Creative Online Communication for Social Change: Key Learnings

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Training Across Distance 5: Creative online communication for social change

Thursday April 15th, 2010 NOON EST

Facilitator: Valérie Plante, Girls Action Foundation

Description: Girls Action is building social networking into our communications planning.  We will share our key learnings and hear from innovative organizations that are tapping into social networking as a way to communicate to the world.  Join this conversation to contribute your learning or to learn more about using Facebook, Twitter and other interactive media tools.

Key Learnings: 

1. Make a plan where you will describe:

• Which tools do you want to develop (facebook, twitter, blogs, etc.)
• What are the objectives (goals) related to these tools (raise profile of your work, promote your program, engage the girls in your group, etc.)
• How you are going to achieve these goals (step by step)
• Who are the leads and supports
• Timeline

(You will find an example of a social media plan attached below)

2.  Create an engagement strategy and guidelines

You have ideas and a plan? Great! Now, how are you going to sustain these tools once they are implemented? With an engagement strategy and some guidelines to support other people’s engagement with all these new tools!

• Have a creative session where people can share their knowledge about how to use social media tools.
• Decide who will be posting messages and decide together what is appropriate or not to post. Figure out the tone of the language you want to use.  Find examples of the style of messages the team likes or dislikes, determine what is relevant content or not, and establish guidelines together.
• Use these sessions as a way to raise the energy, motivate your team, and take some of the fear of these unfamiliar tools away.
• Make sure that the up-keep of these tools is treated as a task and that it is part of the workplan: in order to work, social media needs love and nurturing!
• You can create a calendar so everyone knows when it is their time to post or write a blog.
• Ideally, one person would be in charge (the lead) of all the social media tools. This person plays the role of the moderator, can  tweak some of the posts if necessary, make sure that nothing “weird” that contradicts your organization’s message or intentions is being posted on your page (by friends on facebook, twitter, etc) and keep track of the posting calendar.

(You will find examples of our engagement tools attached below)
 

3. Best practices and tips:

• Facebook and twitter: the key is to cross-post and comment (re-tweet) other people’s posts/profiles/events, etc.

Advantages of commenting and cross-posting:

• It shows your appreciation of other people’s work (and these people will be more likely to also profile your work/program, look at your page, etc.)
• It can generate more traffic on your own page
• It helps you to post great content on your page
• You stay connected with the community

Be creative about your fb page:

• Put a different image than your usual logo (if you have one). Try to change it once in a while (it creates an element of surprise)
• Tap into other peoples’ networks to find key people or organizations who might be interested in your work
• Invite people to “follow” you whenever you have the chance.
• Promote your social media tools through:
  • Your email signature (see document attached)
  • Your website
  • Program/event invitations
     
• When you meet people of interest, search for them on fb and twitter and invite them to become friends.
• Do the same for the participants in your programs/projects/events
•  Be responsive to what is happening: After a while, you may want to reconvene with your team to see what works, what doesn’t, where you feel energy, etc.

Don’t forget that social media is a lab. Every day, people find different ways to use it and adapt it to their own needs.  Do the same and don’t be afraid to experiment!

Resources:

• Girls Action Blog Themes IDEAS
• Blogging Schedule Jan-July 2010
• Embedding a video
• Social Media communications strategy
• http://it.timeraiser.ca/online-communications-strategy
• http://it.timeraiser.ca/cloudcomputing
• Twitter: http://it.timeraiser.ca/twitter
• Facebook: http://it.timeraiser.ca/facebook
• Blogging strategy: http://it.timeraiser.ca/creately/im-tools