7th Floor Theatre is a one man operation run by Hayden Burke. He has produced many performances including Australian Open which received glowing reviews and produced other successful plays includingSprout, and Where’s My Money?.

Hayden runs a monthly event at PIP Theatre called PLAYground wherein no-one except the Hayden knows what play will be performed, right up until the actors read the words off a screen and perform them in a process known as cold reading. This is a fun event which fosters local community through showcasing local playwrights and actors and allows everyone to engage with theatre in a relaxed and casual way.

I met the artistic director Hayden Burke at one of these events, when he asked for a volunteer to help grow the 7th Floor social media, with a particular focus on Facebook.

Goal: to grow 7th Floor social media accounts through regular promoting of their monthly PLAYground events in which no one knows anything about the play to be performed until actors perform it and read the lines themselves while performing.

While 7th Floor doesn’t have a website per se, it does have a Linktree where all calls to action is directed to and followers can buy tickets, submit scripts or otherwise learn about 7th Floor as a company through their past productions.

This volunteer arrangement is ongoing and requires me to photograph the events, edit the photos, ideate and write captions, and schedule the posts using the Meta Business platform, with once weekly posts, which increases to 3 the week before a PLAYground event. I really love this this opportunity, as I have enjoyed learning about theatre, watching plays, and learning all about that happens behind the scenes.

I started with Hayden in May of 2025 and in our initial conversations, Hayden expressed his desire to reach 2000 followers on Facebook, and which was achieved in mid March 2026.

My skills in photography, photo editing, and caption writing have improved in this time, in addition to having experienced many great performances by local actors.

I use Lightroom and Photoshop, Meta Suite, and Canva in order to create, edit and schedule content, while relying on the guidance from Sprout Social for posting times that align with 7th Floor scheduling requirements.

Canva Posts typically involve the PLAYground logo and some wordplay involving the word play in line with the event.

As a baseline, I started tracking reach, likes/reacts and shares in early June, and follower growth in early July.

At the present time, I expect Instagram followers to reach 1000 around October. This is, in some part, due to the majority of actors have profiles there, and tagging them increases engagement on that side.

At the time of joining 7th Floor, I didn’t have a professional camera, and so was limited to using my phone camera. In March of 2026, I bought a secondhand Canon R5100, and there is a significant improvement in photograph quality and editing, which is particularly impressive considering I am just as clueless to the action as everyone else is. This includes needing to learn how to deal with constraints around lighting, action and setting. Shooting with camera raw also allows more nuanced editing in Adobe Lightroom, resulting in only using Photoshop to crop, add logos, and add strategic shadows before exporting and publishing.

Most successful posts are ones featuring the writer of the month. While they weren’t the most stylistically consistent with the 7th Floor brand, they do have the advantage of enticing the writer’s existing audience to come to a PLAYground event and watch the wordsmith’s work in a newer, less polished form, in the same way that you might be able recognise a valuable gem in it’s raw state.