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MAKE IT MATTER
As you mobilise your colleagues, you should introduce the idea of genuine and useful engagement with social media users. One hundred people taking an e-action will usually be more valuable than one hundred likes on Facebook, so while general buzz is good for building online relationships, from time to time you will want to direct your online networks to do something for you. So, as in any communications channel, remind people to think about the purpose of their social media activity. What are you having this conversation for? To raise money? Influence policy? Promote services? Ultimately, digital communications should translate into something happening in the real world – otherwise it’s just pixels on a screen. It’s easy to forget that.
A place for listening Another great benefit of digital communications is that it can enable much deeper engagement with your audiences and provide you with very quick insight into what they are thinking and talking about. We used to run a lot of focus groups to help us learn from our audiences, which are expensive. But now they tell us what they think on Twitter. That dialogue doesn’t dictate our corporate messages but it gives us great insight, and if there’s a serious mismatch then we know there’s something wrong with our strategy. Hilary Cross, Macmillan Cancer Support
Social media and other user-generated content gives your audiences a voice, which can be a great resource for organisations that can mobilise them around their cause. But it can also pose a risk as negative remarks are often accepted unchecked and can spread like wildfire, causing reputational damage regardless of their factual basis. Few non-profit organisations face a daily battle with their public reputation but they do need to be prepared to respond and engage quickly when challenges come up. And so listening to the conversations can help you learn a lot, both good and bad. Despite these opportunities, the people we spoke to felt there are still few non-profit organisations using social media really effectively and that there is currently too much fixation on counting ‘likes’ and ‘follows’ without enough thought about the depth of that engagement and the real value to