Afterglow

A campaign and text message service aimed to combat student loneliness at university

Brand & campaign design →

Afterglow is a text message service aimed to combat student loneliness at university. Students at university are a lonely demographic of people with up to 50% of students admitting to deliberating leaving university due to issues such as loneliness. The aim of Afterglow is to reduce this number.

Collaborative project with Charlotte Hooper.

Afterglow works as text messages will be received by the student at what research shows is the loneliest time of day; twilight. Twilight is when the sun is setting and the day is drawing to a close and is considered the time of each day where people feel at their lowest.

The aim of each message is to send a gentle nudge and reminder to the student that they are not alone and there is always someone who cares. Some messages are funny and silly, but others have a more serious tone with the aim of lifting the mood of a student who faces many stresses during their life at university.

Afterglow is there to remind students that it is ok and normal to feel lonely at times during university and it is something that the majority of students will experience.

Through our own primary research and student surveys we found that 90% of students said they felt lonely and 80% said more tools are needed to combat loneliness beyond joining a sports club like universities suggest. Our research shows that the loneliest time of day is twilight; when the sun is setting and the day is drawing an end. We chose to focus on reducing loneliness at this specific time of day and ultimately demonstrating that someone out there cares.

Our message designs have a consistent style throughout using a bubble like a text message. We used a gradient on the bubble that changes over the week period - getting lighter over the 7 days to link with the sunset theme. We used the “sent” time to not only make it more realistic but also to display when the twilight time was that day. The messages themselves are random and funny to appeal more to students. Still keeping the positivity of the nudge in the message but with a more lighthearted tone. 

Creating A Community

Another aspect of the solution is to follow the Afterglow Instagram (@afterglow_uk). It creates a community of followers of fellow university students and allows them to interact through the page.

To encourage engagement within our campaign we set up a place for people to share their twilight time to link people together with their own sunsets. It works by people taking a picture of their sunset, uploading it to their story on Instagram and using our @afterglow_uk tag so that we could then share it to our story for all our followers to see. It brought people together as students are able to compare their sunsets. By putting our @ on their story it also helped us promote the campaign and we gained more followers.