Widening The Horizon of Social Awareness

Social Media and the changing face of Social Sector

The new media has opened windows of new possibilities for its users. It transcends the boundaries of time, space, culture and race. Users get live updates of events on their gadgets round the clock. Keeping in touch with friends and associates irrespective of physical distance and location has become really simple, entertaining and fast. In terms of business information dissemination, the cost of marketing one’s cause through various channels of the new media is negligible in comparison to other channels pertaining to the traditional media. New media does not involve role of any intermediary and passes on messages directly from the sender to the receiver. Majorly due to a changing scenario in terms of resource mobilisation – both financial and human, the development sector organisations – the non-governmental organisations (NGOs)/ non-profit organisations (NPOs)/ and civil society organisations (CSOs) have adopted an aggressive stance of positioning themselves among their target audiences. Their approach to the respective field of work, cause of existence and issues that require professional attention to be resolved have started getting highlighted and specific calls for actions are found to be mentioned. Virtual campaigns are being organised to draw mass attention towards those causes and promote more champions of the cause in the society. This is a paradigm shift from their earlier stance which involved relationship management with the target communities and the donor/ partners. Resource constraints compelled the organisations to consider this kind of a shift. And in achieving this mission they started adopting well-structured communications strategies involving various media platforms, with specific importance adhered to social media. Advancement in tele-footprint and internet had already revolutionised the information dissemination structure, ensuring reach to the remote pockets of the world. Social media has furthered the ease by taking several of the remote population on board where they can directly participate in the information flow and contribute in their own ways in carrying the messages forward.

Engaging with a wider mass

Social media channels provide direct marketing facility with minimum role of other intermediaries. Traditional media engagement required the strategic and managerial role of advertisement agencies in between the client and the media houses to promote the brand. It naturally involved a complex system of strategic and financial management. With the advent of the new media the requirement to rely only on that structure has reduced considerably. With in-house competencies the organisations can now easily promote their cause and showcase their work to the target audience directly. Apart from facilitating the direct interactions, the media also helps expanding the outreach of target audience to an extent that was never possible before. At this juncture, with tweets, Instagram photos, Facebook posts and or LinkedIn updates, all these organisations can easily become household names for people across various walks of life. Earlier the reach remained confined to donors and government ministries primarily. Positioning the organisation to school and college students, job seekers & young professionals, teachers, journalists and corporates or industries, before, required much continuous concerted effort and lump sum financial investment. For organisations that remains fund constrained even for their main course of activities and overhead costs round the year, marketing through social media channels thus seems to be extremely lucrative and beneficial as an option.

There is least cost implication to maintain profiles at various social media channels; paying for the social media content and designing staff is mostly all that is required to be funded by the CSOs. With the traditional media tools like banners, hoardings and newspaper advertisements, even if the message was reaching a large section of the population, their reaction to it was never palpable immediately. That is not the situation anymore with the advent of social media. Live responses and scope of engagement with the target audience are now largely ensured by the social media posts by means of re-tweets, replies, comments, shares and last but not the least – reactions. The primary objective of public relations i.e. building the brand image has thus become more lively and spontaneous through the use of social media. Cause campaign, this creates longer term and deeper impact in people’s mind. Campaigns need continuous engagement at a stretch varying in between a week to a month on social media channels. It would cost a fortune for these NGOs to plan such a campaign on TV or newspaper and would not have produced much immediate result or generate scope for interaction with the communities. An international organisation like Charity Water had used 30 compelling stories of women under 30 years of age from remote places of Ethiopia to celebrate the cause of women empowerment and access to water to highlight the international women’s day. The work of these organisations thus, does not remain intangible and unquantifiable to common mass anymore. They have come to know who these organisations are working with and to address which types of issues of what magnitude.

Mobilising resources and generating actions

Social media helps in building a community and develop a shared understanding of the cause that the organisations promote and convince the followers about the effectiveness of their approach. The basic objective of engagement is to disseminate information, but building stronger ties with existing stakeholders and local communities also happens with regular activities on social media. Different types of community posts are linked with this goal: interaction with other organizations- advocacy and or appreciation; conversations with the public; and live posting about various events.

The organisations proactively post questions, organise polls and share discussion topics to initiate interaction and conversations with their audience.This process of pro-active and interactive engagement encourages the online community to become the NGO’s ambassadors. The benefit of social media is optimum if the participants and followers speak about the NGO and its cause, on their own free will. There are several instances, like that of a donor organisation like Global Funds for Women who encourage link-building via bloggers and/or photo-video artists. People who are promoting an event often want to ensure their participation so that discussion around the event gets more widespread by means of re-tweets and shares, thereby ultimately reaching out to a larger section of social media users.

Social media contributes in mobilising resources. The decision makers at philanthropies and CSRs need to be convinced about the effectiveness of these organisations in terms of community development and commitment towards their goals by showcasing their own work and advocating the cause in general, The organisations attempt at building the trust of the donors and supporters. But it is true that basis such trust and further close exploration of the ground work, funding becomes easier and secured. In fact more donors and stakeholders are reached out through these channels. Along with finance, now a days social recruitment i.e; recruiting candidates for various roles using social platforms as databases or for advertising, is also on the cards.

It reinforces and acknowledges ties of the organisation with its implementation and resource partners. It is one of the major pillars of social media strategy for any organisation to post on the partnership based interventions impacting lives of a wider section of the population. Such a gesture not only leaves a good will message about the collaborative efforts but also starts connecting with the partner’s followers. So it directly contributes to the NGO’s visibility on social media, helps gather more followers. Social media not only helps disseminating the messages but also contribute ingenerating actions.

Spreading the importance of their work through volunteers’ and staff’s experience is a common method used to mobilise more people with similar interest areas towards these organisations. Many of the NPOs like Teach for India, Child Rights & You (CRY) and others share real life experience of their staff and volunteers who in turn champion the organisations through their stories. For e.g; Teach for India fellow, Sajida Vadgama, spoke on the effectiveness of the fellowship program in helping her spread the cause of education among underprivileged children at a large scale.

Creating a socially responsible generation

As social networks are built on trust, they will succeed only if the organisations allow time for individuals to build authentic working relationships.

Followers on social media can become more aware & relate to the cause championed by social organisations more easily if actual people on social media help spread the message than the official account of the organisation alone doing the job. A more human and effective engagement thus results in increased awareness about the cause of the NGO. It helps build more connectedness with the mission and work of the NGO. Also from the perspective of advocacy – followers become more aware about broader issues concerning development and their role in addressing them. So it also creates an opportunity to call for an action and more human engagement. Funding avenues: donor community engagement is facilitated through the social media posts, acknowledging donors’ support in helping their work as well as creating posts on possible collaboration opportunities and requirement of donation pave the path for more fund flow. Donors become more aware about the goals and activities of the organisations. Their confidence in funding the organisations increases with regular acquaintance of the latter’s work, The non-profits use social networking sites also to engage with funders by posting donation information and giving recognition to donors. Social media helps people to donate in a more easy and transparent manner. Information on the NGO’s social media touch points therefore need to be simple, clear and user-friendly. This runs counter to the traditional view that as much contact information on donors has to be procured as possible. The opportunity to co-create and learn about the sector and competitors is what social media offer to the NGOs. The media facilitates more active interactions and sharing of opinions. The Case Foundation, for example, has its Make It Your Own Awards site to offer people an opportunity to submit ideas for improving their communities, serve as reviewers, and then vote on the best ideas for the foundation to fund. And of course Social media is not a silo and can be implemented in parallel with more traditional marketing and PR channels.Depending on how compelling the nature of the content is, a monthly online newsletter can still be effective. Local reporters can be roped in using trending hash tags on Twitter to draw attention to a campaign or an issue. NGOs who successfully lever on social media as a new engagement channel understand that it is not just about using new technologies. Just because someone is young and has grown up with social media does not necessarily mean they have any clue how to represent an entity online or engage with various audiences in a strategic manner. NGOs, like any other business, have to increase leverage and effectiveness by thinking and working in new ways. It is about reimagining social change with a network mind set.

Evaluating Social Media Effectiveness; A Mismatch with real Engagement

One challenge for small nonprofits appears to be defining and measuring the success of social media sites in terms of public engagement. The non-profits pay close attention to basic metrics of their social media sites like numbers of followers, shares, likes, and growth trends. These metrics reflect the size of audiences and how much interaction occur on their social media sites, and thus speak to the information and community goals of public engagement. However, analytical tools would give little information about performance in terms of achieving the action goal. It remains obscure whether social media visitors are being effectively transformed into highly engaged members or donors, unless there is first hand claim on behalf of the donors or members about it. Without having clear methods in place to match these sets of information, it is extremely difficult to further engage with the audiences.

Nevertheless, the importance and effectiveness of different social media channels in positioning organisations in the minds of the target audiences is beyond questioning as on date. In fact, the question is not whether to have presence on the social media or invest in such a marketing strategy, but the quest is how effectively one can engage in it to get the best results in terms of information dissemination and generating awareness. Afterall, there is no denial of what Seth Godin, the famous American author, has got to say about social media – “marketing is no longer about the stuff you make, but about the stories you tell.” And when it comes to storytelling, what other better means exists in today’s world than social media?