After working 8 years in the nonprofit space, I got to work for a tech start up designing their first mobile game, World Reborn. Born out of peacebuilding techniques and behavioral research, World Reborn aimed to help Gen Z build relationships across political divisions to help them understand how much stronger we are together than apart. Leading a team of three, I assisted in developing a cohesive social media strategy, ad strategy, and website design, as well as creating press kits, and supported our partnerships with brands such as Discord and ELF Beauty.
Below are some examples of how I worked to build digital worlds in order to extend the World Reborn universe, make peacebuilding cool, and create meaningful communities to make a juster world.
Step One
Market Research and Case Studies
In my transferring my skills to the tech space, I was able to learn new strategies from our funders and partners who have years of experience in tech branding and marketing in the tech space.
My first project was researching our audience, 14-24 narrative gamers. This included third-party data and research, as well as developing surveys and directly asking our community for insights into our target audience.
As we received data, I created case studies covering other mobile apps with similar audiences, interests, or genres. This made me study self-help apps like Duolingo, Calm, Habitica, and more. As well as researching narrative mobile games like Episodes, Chapters, and others.
After this step was completed, I presented my findings to my team as well as funders and consultants to consider their insights and suggestions.
Step Two
Messaging Framework
After gathering audience research and case studies, I was tasked with developing a draft of messaging frameworks based on player pain points that World Reborn has solutions to: loneliness, powerlessness, desire for community, and belonging.
This included taking all features in World Reborn and creating messaging that creates a through-line that creates a picture that mobile game apps don’t have to just be a distraction, but they could help build skills to empower young people to make significant change in their lives, relationally and politically.
This messaging was designed to be used for social media, websites, press, kits, and more in order to create brand consistency and reach the audience that needed World Reborn most.
Step Three
Audience and Content Strategy
After audience research, case studies, and a messaging framework, it was time to put our boots on the ground and meet our audience where they are and know who they are. I led our community team to create clear and diverse audience profiles based on the data of who our main player cohort is: where they live, what platforms they use and how, what their day-to-day looks like, what they care about, and what drives them to make change. I then trained our company's social media algorithm to mimic 1 or 2 profiles we created in order to be in their digital world.
This and many other steps I took were never static or fixed because our digital and societal landscape is ever-changing and evolving. One example of this is that when I first started on our content, I focused on hopping on trends in our key audiences (arttok, booktok, gamertok, etc.), as well as highlighting our team to create transparency. As time went on (and some A/B testing) it was clear that our audience loved going to World Reborn’s platforms for an extended universe view. They wanted the characters, conflicts, and environments of World Reborn to feel real as we hop on trends, not confined to in-app experiences. This shift to using our platforms for universe building resulted in an increase in day 1, day 3, and day 7 retention, something we (and our funders) loved to see.
Step Four
Community Strategy and Management
After the strategy was approved and in place, most of my time was spent developing a brand persona to be a trusted voice on social media, Reddit, and Discord. Acknowledging myself as the bridge between players and our developers, I would speak directly with players daily, which led to creating a system to track player sentiment and suggestions, as well as on-brand customer service, in order to build trust with players and center World Reborn around them. This led to a company shift in being much more outward-facing as a company, closing the gap between us and our community. This included having exclusive player-led dev interviews for our Discord members, establishing a Players Council to hear more suggestions and feedback on how to make World Reborn better, and offering sneak peeks to players when they engaged with our asks.
This led to a 200% increase in Discord members and a 60% increase in daily community engagement.
(fan art from our Discord pictured)
