The largest student leadership conference in Washington State
First held at Sumner Highschool in Sumner Washington in 2014, SERVUS Conference is a student leadership conference hosted by Sumner High School students and staff. The goal of the event is to bring schools from across the state of Washington and Oregon together for a one-day event where students can learn about servant-leadership, character development, and actions they can take in their schools to encourage inclusiveness and activism for all students.
How I became involved
At the end of my junior year in high school, I was elected by the student body as Technical Coordinator for the school’s events and government activities for my senior year in 2019-2020. Along with many of my friends, I planned and executed dozens of school assemblies, sporting events, promotional videos, and community events, and partnered with local organizations to support various events’ technical needs. The largest responsibility of this position, however, was to oversee the technical aspects of the annual SERVUS Conference hosted by the school. This event involved months of planning and coordination with guest speakers, sponsors, and event venues. I oversaw the development of a new website for the 2019 conference, management of the conference’s social media page, as well as systems involved in registration for the event for the 2020 conference. The 2019 SERVUS conference was the sixth year of the event and had grown too large for it to be held in Sumner. The conference was moved to the ShoWare center in Kent, Washington. In total, some 3,000 students were in attendance at this event.
The website
The website for the event had two main goals: one, to promote the event to schools across the state, and two, to draw in sponsors for the event to help fund it. To do so, we needed to ensure the website was clear in what the event’s purpose was as well as provide a visually appealing depiction of the core ideas of the event and its past success. Me and a close friend chose to build the website using Squarespace and took guidance from our mentors as to how the event would be characterized. We created a logo for the event and began drafting the website. Since each year a new group of students will come in and build off of the past year’s success, the website as it exists now has changed in a few ways from the website I helped to build. However, some key aspects of the flow and important pages has remained.
The main UX choice that was made when developing the website back in 2019 was use a menu to provide clear navigation for the different users. Doing so allowed us to keep the main page of the website as clean as possible, only including basic information on the event as well as a large button for schools to register through once registration opened. The rest of the website focused on thanking our sponsors and posting images and videos from social media of the event or announcements of speakers for the upcoming event.
servusconference.com
Social Media
In addition to the website, I was tasked with managing the conference’s social media page. This involved posting regular content to the page leading up the event. Some of these promotional events included announcing registration details as well as speakers leading up to the event. We wanted these posts to look minimal while still being eye-catching to people just casually scrolling through their feed. To ensure that our followers would see our announcements, we used clear photos and deliberate tags in the caption to increase the probability that a user would see it and read it.
@servuscon