Social Media Handbook for Local Red Cross Units
Introduction l Complete Handbook PDF [link to attached document titled 2009.7.16SocialMediaHandbook.doc] l Handbook Powerpoint [embed attached ppt titled Social Media Handbook] l FAQ l Contact
Social Media Handbook
Listen l Learn l Participate l Create l Implement
Social MediaTools
Blogging l Facebook Page l Facebook Cause l Flickr l YouTube l Twitter
Introduction
This handbook is meant for all Red Crossers interested in how social media can help us deliver our mission critical services.
This information will familiarize you with our national social media philosophy, invite you to find, join, and participate in our national social media presence, and guide you in creating your own local social media presence.
You’ll find steps to adopting a social media strategy, best practices from your fellow Red Cross units as well as from outside experts, and an explanation of various social media tools.
We’ve included a powerpoint presentation for you to use however you’d like. Feel free to use the whole thing, cut it up, and/or rearrange it. It’s meant to be a tool both for you to learn from and for you to teach others.
We love building online communities using social media tools, but make no mistake, adopting a social media strategy at your local unit is a significant commitment of your time both daily and long term.
We think it’s worth it, but plan accordingly!
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I balance my personal and professional lives online?
You need to determine your own comfort level in discussing work in your personal communications.
If you choose to talk about your Red Cross work via your personal online accounts, please disclose your relationship with the Red Cross and be responsible.
Remember that the NHQ social media team will see all mentions of the Red Cross and may contact you to praise your discussion, invite you to contribute to our corporate online spaces, or to give you guidance about how to talk about your work responsibly. Always follow our Fundamental Principles.
Should I respond to comments or mentions I see on other blogs?
Your national social media team often responds to mentions you see in the NHQ daily social media update. When needed, we seek the counsel of subject matter experts here and at the chapter level to help us get the right information to people talking about us. You are also welcome to respond to these mentions, but please let us know when you do. If the mention deals with a local chapter issue we consult with the chapter to decide if they want to respond directly or if the NHQ team should assist.
Should I use social media platforms to fundraise?
Many people enjoy social media communities simply because they are free from corporate marketing machines. Our goal is to offer value in these spaces rather than to offer our marketing solicitations. Social marketing/fundraising is a tricky beast so tread carefully here.
Once you build an online community, offer tools that make it easy for your supporters to do the fundraising for you. For example, offer web banners and widgets that link to online fundraising portals.
Most successful social media fundraising events are hosted by individual supporters of the organization they’re supporting. Be inspiring and make it easy for your individual donors to take on a fun(draising) campaign.
What if people leave mean comments on our Red Cross blog, Facebook page, Twitter account, Flickr photos, etc?
If you’re following the guidelines and our philosophy, this won’t happen very often.
Social Networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube don’t currently allow you to moderate comments before they’re published, so you will need someone dedicated to checking in with your sites each day. If you receive a negative comment, evaluate whether it’s constructive. If it is constructive, don’t be afraid to engage the person who left it. Even if you don’t have all the right answers, try to find them together. If the comment is not constructive and does not align with the fundamental principles, you can remove it.
If you have a blog, you can usually moderate your comments before they’re published to your site. Again, if the comment is constructive you should use it as an opportunity to discuss, clear up the misunderstanding, or otherwise work through whatever issue the person is having. If you’d like to moderate your comments, you can use this lawyer-approved language:
“Remember, we encourage you to comment on this blog. All viewpoints are welcome, but please be constructive. We reserve the right to make editorial decisions regarding submitted comments, including but not limited to removal of comments. The comments are moderated, so you may have to be a tiny bit patient in waiting to see them. We will review and post them as promptly as possible during regular business hours (Monday through Friday, 8:30 - 5:30).”
Contact
Please contact Wendy Harman, Manager of Social Media, with any inquiries, comments, suggestions, or questions.
SocialMedia@usa.redcross.org
Listen to the Existing Conversation
- Learn to Listen to the Existing Conversation
- Daily Social Media Update
- NHQ does most of the reputation management and listening for you
- We read and respond to the 400+ daily mentions of the Red Cross on various blogs and social networking sites
- We distribute a daily email that contains the most relevant mentions
ACTION ITEM: Sign up to receive NHQ’s daily social media update via email
Email socialmedia@usa.redcross.org
Subject line: Please add me to the social media update list
Learn the Culture of Social Media
We recommend following these steps in sequential order when you’re first creating a strategy. After that, use this handbook and these steps as a reference when you adapt, expand, and sharpen your strategy.
- Getting Familiar with Social Media
- Initiate personal social media use:
- Explore the tools you’d like to adopt by using them in your personal life first. It’s easier to understand the culture behind tools like Facebook and Twitter when you spend some time posting your own pictures and experiences.
- Follow the personal online communications guidelines
Participate in Our National Social Media Presence
- Learn National’s Social Media Philosophy
- Our Red Cross social media philosophy:
- To use social media to execute the American Red Cross mission of helping people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies
- Our Red Cross social media goals:
- To create an empowered online community of Red Cross supporters to:
- Reenergize the brand
- Raise awareness of our services and mission
- Provide critical information to the public during emergencies
- Engage our employees, volunteers, and supporters in a two way conversation that enhances the mission
- Engage and Participate in National Social Media Presence
- Familiarize yourself with our national social media presence
- Take specific action [link to PDF called Step4CrossNet here] for each platform national is using
Create Your Social Media Strategy
- Study what other Red Cross chapters are doing with their Social Media Presence
- Use these links to find chapter/blood region social media projects
- Take cues from the successes and challenges of your colleagues
- Talk to one another to share information and collaborate
- We encourage you to share each other’s content, but please properly attribute the content by disclosing its origin and linking back to the original source
- Evaluate your chapter’s overall goals
- Think about what you want to achieve
- What are your mission critical services?
- These are the services you should concentrate on providing to your local stakeholders online
- For example, we use Twitter to provide reliable real time information and tips during disasters
- What are your public relations goals?
- Evaluate how you currently correspond with local media, stakeholders, volunteers, donors, and the public
- What are your community goals?
- Evaluate how you’re currently mobilizing volunteers
- Evaluate how you’re currently engaging with your donors
- Evaluating and reviewing your organizational goals, strategy and tactics will inform how you choose to use social media
- Adopt a local social media philosophy
- Create your social media goals
- Write down the goals you hope to achieve by using social media
- Analyze whether your goals make sense and work with your chapter’s strategic plan or other goals
- Create your social media strategy
- Write down the reasons your social media use will complement your chapter’s overall strategic plan
- Write down the types of content you’ll provide and the types of content you’ll solicit from your community
- Create tactics
- Figure out how you’ll execute the strategy to achieve your goals
- Who will be responsible?
- What tools will you use?
- See detailed strategy plans for 5 of the most common social media tools in the navigation buttons above
- How will you develop content?
- How will you engage with your audience?
- How often will you be present?
- What steps will you take to reach your desired outcome?
Implement Your Social Media Strategy
- Tell us what you’re doing and how you are doing it
- Now that you’ve done the hard work of tying your social media goals to your organizational goals, picking the right tools for you, and creating a strategy, you’re ready to tell us!
- We’re interested in cataloguing your:
- Strategy
- Chosen Tools
- Links to your activities
- We will do the following with this information:
- List you on our aggregated national sites
- Cull your strategy for best practices. We hope this will bring you additional fame and glory
- Ask us about any hesitation or issues you encounter
- Implement Your Plan
- Have a short term and long term implementation plan
- Devise a communication plan for your community where you announce that you’re now available in social media spaces
- Consider linking to your social media activities from your main web site
- Stick to your commitments, but be ready to be flexible and make adjustments as you encounter successes and challenges along the way
- Remember that we’re here to support you and ready to help at any time.
- Measure Your Successes and Challenges
- ROI of Your Social Media Strategy
- Define the “R” – what are your expected results?
- Define the metrics – what you want to become
- Determine what you are benchmarking against
- Document your challenges and successes on your chosen tools
- Analyze results, glean insight, take action, measure again
- Documentation
- If you’ve documented your activities as you progress through these steps, you’ve got a great baseline starting point to measure:
- The impact your social media strategy has in your community
- Whether you are able to achieve your original goals
- Write down everything that happens in the beginning so you have a multitude of qualitative and quantitative results to analyze
- Evaluation
- In the beginning, give yourself room to learn and gain insight before you tie yourself to a traditional ROI analysis
- Adopt a “listen, learn, adapt” measurement strategy
- After you’ve tried your strategy for a while, ask yourself what you’ve learned and how you can improve for the next iteration or try.
- ROI Resources
- Send your links and measurement data to national
- You’re doing it! You’re really doing it!
- Make sure we know what you’re up to so we can toot your horn from a national platform
- We strive to be a leader in how nonprofits utilize the social web – you all are a huge part of this goal so don’t be shy about sharing with us
- Together, we are bringing the mission of the American Red Cross into the 21st Century – Congratulations!
Social Media Tools: Blogging
- Evaluate whether blogging is right for your Red Cross unit
- You’ll need a handful of employees and volunteers who are willing to share their personal Red Cross stories regularly. They don’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) professional writers, just good story tellers. They also need to have good judgment and willing to uphold the good name and reputation of the Red Cross online.
- You’ll need enough capacity to commit to updating your blog regularly (at least once every few days)
- You’ll need one or more people to act as editors or keepers of the blog, making sure your contributors update regularly or otherwise providing content
- Explore content that works
- Be creative: [example]
- Engage your audience – invite readers to get involved by posing questions or inviting them to share photos and personal stories
- Tell important stories [example]
- Share your process – how your chapter carries out the mission
- Share successes and challenges
- Be impactful: action oriented posts
- Link to interesting local news
- Find your niche
- Be a subject matter expert
- Be conversational – write like you’d talk to your neighbor
- Feel free to use the first person
- One small Alabama chapter, Covington County, uses a blog as their web presence. This is something you might consider if you have a small chapter. It’s free and easy to update with multimedia content.
- Follow these technical requirements
- Wordpress platform
- Use the Wordpress blogging platform-it’s FREE!
- We recommend using the Digg 3 Wordpress theme
- Name
- Call your blog a blog
- We know there’s a desire to have a clever blog name, but 500 different clever Red Cross blog names dilutes our brand. Keep it simple.
- Masthead (header)
- Show some creativity with your header
- Please follow brand standards
- Please use your chapter lockup or otherwise state the name and location of your chapter/blood region in your header
- Learn from these excellent local Red Cross examples:
Social Media Tools: Facebook Page
More than 200 million people are now on Facebook, making it a prime opportunity to offer Red Cross services to a wide audience. We hope to achieve the following with our collective Facebook presence:
- provide information to help people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies
- mobilize our existing volunteers
- inspire new volunteers and donors
- provide an engagement point for supporters
We encourage you to create a personal Facebook account before you create a presence for your chapter or blood unit. It’s important to take this step so you understand how the platform works, how the culture works, and how you can be effective.
No matter how you choose to use Facebook for your local Red Cross unit, please remember to follow the fundamental principles and remember that we are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit so your chapter must not join any political or religious advocacy groups, pages, or causes.
- Background Information
- Pages work just like personal profiles.
- you can make friends
- you can update your status
- you can upload videos, photos, and articles
- you can create events
- Decide if a Facebook is right for your chapter/blood region
- Is your local audience on Facebook?
- Do a little research (search your area within Facebook)
- Ask your constituents if they use Facebook
- Decide whether you have the time to update your page with valuable content?
- If you choose to launch a Facebook page, you’ll need to update it daily
- You’ll need someone to be responsible for your page and make sure they have a few minutes each day to concentrate on updating it
- Determine whether you have the capacity or desire to interact with your fans on a daily basis here?
- Not only will you need to update your status, post news items, and offer other types of timely content on your page, you’ll need to acknowledge and engage your fans here each day.
- Please assign someone to be responsible for these activities
- Determine whether you can offer local content focused on your local stakeholders?
- Please list your local events, volunteer opportunities, classes, and mission-related news in your area.
- Share it with people who care about you.
- Set out a clear goal that your Facebook page will help you achieve
If you can answer yes to all of the above questions, you are ready to set up a Facebook page.
If you can’t answer yes to all of the above questions, please join our national page and let your stakeholders know they can find Red Cross there.
- What are the rules?
- Name your page after your chapter name or blood region name
- Use your chapter lockup or otherwise identify the name and location of your chapter or blood region in your profile image
- Please host only 1 Facebook page. Below we’ll explore ways you can highlight all you do and your action items with Causes.
Social Media Tools: Facebook Cause
- Background Information
- Causes are basically online fundraisers
- You can set up multiple causes for your campaigns or current issues
- Since we all share a single EIN number, the cause you create will benefit American National Red Cross.
- Is a Facebook Cause right for you?
- Don’t get too excited. You’re probably not going to overflow the coffers with a Cause, but you might just be able to get your passionate supporters to carry your campaign messages for you.
- How to create an effective cause
- Get the name right: the name of your cause should use an active verb and grab attention, like, “Fight the Malaria Bite!” Causes is where you can show some creativity and get people passionate about what you do rather than your official name
- Turn your cause into a campaign: Set an achievable goal – like raising $1,000 – and find a creative way to engage people to invite their friends. The “Power of 10” campaign asked 10 people to invite 10 other people to send $10 each.
- You can strive to always have a fundraiser up on Causes in addition to any generic fan page you may have set up for your chapter or blood region.
- Consider an incentive, like a drawing to attend a free CPR class, a free downloadable CD, etc.
- Use the announcements feature and keep followers in close touch. Make the content different each time (and short)
- Engage your super users. Keep them encouraged and make sure you acknowledge their work.
- Don’t be afraid to try different campaigns here. If one idea doesn’t work very well, shut it down and try something different!
Tools: Flickr
- Background Information
- Flickr is a photo sharing website that allows you to post digital pictures publicly. You can tag and categorize them so they’re easy to find.
- Set up a personal account first
- We encourage you to set up a personal Flickr account so that you understand how awesome Flickr is.
- Decide for yourself how you’d like to present yourself publicly. For example, if you don’t want photos of your children to be accessible to everyone, post them only for friends & family or not at all. Otherwise, have fun and show your personality!
- You are welcome to post photos you have taken for or about the American Red Cross to your personal photo stream, and we encourage you to add these photos to our group.
- Your local chapter may also have a Flickr group. You’ll want to add appropriate photos there, too.
- Participate or start Red Cross discussions in the comments of the group.
- Is a Flickr photostream right for your chapter/blood region?
- Photos are a powerful way to tell your story.
- Do you have an open mind about sharing your photos with the public?
- Will you be happy if your local news outlets use your photos?
- Do you have the ability to obtain releases for the photos you post online?
- Is a Flickr group right for you?
- A group is a place where your supporters can add their own photos.
- Do you have offline events where people take photos? If so, Flickr is a great way to invite these people to contribute to your chapter/blood region. Ask them to add their photos to your group.
- Do you have the capacity to manage and support a Flickr group? We estimate this takes a few minutes each day.
- How to set up a Flickr account:
- Directions for creating a Flickr account
- First, upload your digital photos to your computer and store them wherever you normally would.
- Go to http://www.flickr.com
- Click “sign up”
- Register. Please use your chapter or blood region name
- Go to the page marked “You.”
- Click on “Upload Photos”
- Find the photos you want to share on your hard drive
- Tag the photos: American Red Cross and any additional tags (or keywords) you wish to identify your work
- Directions for creating a Flickr group:
- Sign in to Flickr
- Click “Groups”
- Click “Create a new group”
- Follow the step-by-step guide to create a group for your needs
- Directions for adding your photos to your group:
- Go to your group’s URL
- Click “Join this group”
- Go back to your photos
- Click on the photo you wish to add to the group
- On top of the photo you will see a button that says, “Send to Group” – click that.
- You should see the name of your group in a pop-up window – click it
- You’re done! You’ve added your photo to the pool. Congratulations!
- What are the rules?
- Profile Image
- As with all social media tools, we stress that you use your chapter lockup or other image clearly identifying your location and name
- Account Name
- As with all social media tools, please choose a username that clearly states who you are. For example, “Chicago Red Cross.”
Tools: YouTube
- Is a YouTube channel right for you?
- Do you create video often?
- Do you have events that can be captured by your employees and volunteers on digital and/or flip cameras?
- Do you have creative ideas to tell your story?
- What kinds of videos work on YouTube?
- Reach out: YouTube is an interactive space. Post videos, get a 2 way dialogue going and then stay in the conversation.
- Ask questions
- Make statements
- Call people to action
- Give people a chance to get involved in your work
- Partner up: find your local partners on YouTube and exchange ideas and cross-promote each other’s work
- Keep your content fresh: a steady stream of content will keep your viewers engaged.
- Your subscribers will be notified each time you upload a new video
- Try developing a series of episodic videos to hook people in and then keep them coming back for more
- Spread your message: YouTube is built for sharing.
- Embed your videos on your other online sites.
- Pass your links to your supporters
- Be genuine: your videos don’t have to be perfect.
- Authenticity speaks volumes
- This is your chance to have a visual conversation on the issues you care about, so be yourself
- Have fun and experiment with different types of content
- How to get started:
- What are the rules?
- Naming your account: Please choose a name that clearly states your location and chapter or blood region name
- Profile image: Please use your chapter lockup or otherwise clearly identifying image that adheres to brand standards
- Channel customization: please adhere to brand standards when choosing the look and feel for your channel.
Tools: Twitter
- What is Twitter?
- Twitter asks the question What are you doing? and millions of people answer in 140 characters or less.
- Personal Account
- We recommend setting up a personal Twitter account and using it for at least a month before creating your chapter or blood region strategy.
- While you’re welcome to talk about your Red Cross work on your personal account in accordance with the online communications guidelines, please don’t Red Cross “brand” your personal account unless it’s part of your overall Twitter strategy. For example don’t use a Twitter name such as “RedcrossBob” or “ARCJane” for your personal account.
- Is Twitter right for my chapter/blood region?
- Are you ready to offer mission-based value to your local supporters?
- Have you read the entirety of this article and its supplemental links?
- Do you have at least one person dedicated to spending a few minutes per day tweeting, engaging and responding to supporters?
- What works on Twitter?
- Lots of stuff works. Here are a few examples of chapters we think are doing a bang up job of providing valuable information to people who want it:
- What are the rules?
- Naming your Twitter account:
- Choose a name that clearly indicates your local affiliation.
- Keep your name as short as possible. You only have 140 characters to type, so the less your name takes up, the better for retweeting.
- Your profile image
- Twitter’s image machine is tiny. It’s difficult to adhere to brand standards on this one, but you must! If you’re having trouble, please contact us at national and we’ll help you devise an appropriate image
- Your Twitter design
- You have the flexibility to design a background image for your Twitter account. Please follow brand standards if you choose to do this.