Snapchat Communities

A creative campaign to raise awareness of and inspire engagement with Snapchat’s new ‘Communities’ feature which allows users to join groups based on their school + graduation year.

Get high-school and college students in the US to sign up for their school community, add new friends, and post to the school story. In turn, enhancing relationships with friends and classmates.
For individual students, putting yourself out there is scary. But doing it together with a group you’re in becomes a badge of belonging.
For the Shared Story specifically, what if we could expand on the local aspect of current bulletin board behavior to take it beyond purely functional and make it more fun and interesting.
My role as Sr. Creative was to lead the design direction and art direction for the product marketing campaign and lead an external partner on the motion graphics and video edits seen in the campaign.
External Partners:
Bennett Johnson (Director)
Victor Palm (Director)
HB Studios (Production)
1stAve BA (Motion & Graphics)

Hats Worn

Creative Direction
Art Direction
Design Direction

Creative Team

Eric Fensler
Ghislaine LeFranc

About Communities

Communities are an added layer to your identity on Snapchat. Signing up for a Community brings students within the same school together and helps them share info and fun moments. Communities allow access to features specific to their graduating class – most notably a Shared Story.

Creative Approach

Communities has a dual purpose. It can be used to connect students in the same classes, offer tickets to a game, or share goofy Snaps from around campus. It has the opportunity to be the best virtual-bulletin-board-quad-grassroots-newspaper-yearbook-interactive-live-forum ever created.

We came up with the key messaging of, “What’s your School Story?” It’s both a question and call-to-action. Knowing that there are opportunities with both the awareness and Storied content, this messaging provokes Snapchatters to participate in not only repping their school by joining, but also sharing their perspective and experience via the Shared Story.

Design Direction

The design direction is full of duotone palettes and halftone patterns, inspired by the crude aesthetic of handmade flyers and vision board posters seen on bulletin boards and in dorm rooms around campus.

Campaign Rollout

The campaign created for Communities was rolled out across a variety of channels including:

Snap Ads

Full-screen vertical video ads driving community sign ups showing examples of school story Snap submissions.

Discover Story

A video in Team Snapchat’s Discover channel highlighting the feature and its appeal to story posters.

Mass Snaps

A ‘Snap’ sent from Team Snapchat, via a push notification, to a targeted cohort of Snapchatters to drive awareness, engagement, and adoption of the new feature. Cohort sizes are often measured in the tens of millions of Snapchatters.

Mass Chat / Chat Media

A ‘Chat’ sent from Team Snapchat, via a push notification, to a targeted cohort of Snapchatters to drive awareness, engagement, and adoption of the new feature.

Creative Tools

A custom sticker pack released in tandem with the feature. The stickers are fun to use regardless of if Snapchatters are aware of the feature, but adds context to students’ Snaps and hopefully tempts them to contribute to their School Story.