven PWR classes being offered, sent the printable ads to my supervisor, and posted one graphic per day leading up to registration on all the program social media accounts. 

    The ads I included here are the ones for the two courses--PWR 211: Publishing and Editing and PWR 304: Understanding Rhetoric--for which my supervisor and I agreed were the most critical to find students to register. Many students did not realize they could take a PWR class over winter term, when PWR 211 would be taught; and PWR 304 was not scheduled to be offered during the 2021–2022 school year and had been cancelled due to low enrollment before. In order to avoid more low-enrollment cancellations, I gave the most attention to designing these ads and reposted them several times.

Rhetorical Decisions

    For all of my course registration ads, including these, I wanted to keep the color scheme consistent (white, yellow, and the same two shades of blue) to identify them as part of the PWR “brand” and therefore evoke ethos. Additionally, I always tried to capture what makes each course unique in the ad for it for added pathos. I sent a group email to the PWR faculty while I was planning these ads to ask if they wanted me to feature anything specific about the courses they were teaching, and the professor for PWR 211 wrote back to tell me about the satirical newspaper project he was going to put together with the students in that class. I had already planned to take PWR 211, but knowing about that project made me more excited for the course; and I thought other students might have the same emotional reaction to the project, which would lead them to register for the class as well. So, I put a large newspaper clip-art piece on the ad and changed its color to yellow to create contrast with the other dark blue and white shapes on the light blue background. PWR 304 was a bit harder to determine the “flavor” of, but as I was browsing Canva templates, I found one with brain clip-art and associated the mind with “understanding” in the course name.

    I tried to put as little text as I could on the social media ads because I could add more information to the captions and therefore have more visual appeal for followers when they first saw the ad. So I only included what I thought to be essential information to be seen at a glance: the course title, days/times, professor, and what core curriculum requirement the course could fulfill because those designations were relatively new for PWR courses. However, the print ads had to be self-contained and take up more space, so I put as much information as I could fit on the posters. The items that I chose to set off in separate areas of the poster with added contrast were those which I believed would add the aforementioned pathos: the satirical newspaper project could generate excitement for PWR 211 among a student audience, but the detail about PWR 304 not being offered during the next school year would create a sense of urgency about signing up for that class during the current registration cycle.

Reflection

    My design choices and post timing for these two course registration ads seemed to work as PWR 211 completely filled up and PWR 304 only had a few open spaces. I am also proud of the way I manipulated elements on Canva to create two different size ads from the same template. However, I learned a lesson for my general professional future through this experience. The courses for which the PWR program wanted to prioritize communications were the same as the ones that I personally did not want to be cancelled due to low enrollment because I planned to take them. But in the future, my priorities in communications may not line up with the priorities of the organization for which I work, and then I will need to put the organization’s needs ahead of my personal interests in order to represent the organization effectively and complete my work in an ethical way.

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