It’s a great feeling when an email hits your inbox that you’ve been accepted to a conference. The Motor MVB project team was thrilled to receive two such emails for the 2018 Broadcast Education Association Conference, where the team presented a poster and panel discussion.

Since the summer, I’ve led a team of Emerging Media Design & Development graduate students working with Motor MVB–a nonprofit philanthropic effort to increase awareness and participation in boys’ and men’s volleyball–on a communication plan that includes a social media campaign, original journalistic storytelling and an alternate reality game. We are all in our second year of the program and finishing up our final semester with a trip to Las Vegas.

But the conference, and the preparation for it, are about more than just spending a few days in warmer weather (although that will be nice, too.) Our team has learned a lot and grown together throughout the process of considering our project’s importance for learning and scholarship, writing a paper, and communicating our work in a visual poster format.

For the conference, my team organized a panel titled, “Grow Online Engagement with Sports Narratives and Interactive Experiences: ARGS, Social Media, and Original Storytelling.” Panelists (in addition to myself) are

• Dr. Jennifer Palilonis (moderator)–Director of the Center for EMDD
• Dr. Ian Punnett–author and former national media personality
• Dr. Colin Walker–assistant professor of digital production at Valdosta State University
• Brian Hamilton–adjunct journalism professor at The University of West Alabama, CEO of West Alabama Sports Central and sports director of the Northport Gazette

Our team was also accepted into the Research-in-Progress digital poster division. The title of this presentation is “Social Media Storytelling: Building a Brand and Engaging Sports Fans.” This poster will explain how our team used an audience-centered approach to create our social media effort. This poster will also explain the framework we created to engage athletes and the audience in the creation of storytelling content, which uses traditional and nontraditional storytelling methods and platforms.

Not only does presenting at conferences like BEA help promote the Center for EMDD, but it also serves as an opportunity for me and my team to gain knowledge and skills during workshops and sessions as well as connect with other experts working in these disciplines. This experience is definitely something that will be on my resume as I’m looking for a job post-graduation. Building and managing this project has been a really beneficial experience; however, landing not one but two spots at a conference takes that experience to another level, showing that our work is recognized as influential and important by experts in the field.
This post was written by second-year EMDD student Kylie Leonard.