General Goals

The Content Editor/Social Media Specialist (Melissa) will establish relationships with the Bandura community, cultural institutions such as the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America (UNWLA), the Ukrainian Museum, Women’s Bandura Ensemble of North America (WBENA), the Ethnomusicology department at CUNY, Ukrainian History and Education Center in New Jersey (UHEC), Dr. Maria Sonevytsky from Bard and Dr. Marcia Ostashewski from Cape Breton University in order to foster relationships for the later distribution of our project through personal outreach and social media. The plan is to connect with members of the Ukrainian diaspora and garner interest in our project. 

Audience

• WBENA
• Academic Scholars
• CUNY Digital Humanities Community
• WAX Community
• North American Ukrainian Community
• Musical Programmers
• Ethnomusicology Scholars

Our Values/Voice

The Women in Bandura team is working closely with the WBENA in the framework of “slow archiving” to ensure that the community we are working with is included in every decision we make and has ultimate control over what gets published. We are aware that this project is inherently political in these times and we do not want to draw any unwanted attention to our own work, and more importantly to the Ensemble. 

Website and Logo

Women in Bandura will be created using WAX and hosted on GitHub. Once our site is complete, users will be able to explore two programs from WBENA performances in Boston/Providence and the Rust Belt. They will be able to read about each song featured including details on the composer, genre, theme, tempo, key, description of the song, lyrics, and soloist.

The Women in Bandura logo(s) was created by our Researcher/Assistant Content Editor/Development Shadow, Lini Radhakrishan.

These are the four logo ideas that Lini drafted. We have not decided which one we’ll use as the logo for the project. 

Social Media Strategy

The Content Editor/Social Media Specialist will create social media accounts on Facebook and Bluesky in order to connect with members of the community and to promote and build interest in our project. The Social Media Specialist will create content working with the Assistant Content Editor to post on Facebook and Bluesky. Initially, the Social Media Specialist will post one time per week on Facebook and Bluesky with original content related to our project and supplemental reshared content from the community. This includes blog-like posts on our logo design process, the website design process, sharing any hiccups we have, and fun facts about Bandura history as well as cross posting and/or sharing content produced by the WBENA on their social media accounts. We hope that our social media presence will increase visibility for our project and possibly prompt members of the community to get involved themselves. 

The Social Media Specialist will be responsible for fielding any inquiries and interactions on social media, only escalating to team review when necessary. 

Communication Strategies

Our outreach strategy is multi-pronged. Alongside promoting the project on social media, once the project is complete we will create brochures (both print and electronic) that will provide context for the project, explain the importance of this work and ultimately lead the user to our website via a QR code and WBENA. We will distribute printed brochures to the Mina Rees Library on the CUNY Graduate Center Campus and other cultural institutions where appropriate. We will send out electronic promotions through our social media accounts, the CUNY Academic Commons, cultural institutions and organizations, the WBENA website, and the Graduate Center Newsletter. Additionally we will reach out to WAX and ask to be featured on their channels promoting projects made with the platform and to NYCDH (NYC Digital Humanities) in order to promote our project to the larger community.