As I started my journey with Savor Brands, owners Patrick and Mio had an amazing initiative: the Pono Collective.
Hawai‘i is a unique place - one where there is opportunity to bridge together two worlds: Culinary & Coffee. How can we, Savor Brands, accomplish that?
Using our vast network of coffee professionals that we’ve met through the years, along with the Culinary Institute at Kapiolani Community College, we worked together to make this four day farm to brew education come together. We had a couple of goals:
Get students to sign up for this free education, that was outside of their regular class schedule
Educate what the Pono Collective was (a completely new concept, and this was our first cohort, and all volunteered time and organization - something completely unheard of at the time)
Document the Journey
My involvement included creating the social media strategy to help accomplish all our goals, organize and create a plan to interview and highlight our partners in this and bridge the gap between students and coffee professionals, and work with the Kapiolani Community College Culinary director to encourage signups from the students.
Our biggest challenges included:
This was a completely new concept - what motivates our audience (Culinary Students) to want to sign up and learn about coffee on their only days off from classes in the middle of their culinary school career?
Our partners for the education portion of each day (Coffee Farm and Agriculture, Coffee Sensory, Coffee Roasting and Culinary Application, Coffee Brewing and Career Paths) were top in the industry here on Oahu - how do we use social media to highlight their expertise, their businesses, and show them off?
During each experience, how do we ensure that the atmosphere is special when it comes to multimedia - using print mediums, social media sharing and hashtags, post-class interviews - and how do we encourage engagement not only from those who are participating, but with the outside audience looking in?
Working with the Creative Director at the time, we came up with the concept:
DISCOVER. EXPERIENCE. CONNECT.
This was short, to the point, and really highlighted the impact that this program would have when you attended. We used the new feature at the time, Collaboration Tags, with KCC Culinary on our main Savor Brands Instagram account (PonoCollective was later created and introduced after we grew the main concept). We utilized the strength of the hashtag #kccculinary to capture more impressions and entice students who see it to sign up.
