I've been buried putting the final touches on some new curriculum for social media and nonprofit peer learning approaches. It's the dance floor and the balcony - both strategy and tactics but deployed in a lab with focused experiments, measurement, reflection and learning from peers. And, most importantly, designed for people to have fun doing it. (I'm drawing my inspiration from 4th grade science experiments and science fair.)
To build an effective strategy, one needs to identify an objective that links to a communications goal or theory of change and, of course, identify the audience.
I've been translating different audience analysis frameworks to a nonprofit context. These include:
- Audience Target Group Identification: This is the most important question and may be informed by research or listening. Who is target group you need to reach with your overall communications objective? For this, I'm drawing on the Smart Chart of Kristen Grim and from working with a cadre of smart nonprofit communications folks who have remixed the social media game.
- Primary and Secondary Social Media Research: Once the audience is defined, it is important to fill in the gaps with primary or secondary research. The primary research includes surveys, interviews, and observation. I've been collecting secondary research and stats on social media usage and typically share synthesis of the most recent information in every workshop.
- Socialgraphics: I have been using the Forrest Social Technographics framework, but it was developed a while ago and the environment has changed. A few months ago, Charlene Li and Jeremiah Owyang, offered a free webinar about Socialgraphics or understanding your audiences' social behavior. They presented a framework called "The Enagement Pyramid" which is based on Jake McKee's 90-1-9 rule and gave different corporate use cases for social behavior for each level. I used the framework to analyze nonprofit examples. I also created some fun group exercises for folks to learn the concepts.
Pscyho Socialgraphics!!
In thinking about this, I felt there was something important missing. But, then I stumbled across a post by my colleague Adrian Chan who is an expert in social interaction design and I've had the opportunity to get to know and talk shop with for hours. His recent post Why User Competencies Matter in Social Design was a major breakthrough for me and circled me back to Jennifer Aaker's research.
In designing for social participation, Adrian Chan urges us to consider user goals and needs — even interests, features, functionality, and adoption. Best practices and popular ways of using social media guide us in our decisions. What is also important to consider users psychological motivations and build that into your strategy. Here's his suggestions:
Goals and rewards – Consider the kinds of goals you might set and the rewards that may be earned by users who reach them. These might be personal goals and rewards levels, tasks, challenges, or points. Or social goals and rewards, resulting in status, ranking, visibility, lists, features and spotlighting members.
Moods and feelings – Give expressive users ways in which to communicate their moods and feelings. For example, emoticons and gifts, or icons to be used and exchanged with friends or attached to messages and content. These small gestures, while small, can be curiously compelling.
Knowledge and learning – For users interested in research, information, bookmarking, and more search and browse-related activities, provide ways to share discoveries. Capture those learned moments and make them visible — perhaps surface and validate experts and top contributors.
Giving and receiving – For users who enjoy social transactions provide gifts and a means of passing them around privately and publicly. Gifting is a highly social form of communication, and besides being kind, engages a sense of reciprocity in most of us. So it’s naturally contagious.
Helping and assisting – Some users are just naturally good at paying attention to others, and enjoy helping and assisting those with needs or questions. Design ways to surface these needs and create channels by which helpers can pitch in.
Reviewing, recommending, and rating – Users equipped with opinions and a sense of taste can make valuable reviewers and recommenders. Design ways to capture their contributions as social content. This can be designed then into lists, favorite, trends, news and more.
Asking and answering – In a world of search, there are still many occasions when users want to ask questions and get personal answers. And in a world of search results, there are those who enjoy sharing their knowledge, expertise, and help. But questions disappear if they are not captured and paid attention to.
Announcing and sharing – There are users so on top of news that furnishing them with means to announce their discoveries makes for an easy and effective way to keep social content fresh and interaction active. Topical organization, along with trends, help users sort and filter what’s relevant to them.
What do you know about the target audience you are trying to reach with your social media strategy?
Social Media was at one point of time just about what we read or saw in news or heard over the radio. Then came in social media as an effective mechanism to be able to catalyse change.Maybe the attention its got is relatively new but no denying that its become today such a strong change maker.
I am a lawyer by profession and presently a student of human rights law in my masters at India. Going back to my under graduation days i can say social media helped me bring together people for a cause time and again. Today i use it effectively with maybe another handful of lawyers spread over the country who communicate via mails and help in their own small ways . My theory for a change has some linkages to my law specific profession:
1. How to get Communities like the litigating, practicing lawyers effectively engaging on social media: It is still a fact that in India the lawyers who are practicing,are working in firms have a very very closed view on usage of social media tools. It is important to get them initiated into usage of social media. This becomes important for pro bono services. Some lawyers are ready to help people in distress in pro bono cases and in India you need a strong network of such lawyers. Getting the practitioners all across connected via social media tools ensures that this network is able to deliver services for the masses who donot have enough means for access to justice. Today i am a part of a small group like this, but we are people who are in a younger age bracket and have been using social media for sometime. The change is needed in the whole fraternity where in the sensitivity and readiness of lawyers to take up pro bono cases is encouraged by teaching them how effective social media tools can be for conversing with other like minded professionals etc.
2. Breaking the Myths about Social media: For a community like the lawyers its important to introduce them to the new age social media and what it has come to mean. It is important to make this community to realize that their services can bring about a change in societal access to justice delivery system and more importantly that social media is now not a waste of time but an effective tool for sharing experiences and getting motivated by work that others in their community do. Even as social media experts/trainers engage with professionals from all walks of community it is important that this community is also engaged in breaking their myths, apprehensions etc.
3. Every individual is a change maker: My experience with social media tools has been that conversations, discussions, arguements shared on discussion boards, forums, groups has brought the unconventional professionals to come ahead with ideas that can bring change. A lot of times these discussions have brought ahead an individual who probably would not engage in a certain type of case but is inspired and motivated by following the discusisons and gives his input which becomes an important idea for people like us who are into human rights practicing. It is therefore pertinent to constantly realize that, to bring together an effective change maker group of lawyers who are ready to provide justice delivery services, every lawyer we train in social media tools or even get introduces to such tools becomes an individual who can have an amazing idea.
For me personally i can envisage a system where in we have trained lawyers from all walks of practice in India, in effective communication via social media and such engagement can bring about at least a start of coming together of ideas, brain storming of changes needed and more importantly networks of professionals who are readily available for getting justice to the under served masses.
Megha Bhagat
Advocate
LLM student, NLSIU, Bangalore(Human Rights), India
[email protected]