UC Davis Unmasked
Internship Overview
Unmasked is a supportive, anonymous community for college students, by college students. As a student movement, we are working to erase the stigma surrounding mental health and lower the barriers to accessing emotional support.
The Unmasked App
The Unmasked app can be found on the apple and android app stores.
Founder/Co-President
The idea of Unmasked was first brought to UC Davis in the summer of 2020, in the heist of the pandemic. I had discovered the Unmasked community in my social platforms and was quickly intrigued by its welcoming environment and dedication to spread mental health awareness. It was a safe, open space for college students to share their feelings, thoughts, etc. and right away I knew that this platform was needed at UC Davis. Upon reaching out the Unmasked officials, a meeting was set up to discuss bringing it to Davis. And before I knew it, I was in charge of all operations (marketing, recruitment, coordinating, facilitating) to make this a reality. This position allowed me to grow as a leader and team player.
Marketing
In order to bring this project to life, a marketing plan had to take place in order to spread the word in every way possible. With little experience but a vision, I took the role of a one man team to market this opportunity to UC Davis students. The first step in the marketing process was to find my target audience, individuals interested in mental health and wellness. To do so, I focused on marketing on social platforms as well as email list servs from clubs, organizations and major departments at UC Davis. One specific post (shown below) on twitter had great performances with 17,853 impressions, 2,169 engagements, 58 retweets and 71 likes. This was more than I thought would happen. Various departments that I had emailed were also more than happy to share this opportunity with their subscriber list. Later when interviewing those who we recruited, I learned that twitter and the email listservs were the most effective in spreading the word. My main goal for this was to recruit people to help me run this app. Furthermore, I wanted to share with the UC Davis student community of this safe space that was soon to come. With no marketing knowledge, I used my own Gen Z social media knowledge to reach my desired audience, and quite frankly it worked.
Recruitment and Onboarding
After getting over 75 applicants, the interview process began to find the right candidates fit for this project. The number was lowered down to 20 people who were grouped to take on different tasks. The groups were arranged by app moderators, the marketing team, analytics.
Before the app launched, trainings were done to ensure that our team was equipped with the right resources and knowledge of how to smoothly run this app. These trainings include mental health awareness trainings, deescalating workshops, signs to look out for, and how to direct users to resources they may need. Team members from the Unmasked “headquarters” taught these workshops.
Launch
The app officially launched at the beginning of 2021 where it was available for everyone to download from the app store. To create an account one had to select their school, login using their school emails to verify they are students and create a password. This made it possible to keep this app just within the college student body. Everything the users posted was completely anonymous and confidential. More marketing was done after the launch to spread the word to new users.
Main Tasks
As the Co-President of this new project, my role was to oversee that all was running well. This means making sure the moderator team was interacting and engaging with posts. Being that this is a "mental health" community, it's important for our team to make others feel welcomed. Other times I worked with the marketing team to figure out how to reach new users. We used some of the same marketing tactics that I had done to promote this project, as well as make physical flyers and create social media pages. The analytics team was important to see as it showed us the progress of the Unmasked app and social media/marketing team. We used it to see how many users had signed up, the frequency of activity, etc.