BRIEF
From September 2016 to May 2022, I served as a volunteer Director of Communications on the board of the Bridgeland-Riverside Community Association (BRCA). My portfolio included social media management. I focused on this area because it offered the most impactful opportunity to connect, engage, and bring joy to the neighbourhood.
BACKGROUND
Bridgeland is an inner-city community, immediately adjacent to Calgary’s downtown core. During my time serving on the BRCA Board, the community was undergoing intense development and densification. Between 2009 and 2014, Bridgeland increased its population by 104%, compared to 24% for Calgary as a whole.
The onslaught of challenges associated with fast inner-city growth demanded intense commitment from the community association’s planning and communications portfolios.
Our main communications channels were social media and our website. The community association had rebranded the prior year, and I inherited the brand assets: a logo, a brand guide, and a really cool, one-pose Bridgeland Betty persona design asset that had been commissioned as part of their rebrand.
DESIGN SNIPPETS
GETTING SOCIAL
Success on social media demands not just creative posting, but also inspiring meaningful engagement. Serving as the community association brand’s voice during my time serving as Communications Director on the BRCA Board, I had a daily social media presence, creating, posting, and commenting multiple times a day. One of the many sources of daily laughs was the friendly tweeting rivalry between our neighbouring community association (Renfrew, which we playfully called ”North Bridgeland”).
Following the BRCA brand guidelines and its Bridgeland Betty persona, I designed close to a hundred posters and developed countless graphics and a few videos to bring the brand to life and build a fun, welcoming community online that spread to the in-person world. Working within the brand guidelines, I expanded on the existing Bridgeland Betty character by designing over a dozen versions (Stampede Betty, soccer Betty, wear your mask Betty, shop local Betty, Farmer’s Market Betty) and a bunny mascot friend.
At the end of my tenure, I had doubled our following on Twitter, typically reaching 14K to 50K people every month, and increased our following by 270% on Facebook.
I amplified our reach by leveraging my direct relationships with two other volunteer-based organizations. The first one was the Calgary Tool Library, a program of the BRCA, whose social media voice I managed from 2017 to 2018. The second was Beakerhead, an educational science, technology, engineering, arts, and math charitable organization, whose “street” (promotions/marketing) crew I co-chaired from 2015 to 2019.
I currently serve as the BRCA newsletter editor.
BRIDGELAND LOVE
Working closely with our community association board’s Planning Director, who organized dozens of successful placemaking and tactical urbanism initiatives, in 2017 we coined the term “Bridgeland Love”: using kindness to strengthen our community spirit, by building a more connected, active, inclusive, safer community.
The planning director and I also started a community group on Facebook called Bridgeland Love. She and I cultivated its growth with ongoing posting, community management, and engagement. It has grown to close almost 2K members who live, work, and play in Bridgeland.
Fast-forwarding to the 2024, the Bridgeland Love movement is still helping build a more connected, inclusive community in Bridgeland. It has become an online community-led support hub where people share ideas and neighbourly solutions, from guerrilla urbanism initiatives like painting a rainbow pride crosswalk and traffic-calming polka dots, to rock art, Bridge-LA-LALAND signage jokes, supporting a wild turkey who roamed the neighbourhood one summer, encouraging each other during the pandemic, taking on guerrilla gardening and community cleanups in unkempt spots, or placing fun dog waste signage and bags around the neighbourhood.
Bridgeland Love is about using kindness to create safer spaces and respond to issues. For example, in problematic areas around the community, residents used chalk to draw hearts on the sidewalk and wrote messages of kindness. In response to a racist graffiti on a local business’ wall, we rallied neighbours to stick paper hearts and raised money to paint a beautiful mural.
Bridgeland Love was already there, but it takes a village to activate it. On social media, my role was to engage our old and new neighbours to cultivate and share kindness more widely. They did — and still do. That’s because Bridgeland is the kind of kind neighbourhood that with one day’s notice can rally volunteers to build a community tool shed in an afternoon — with one tweet— just like in the old days of barn-raising.
Best of all, our #BridgelandLove hashtag has spread out to our neighbouring communities of Inglewood and Kensington. How neighbourly is that?
BRIDGELAND LOVE STORIES
Many of our community stories have been widely covered by local and even international media. They exemplify what our friendly, inclusive community stands for and how we face challenges with kindness and fun.
If you haven’t heard about them on the news yet, this is your chance. They will make your day.
Although I did not set up the “D”, “LA”, or “LALAND” signs, I do know the wonderfully kind, funny neighbour who did. You know who you are.
Thank you! You are amazing.
THANK YOU, NEIGHBOURS
An engaged community is only possible thanks to kind people like you, who take time from their own daily struggles and busy lives to volunteer.
Thanks to you, Bridgeland becomes warmer, kinder, and more joyful every day.
RESULTS
Bridgeland has earned an enviable reputation as one of Calgary’s most vibrant, engaged, friendly, and inclusive neighbourhoods.
When I served on the BRCA Board, Bridgeland-Riverside was named Calgary’s best neighbourhood in 2018 and made the Top 5 lists every year.
A same-sex couple who celebrated their wedding at the community hall in 2018 shared with the hall manager why they had chosen to be married in Bridgeland. They told her that this was the community where they felt most warmly welcomed, in person and online. That is Bridgeland Love.
