Are We Taking Full Advantage of our Sustainable Campus?
The campus of UW is considered a sustainable campus and provides many sustainable choices to enable students with what is needed for a sustainable lifestyle during their college experience. Unfortunately, these sustainable choices are not easily apparent to the college community, making the promotion of sustainable efforts needed to enable students with the knowledge for living sustainably. The aim of my study was to find out how aware is the UW community over sustainable efforts made on campus, as well as what traits make a successful social media to promote sustainable efforts. From my internship at UW Sustainability I took on several tasks to complete my research, such as analysis on the results of their Sustainable Choices survey held over the Fall quarter of 2019, as well as promoting sustainability on campus through their Instagram and analyzing what traits and trends a successful Instagram post has to reach more people. The results of the survey indicated a very small number of participants knowing all of the listed general sustainable efforts made on campus. In terms of UW Sustainability’s Instagram, it showed that the largest amount of activity with our audience was in certain time ranges and locations with factors such as relatability being necessary for an impactful post. This shows significance as knowing which efforts are less known, and what factors lead to an effective post are important for understanding what topics to target and how to best educate the UW community over sustainability on campus.