From idea to implementation: 11 Helpful Tips to Built an Advocacy Campaign on Social Media

Building an advocacy campaign on social media is not as difficult as it seems. It would rather need time and thorough planning, explained to us Alexandru Lebedev, founder of diez.md news portal, Web Communication Specialist. Here is a list provided by Alexandru, containing useful steps for all those who intend to start and develop an advocacy campaign on social networks.

Before starting: an idea, a place, a hashtag

#1. It is more efficient to know exactly what you are promoting and what you ask from your supporters before starting to promote an idea. Ask for one thing, not five or ten. You’d better create five specific mini-campaigns than one campaign with lots of requests. When you ask for too much, everybody will hear what they want to, and you risk not to have homogeneous supporters.

#2. Take care that people supporting you get easily the answers to their questions. To any questions they have. I would recommend a site/blog describing the advocacy campaign step by step, as well as the campaign’s goals, the requirements for supporters and the final product of the campaign. Supporters need to feel the results of their involvement, this is all that matters, whether you want to introduce sexual education in schools or to conduct a referendum against a mayor. It is good to have a Facebook group/page, Instagram and Twitter accounts, but all these tools are used during the campaign. The information needs to be concentrated in one place, and all the links must lead to that place. This could be the campaign’s site or the link to the fundraising campaign if funds are needed.

#3. In order to keep up with the campaign, the supporters will need an easy recognizable label or a hashtag that appears everywhere. The hashtag must be short and must represent the essence of the campaign. It will help you to follow the posts of people that get involved in the campaign and you can further collect all the information about them.

Timeline

#4. It is necessary to identify your partners before starting the campaign. They can be:

# Influencers (bloggers, vloggers, famous people on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter);

# Big and small communities;

# Informal groups;

# News platforms.

#5. You must work a lot with media when launching the campaign, so that media will reveal only the idea you want. Thus, a press release must contain three links. All three links must contain the information you want to deliver:

# Link to the platform describing the information;

# Link to the page or group on Facebook where supporters can talk to each other;

# Link to the campaign’s hashtag so that supporters can see what happened until now.

#6. After a period of time, send notifications about the campaign, achieved successes and updates to all media partners. If you raise funds, celebrate every 10% raised, express your happiness in public when the pages/communities achieve 1,000, 2,000 or 5,000 followers. Celebrate each step and publish this information everywhere you can (personal pages/media partners). This way you will create the feeling that things are moving on and you will attract more supporters because people want to be a part of things that move to a positive direction.

#7. After the first media wave passes, the views could decrease, the fundraising could slow down and the number of followers could increase at a slower pace. At this point:

# you must have decided on X number of communities that will share the information about the campaign, two or three times a day in order to maintain the subject in the news feeds;

# you may ask the influencers to share some information on their profiles (it is not necessary for them to write something, but you may ask them to share messages with the information you want to be heard);

# thank the new followers on your channel and ask them to share the information on their channels.

#8. If you want to share the information on the pages of other Facebook communities, it is very important to speak with the administrators before writing or sharing something, so that they do not regard your information as spam and understand the reasons you run this campaign. Thus, they could start following you, and why not – supporting you.

#9. A campaign may last from several weeks to several years, and it is important to efficiently plan when and who you discuss with, and what information you share. It is also good for media to receive updates about the campaign, once per one or two weeks, in order to avoid the perception of too much information provided. Sent updates to influencers/communities/pages around once a month. It is good to share the information in groups maximum twice a week. But you should daily update the information on your pages (Facebook), you can post on Instagram twice a day (every six hours), and on Twitter – anytime.

#10. The graphic materials are also important, but no more than the idea. If you want spaghetti for kids, ask for spaghetti, not for a better life.

#11. In respect to foreign partners (media, communities, influencers) it is important not to use everything you have at once, because you will obtain a hype that will grow fast, and that will die even faster. Take one step at a time.

The article was drawn up in cooperation with the EU-Eastern Partnership Culture and Creativity Programme 2015-2018 http://diez.md/2017/03/21/de-la-idee-la-implementare-11-sfaturi-utile-pentru-construi-o-campanie-de-advocacy-pe-social-media/

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