The Moving Mountains Project

I recently have finished working on a social media campaign called the Moving Mountains Project. This project was a passion project of mine and covered a topic I care very strongly about. Climate change and its impact on our winters is a subject that affects not only skiers and snowboarders, but also surrounding communities. I started this project to create a platform that would inform skiers and riders about climate change while also creating a place where they could come together to help protect the mountains and earth we all love. Educating the winter sports community to help combat this problem was something that was missing in the global climate change fight and I felt there was space on social media for this type of platform.

Project Proposal

Before starting the project, I created a project proposal. This broke down my topic into more detail as to why and how I am going to turn this idea into a successful social media campaign. Within the pages lists my goals for the project, what platform I will be using, my target audience, and my individual project deliverables, broken down into 15 Instagram posts. The full proposal can be viewed below and if you would like to read more in detail about constructing the proposal you can read my blog post.

Creating The Instagram Page

Once the project plan was written, I created the Instagram page I would be using to reach my followers and post my content. This step included me picking out colors, fonts and creating a style that I would keep throughout the weeks of posting. This was an important step because I wanted to maintain a professional outlook but also have my Instagram grid be visually pleasing. Below you can see the final logo I created for the page, which resembles the project plan cover. However, I ended up changing the colors to green to represent the mountain theme. My Starting A Movement blog talks about my process of creating the page and ultimately deciding on this logo.

Research Topics

As described in the project plan, I had a method to my research. I first wanted my posts to explain climate change and the signs of global warming. Educating my viewers was important to create awareness and to gain followers that support climate advocacy. Once those were posted, I would transition to how climate change was affecting mountains. Relating climate back to winter sports would resonate with my followers, and I knew this would help my page stand out against other climate platforms. Towards the end of posting, I planned to shift the topic to ways skiers and riders can help the planet and fight climate change. Giving them the tools to actually make a difference and see that even small daily changes can have a bigger, global impact.

Two articles that stood out in my research were from Ski Magazine. They were: Here’s How Much Shorter Your Ski Season Might Be in 25 Years and
Here’s What You Should Know If You Want To Keep Skiing. I mention these because the articles were written by fellow skiers, who you could tell cared about the sport and preserving it. They talked about how the ski industry is suffering and the future of the sport. After reading many articles, books, listening to podcasts, and watching videos, I knew there was an audience out there that would be willing to follow along on this project’s journey, which encouraged me.

Sketching Out The Ideas

Now that the research was done, I moved on to sketching my designs out. I was committed to sketching and designing three posts a week, which included writing captions and any additional research for a post’s topic. For example, I had to do some extra reading on interviewing and recording people since I planned on questioning fellow skiers in my community about climate change and posting this as a video. One piece that helped me to prepare for this was the article What I’ve Learned So Far about Interviewing for Video and Audio Stories. It covered all areas of how to interview someone and how to ask the right questions to get the best content.

Designing The Posts

Once I finished my sketches, I would usually get started on designing them in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and/or InDesign. Many of my posts included graphic icons, so I would usually start with creating those and then build the rest of the background or image from there. These weeks of production were long and strenuous as I tried to stick to the design guidelines I made in week one. But as I learned, even with a plan, sometimes things change. My blog post in week four goes into the challenges I encountered along the way as I was deep into the designing phase.

Overall, the sketches did help the design process run more smoothly and allowed me to create faster since I had already mapped out a plan. As I finished each one, I would lay it next to the previous post to make sure they all looked cohesive.

Interviewing The Ski Community

As I mentioned earlier, in addition to creating infographic posts, I also had the chance to film skiers about climate change to use as an Instagram reel. This was a great opportunity to get content on others in the ski community and to see how much they know about this topic. I used the footage to create a short video where they talk about the challenges of skiing in a warmer climate and what they are doing to combat this problem. I felt it was important to include these types of videos because it would help my audience connect with other skiers and encourage them to come together for the good of the planet. These videos were a great addition to the grid and also added variety to my content.

Organizing My Grid

As I continued with the design process, I decided that creating an Instagram grid offline for myself would be helpful to see how my actual grid style would look. My goal here was to get a sneak preview of all the designs I created and to see if I needed to move any pieces around. After creating and posting about two-thirds of the designs, I decided to change the posting order for the last few, just to create what I felt was better visual symmetry. For example, I made sure the three reels (which are the moving mountains advocate and founder videos) are shown diagonally since they have similar cover photos. These three posts stand out against the rest of the images, so I knew I needed to organized them in a way that didn’t feel messy. The overall grid can be seen here:

Posting My Content To Instagram

The final step in this project was posting to the Moving Mountains Instagram page! As noted in the initial project proposal, I was posting three times a week, about a week behind of when they were designed. This allowed me to review and finalize before posting and double check the overall grid design. When posting, I always tried to use hashtags and emojis to attract the right audience and tried to pair this with a catchy caption. As the weeks ended and my grid filled up, it was such an overwhelmingly positive experience seeing my posts get noticed and my page gaining followers. I even had people reaching out to me, saying how much they loved the content and wanted to help anyway they could. This project has changed me and my own daily habits as well as making me a voice in the ski community, as I describe it in my latest blog post. It’s a great feeling, knowing my platform reached so many people and that it has brought us all together for a good cause. I hope to reach many more and to continue fighting climate change and protecting our winters!