Six tips for enhancing your charity’s social media strategy and practice

To be honest with you, I’m beyond excited that DSC has published my new book, Social Media for Voluntary Organisations. In celebration,I want to share my top tips for creating a powerful and impactful social media strategy for your charity. 

Dare to dance with the beast with many heads 

I get it, you might be wary of engaging with social media – the proverbial beast with many heads. Lots of charities feel that way. On one hand, you understand social media offers many benefits – it creates spaces where we can connect, interact, socialise, work, play, shop, study, campaign, volunteer and debate. On the other, it’s fraught with challenges – social media is used by some for spreading misinformation, violence and hate, fuelling division, mistrust, depression, self-harm and even civil unrest. Given the wide-ranging benefits and risks, it’s important to be confident that engaging on social media will be a valuable use of your precious resources. If you think of social media as a game of darts (I will stretch this analogy to unfeasible lengths in what follows!), now is the time to decide whether you want to play the game or to lock the board away in your cupboard. It’s worth considering your key stakeholders – who they are, where they are, and what you would want to achieve by communicating with them through social media. Given that more than 60%1 of the world’s population are active on social media, rising to almost 80%2 of people in the UK, it’s likely that you’ll find a sizeable number of your beneficiaries, supporters, partners and donors are using it, and if they are, then it’s probably a good idea for you too.  

Create a social media strategy  

Being social media-active without a strategy is like randomly throwing darts at the board hoping to hit the bullseye – you might get lucky, but you’re unlikely to achieve consistent, targeted results. Investing some time in creating a strategy will ensure that you’re making informed decisions about your strategic objectives for social media activity and how you plan to achieve them. This should involve taking stock and planning for the long term, before you even think about content creation. First, evaluate your current practice and outcomes, then scan the horizon for new trends and technologies, develop security protocols and branding guidelines, and plan key events and milestones. This will put you in a great position to set strategic goals, choose your platforms, create content plans, design engaging and actionable content, understand what resources you’ll need to devote to this work, and how to measure the extent to which you’re achieving your goals. Creating a strategy puts in place some guardrails around your dartboard, so you can be confident you’ll at least hit the board.  

Identify and manage risk 

Take a systematic approach to managing the risks of engaging with social media by identifying things that could potentially go wrong and putting in place systems to avoid or minimise any chance of negative impacts. For example, limit the risk of your accounts being hacked by limiting access to a named group of trusted individuals, protecting login details using encrypted formats, and creating a rota for out-of-hours monitoring. Using social media management software that requires central approval of all posts can minimise the risk of inappropriate posts going out, social media backlashes and even legal action. You can reduce the likelihood of another common risk – inadvertently sharing misinformation or disinformation – by developing alliances with trusted partners and requiring staff to fact-check before sharing content from other sources. Effective risk management means ensuring your fellow players stand well clear of the board! 

Create connected communities 

Next, focus on building connected communities of like-minded stakeholders, including beneficiaries, supporters, volunteers, donors, partners, and others working in your field. Building a sense of community and belonging is important for all charities, which strive to make the world a better place, and online communities are just as important as offline ones. On social media, you can build connected communities by following others and asking others to follow you, demonstrating appreciation of your stakeholders, participating in conversations about your cause, and engaging with authentic influencers and ambassadors who share your charity’s vision. Creating connected communities gives you some friendly teammates to support and encourage you as you step up to the ochee (that’s the darts throwing line, to extend the darts analogy).  

Embed contagious content 

Alongside this, you’ll want to embed your content with contagious characteristics such as high-arousal emotions (such as joy, surprise, shock, awe and anger), practical value (such as useful and credible information and clear calls to action), and storytelling narratives (giving your posts a beginning, a middle and an end). Contagious characteristics like these make your content more memorable, sticky and spreadable, enhancing the likelihood social media users will engage with it, share it and act on it – whether you’re asking for donations, recruiting volunteers or building public support for policy change. Embedding contagious characteristics in your social media content is like repointing your darts – all the better to nail that treble! 

Design creative campaigns  

Finally, conjure up some creative campaigns – focused initiatives or programmes designed to achieve specific goals through concentrated bursts of coordinated activity over a limited timeframe such as a few weeks or months. This will help your charity avoid the incredibly easy mistake of using social media to simply report on day-to-day news and events, without ever really thinking about the message this sends about your work and cause, or what you are asking of stakeholders. Creative campaigns are built around a novel, entertaining or imaginative creative concept – these might be challenging to think up, but the outcomes will be well worth it. For example, Save the Children’s ‘If London were Syria’ campaign, which prompted social media users to imagine it were British children experiencing the same horrors of war that Syrian children were going through, resulted in hundreds of thousands of social media views, shares and comments, 150 articles in national and international media, and a 93% increase in cash donations. Bullseye! 

Overall, being present and engaged on social media can increase your charity’s visibility and profile, improve engagement online and off, and achieve important strategic goals, but it’s crucial to be mindful of the risks and take practical steps to minimise potential harms.  

For more tips and advice on social media strategy and planning, check out Social Media for Voluntary Organisations here.