Managing social media for a charity

Guest blog by Kerrie Carter, Worthing Churches Homeless Projects

As a PR and Social Media Apprentice, I know first-hand what it takes to get a charity noticed online. There are so many platforms out there and it can sometimes be hard to choose which is best for the needs of your particular charity. You should really stick to two and do them well. Develop these platforms so you have a good following on each, aiming for key decision-makers and opinion-formers. It’s important that your followers should be invested in the service you’re providing.

Working for a charity that helps the homeless, I have to be incredibly careful about the message I put on social platforms as it can so easily be misinterpreted. There is a huge stigma attached to the topic of homelessness and every person has their own opinion to give, which they like to do on social media. It’s important to be neutral to all of this and remember your charity’s aims; those are what you have to deliver no matter what.

Besides, the majority of people who follow you on social media are genuinely interested in the service you give and want to support it in any way, and that’s the valuable thing you need to focus on.

Facebook is a popular platform for our target audience so I tend to post on there the most as we get more engagement. Occasionally we get a negative comment which I may hide if likely to cause offence to clients/supporters, but in most cases I don’t delete a comment as everyone is entitled to their opinion. When posting, I try to stick to the same tone and this is reflected by my colleagues as well so the audience knows what to expect from the charity. We also get the chance to be quite personal as it’s a fairly small, local charity and those in our area are the audience we want to be targeting. I find posts with photos attached to them always work the best for our audience as they like to see the work the charity is doing.

Twitter, on the other hand, is less prominent for us. We get more support from local businesses on here but mostly through the form of retweets and favourites. When we team up with other organisations, Twitter is a valuable tool for tagging and updating people on what’s happening. The same goes for fundraising events however, it’s easier to document these through photos on Facebook as this is where our dominant audience lies.

Scheduling tools like Hootsuite are brilliant for managing your social media accounts and for us, ensures there is content going out over the weekend so the account doesn’t suffer with loss of traffic.

There are other platforms we are considering using, such as Pinterest or Instagram, and we do post appropriate videos on YouTube, but since our following is constantly growing, Facebook and Twitter are the main forms of promotion. They are easy to use and can put out a powerful message although restricted to 140 characters on Twitter. Now that’s what I call effective marketing.

Kerrie had 1-2-1 social media training with us as part of her development as an apprentice with Worthing Churches Homeless Projects www.wchp.org.uk