IMAGE VIA UNSPLASH.COM, BY SYLWIA BARTYzEL
ONLINE MESSAGING ACROSS GEOGRAPHIES CHALLENGES & CONSIDERATIONS BY CHERY CONTEE, ADRIANA DAKIN, ABIGAIL SIMMONS, FISSION STRATEGY
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igital campaigns for nonprofits are often global and can reach audiences everywhere with the right international messaging, visuals, targeting, and channels. Challenges may arise with outreach to diverse populations due to differences in languages, cultures, and practices in technology. How can organizations succeed in messaging to an international audience? Let’s look at the example of a live campaign that we’re working on at Fission – the Varkey GEMS Foundation’s Global Teacher Prize. This Prize hopes to do for K-12 education what the Nobel Prize has done for science & human rights. One special nominated teacher
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will be selected for an award of $1 million. Visuals are Vital When targeting an international audience, images are vital to help bridge the language gap. Fission’s Creative Director, Martha Ormiston, says: “Images have become a necessity for successful online engagement. Users are turned off by huge walls of text and image posts do the best in social media. Basically, to put it even simpler: the internet is boring without pictures.” However, organizations often do not have a stockpile of great images needed to run a whole campaign. Luckily, you can source images
through Creative Commons (see our blog post on this to learn about attribution licenses so that you make sure you are sourcing visuals legally.) Your narrative arc and timeline for a campaign should have images planned for moments that touch the wider cultural zeitgeist beyond your organization. In these Creative Commons-sourced visuals below, we celebrated Malala on Malala Day, and World Cup coaches and players during the 2014 games – the largest volume of social traffic ever. On a technical note, make sure you include the image attribution in small text, and overlay text (a quote, for example) short enough to fit inside Facebook’s 20% grid rule for promoting visuals. You’ll make the most of the work on your images by promoting them from your Facebook timeline or with Power Editor, where you can even target by role (such as “teacher” for the Global Teacher Prize campaign), and on Twitter via promoted posts. Perhaps you’re already making the most of online ads and want to go further – using a tool like ActionSprout can help you engage visually while also offering your audience one-click easy engagement. This tool also creates high quality email lists – every time someone likes or comments on an action, their email is captured. Once you have a great email list, upload it to Attentive.ly (disclosure: our sister company!) to see whom your strongest influencers are, what they care most about, and to ask for their help! Multichannel Includes Mobile Texting How can nonprofits effectively create a campaign that is appropriate for an audience that may have low media skills or for populations with varying Internet access? The use of social media in one region may be vastly different in another, so balancing the right messaging channels is essential