Sam Dumitriu

Chair, Giving What We Can: Manchester

samdumitriu@gmail.com

SOCIAL MEDIA GUIDE

How to use Social Media to grow your chapter

Social Media is a vital tool for Giving What We Can Outreach

Starting a chapter with Social Media

Erwan’s experience at Queen’s University, Belfast

Reasons to believe Social Media is effective

• Updating and checking social media is not time intensive
• Erwan estimates that sending out emails only took a couple of hours, and joining societies and posting on Facebook took around 3 hours.
• That allowed him to form the basis of a Chapter and get around 100 likes on Facebook
• If just 1 signs the pledge that’s worth £100,000
• Potentially very high gains for comparably little effort

Social Media Guide

Erwan’s story

• Erwan tried to start a chapter at Queen’s University for 2 ½ years with little success.
• He decided to try a new approach as he was leaving:
• Join as many Facebook Groups as possible at Queen’s
• Posted in each group “Learn about effective ways to eliminate global poverty” followed by a link to Giving What We Can’s website
• Then set up a Facebook page for a Belfast Chapter

Social Media Guide

Erwan’s story

• Erwan then approached more promising societies, such as Medics and Philosophers
• Emailed lecturers making sure to make it relevant to them. For example, talking about Parfit and Singer’s involvement in Giving What We Can to Philosophy professors.
• Posted on Online Communal Notice Boards seen by 1000+
• Belfast now has a stable committee with 3-4 people on it.

Social Media Guide

Increasing Outreach with Facebook

Manchester’s experience

Using Facebook to reach more people

• At Manchester we imitated Erwan’s approach.
• Each committee member had to pick 5 student societies at Manchester (we picked around 40 in total).
• Each committee member was then tasked with joining and posting in each Facebook group they picked
• As a result we received 24 new likes.

Social Media Guide

Tailoring posts

• When posting in new facebook groups:
• Don’t post a generic blurb about Giving What We Can
• Do tailor your post to the interests of that group
• Example (University of Manchester Philosophy group): If you're interested in ethics, altruism and want to learn about the practical actions you can take to save a life (it's easier than you think!), I encourage you to check out Giving What We Can: Manchester, we're a student society who plan to hold talks with philosophers and ethicists on the case for giving to the world's most effective charities.

Social Media Guide

Getting tone right

• We are a welcoming community, sharing our passion and energy to end extreme poverty.
• We care, we are optimistic and we take decisions based on evidence
• This should come through clearly when we communicate through our social media page
• Example: We are the generation that ends extreme poverty. We take charity seriously. Join us.

Social Media Guide

Groups or Pages? What works on Facebook

• Facebook Groups should be considered superior to Facebook Pages for a few reasons
• Events: You can invite everyone in the Facebook group to an event. You can’t do this with a Facebook Page.
• Community: People other than the committee can post, this allows you to address concerns and makes your chapter feel more like a community.
• However Facebook Pages also have their benefits
• Posting regularly on FB Pages doesn’t feel like spam, while it may become irritating in FB Groups

Social Media Guide

Scheduling Posts

• By scheduling Facebook posts you can increase the number of people you reach online.
• HootSuite is a free web app that allows you to schedule posts. You can sign up for a free account and schedule posts for up to 3 social networks.
• Sunday Afternoon is the best time to schedule a post, try to avoid late night i.e 2am

Social Media Guide

Inviting Friends on Facebook

• Inviting friends on Facebook to Giving What We Can events can be time-consuming .
• Ben Kuhn proposed a solution: Friend Lists
• Create a Friend List in Facebook, by scrolling down on the left-hand side of your news feed and clicking More next to Friends.
• Make a list of everyone you know who potentially could attend an event.
• Bookmark the following script in your browser: javascript:elms=document.getElementsByName("checkableitems[]");for (i=0;i<elms.length;i++){if (elms[i].type="checkbox")elms[i].click()};
• When inviting friends to Events, select the list and then click on the bookmark, this will check off everyone on the list.

Social Media Guide

Facebook Ads

• Don’t Pay For Facebook Likes: These are usually either low-quality (i.e. in Brazil when you’re in Oxford) or not even real people.
• Do Pay to Promote Events: Matt from York said “spent around £35 on facebook advertising in the week leading up to the talk. This achieved 48 event responses (presumably clicking 'attending' or 'maybe attending') and reached just over 14,000 people.
• Adverts targeted at people who already are attending/like GWWC are more successful
• Adverts mentioning careers are more successful than adverts mentioning charities.
• Avoid overusing promoted posts because they can appear spammy.

Social Media Guide

Using Twitter

Other ways to reach more people

Twitter

• Twitter doesn’t appear to be as effective as Facebook at building a committee
• However, there are still ways to harness Twitter without expending too much time and effort.
• You can link Twitter to Facebook and automatically Tweet certain Facebook posts, which https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/publishing-to-twitter-from-facebook-pages/123006872130
• You can also Retweet various notable Effective Altruists so your account stays active, for example @robertwiblin, @willmacaskill and @macchiatogirl

Social Media Guide