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Women’s Resource Centre’s Journey into Social Media

By Leah Williams

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Leah’s top tips

Leah has the following suggestions for anyone taking their first steps into using social media as part of their organisation’s strategy for communication and engagement:

• Be bold but not reckless. It’s your charity’s reputation on the line of course, but organisations need to start being more open. It can feel quite exposed or vulnerable, but you have to give up a little bit of control to allow people to communicate and engage with you.
• You don’t have to be perfect but you must be human. That means you have to sound like a human being, you have to talk to people and not just broadcast your press releases. You have to admit mistakes and give opinions.
• Experiment. All these things are quite new and there are lots of ways of using them that haven’t been discovered yet. Try things out and see what works.
• Learn from other people. Listen and look at what other people are doing before you dive in.
• Don’t think of it as just shiny new toys. It’s a whole new way of communicating and might require a big change in organisational culture. Who is allowed to ‘speak’ on behalf of the organisation? How does information flow?
• Know yourself. Be clear about your identity, your messages, your voice. This will make it much easier to know what you should be talking about and who you should be talking to.
• Know your audiences. Who are you trying to connect with? What are they interested in? Where are they?

Next steps…

If you read this far, it’s likely you’re at least a little bit interested in taking forward social media use in your organisation. So what next? Here are some things you can do after reading this article (ok maybe tomorrow):

• Investigate different social media platforms as an individual (join Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, navcaboodle etc.)
• Set up organisational profiles on some of these (basic info, point to your main website, claim your spot so unauthorised people don’t).
• Start internal conversations about social media and how it could work in your organisation. There will be lots of ways that it won’t work, but there will be ways in which it can really support your aims. What will you need to change to make it work?

Other things to think about

Once you’ve experimented, listened and learned, looked at which tools are the best strategic fit for your organisation it’s time to turn your mind to matters such as:

• Getting internal buy-in (bringing others in your organisation along with you)
• Time, resources (how much of these to have to devote? How you are going to maintain your presence on your chosen social media platforms)
• Policies (e.g. who has permission to speak, post etc?)
• Who is responsible?
• Openness, transparency, making mistakes
• Organisational identity and voice
• How useful is it really?

More Resources

Leah Williams’ slides – Women’s Resource Centre – our journey into social media

Rachel Beer’s slides for charity communications - Social Media for Change – Bringing charities and supporters closer together 

NFPtweetup wiki – A meet up of Twitter users - and those interested in the potential of Twitter and other social media - who work at, or with, non-profit organisations. NFP tweetup on twitter; NFPtweetup on flickr; NFPtweetup on facebook.

1in10: A case study in social media campaigning – Slides of AmnestyUK campaign for International Women’s Day