A national social media campaign that encouraged university co-op education students to share their photos, stories and anecdotes has earned SFU staffer Adam Brayford two awards of excellence from the International Association of Business Communicators.

Brayford, communications and marketing coordinator with SFU Work Integrated Learning (WIL), won an international Gold Quill and a local Bronze Quill.

The awards recognize Brayford’s work on a national campaign for the Canadian Association for Co-operative Education (CAFCE) that used social media to increase member engagement during National Co-op Week.

Brayford says the idea for the national campaign started off in 2011 as a small project at SFU, which is a member of CAFCE, and blossomed into a full-blown communications campaign in 2012 that included 40 colleges, universities and institutes across the country.

The social media campaign targeted co-op students, but Brayford won the award for the way in which he used the campaign to engage the institutional practitioners.

“I got them all involved in various aspects of the project’s delivery and co-op practitioners from coast to coast worked together to offer it to our students.”

The campaign involved a challenge-per-day that asked students to reflect on their co-op experiences and successes by sharing co-op stories, photos or anecdotes via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

“All of the social media monitoring, archiving and prize selection was done centrally at SFU, so it was a service offering to the whole country, and it garnered several thousand entries in its pilot year from students across Canada,” says Brayford.

In the second year of the campaign, other institutions joined in to offer sponsorship and help with translation and student engagement.

Brayford’s initiative won kudos because it’s an easily adaptable, low-cost framework for engaging staff and students, and doesn’t require a huge time commitment from busy co-op practitioners.

 “For the first time, we had a truly nationwide digital conversation and celebration where co-op students across the country interacted with us and with each other,” he says.

“It was hugely inspirational for co-op practitioners who spend so much time working to better students and improve programs.”