Add value, listen, inspire: Samaritan’s Purse social media plan

After crawling out of a mudslide, a girl, along with a group of people, walked on a broken leg searching for help. She made it to a clinic, housed inside a tent, where one of the doctors attended to the injury and provided her with crutches. She was hungry, and so the doctor sent her to the disaster response team from Samaritan’s Purse. The girl was Michelle de Carion, a staff writer for Samaritan’s Purse who blogged about her experience participating in one of the first disaster simulation training exercises of its scale by an international non-governmental organization. It even involved the U.S. Air Force, which tested a state-of-the-art mobile medical unit during the three-day event (Sept. 22-24) at a private estate near the NGO’s headquarters in Boone, N.C., USA. The exercise dealt with an imaginary 8.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Mexico City. The Christian organization, which has been helping victims of war, poverty, natural disasters, disease and famine since 1970, posted updates of the exercise through Argyle Social and on Twitter. On its Facebook page, many of its more than 360,000 followers applauded the relief group for the undertaking and expressed eagerness to get involved in its work. Devex spoke with Hope Blaylock, integrated marketing manager at Samaritan’s Purse, on day one of the exercise. In this exclusive interview, she shared a few more examples of how the organization has used social media in innovative ways and some helpful, free tools for evaluating social media metrics. She also emphasized that real-life relationships play a vital role in how development organizations should build and engage audiences on Facebook, Twitter and similar platforms. In fewer than 140 characters, describe your social media strategy or vision. In participation, add value. In conversation, listen. In relationship, inspire. In partnership, provide opportunity. What has your social media presence allowed you to do that you may not have been able to achieve otherwise? Because Samaritan’s Purse is an international disaster relief organization, a lot of the value of social media is in the ability to communicate with our donors in real time, during immediate responses. Very often, we’re on the scene of a disaster within 24-48 hours. … Our teams are there in the middle of devastation that the vast majority of the public has yet to comprehend or really even see. So social media has given us the opportunity to let them see from our unique perspective in that moment, almost immediately, and often to provide information about what’s really happening on the ground that people haven’t seen in the mainstream media yet. When the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, we had teams on the ground very quickly and at first, just had iPhone videos from our vice president of programs saying, “We’re here in this region in Japan, this is what you’re looking at, and this is what we’re going to do today.” The videos were very successful. We posted them every day. Sometimes we get to highlight more celebratory events, like on July 9, when South Sudan became an independent nation. … We had behind-the-scenes videos of the ceremony and exclusive interviews with political figures, but the posts that really received the most interaction and feedback were just cellphone photos of South Sudanese people that were captioned with a quote saying what independence meant to them. Those posts received far more interaction than anything else. … It really highlighted that our audience — and I think people who are interested in the kind of work that relief organizations do — they want to hear from the people we’re helping, and they want to hear those first-hand accounts, and they really feel a personal and emotional connection to the work that we’re doing. They don’t only want to hear numbers and statistics. … Social media has given us a great opportunity to do that and to highlight the real things that are happening every day. How has social media broadened your support base? You know, it’s hard to say. … People who have supported Samaritan’s Purse for a long time now also follow us on social media. But we have been able to reach a much younger generation who support the relief work we do. We have different audiences on our different platforms. On Facebook, a lot of those fans are the people who have followed Samaritan’s Purse and supported our ministry for years. And then on Twitter, a lot of our followers are people who are in the relief world, who are actually in the same places we’re doing our work … and they trust that the information we’re giving them is correct, that we’re giving them an accurate picture of what’s going on. And so these audiences are very different and they want different things, so we give them information differently. … On our Facebook page, a lot of the supporters want to know how are you showing God’s love to people through this work. And on Twitter, it’s people who want to know the details of the work that we’re doing and the technical aspects of relief. To me, that highlights that one of the most important things to remember as you’re engaging your audience on social media is to know who your audience is, and to know what they care about, what they’re talking about, what they want from you, and how you can add value to conversations that they’re already having. … That’s one of the things we ask ourselves often, because as our audience has grown, it’s changed as well. I think it’s really important to constantly look at your metrics, to look at the kinds of posts your audience engages with the most, and evaluate how you can better serve them, how you can give them the kind of content that they are looking for, and the kind of content they are going to engage with that will activate them to share what you’re doing. Speaking of metrics, what tools do you use for that? We use a combination of a lot of different things. There are many free tools out there that are incredibly helpful. Obviously, Google Analytics, because a lot of the content that we post is housed on our website. … We also use Hootsuite; it’s free and it’s a great tool. And we use a marketing dashboard called Argyle Social that has been a really useful tool for us in terms of tracking and reporting. Sometimes it depends on what event we’re covering, what kind of metrics we’re looking for. I think Facebook Insights are incredibly helpful, and that’s a free tool as well. Give an example or anecdote for how you’ve used social media in an innovative way. Today, our programs department is … simulating a large, full-scale international disaster response, with about 250 people. … They’re out on several acres of land, and they’re being thrown different curve balls of what’s happening in this “disaster” as they would in a real disaster. We’re covering it on social media, and the challenge there is how to talk about a fake disaster without sort of creating a “War of the Worlds” kind of thing where people think that our simulation is a real event. So that was our big challenge, but we really feel that it’s an opportunity for us to educate our audience about the how and why we do what we do, while we’re also improving our own organizational capacity to respond effectively in a disaster. So we’re posting a lot of tweets and giving facts about the details involved in a disaster response, such as: What does an information officer do on the incident management team? Or, what is an incident management team? I think when our audience understands the depth of training and attention to detail that goes into how we respond in crisis, it builds trust in our organization, that we are good stewards of donor support, and also that our responders are trained to the highest level. Building trust with our general audience is really important. This coverage is not anything we’ve done before on the simulation side or the social media side. … It’s a unique way to show our supporters and to show the broader public interested in relief work, what goes into this kind of response — that it’s not just go, show up at the disaster site, and see what you can do. It’s very strategic. There’s a lot of education that goes into how we respond to international disasters effectively, so we can help as many people as possible. What do development organizations, whether bilateral, multilateral, nonprofit or corporate, need to know about social media and how it can help them? One of the ways that I explain it [social media], especially to people who aren’t as familiar with the differences between this somewhat new form of marketing and traditional marketing, is that it’s sort of like a big high school party. Facebook, Twitter and social media are the party, and everybody’s there, but the people who don’t understand the culture kind of hate on it and say it won’t last or it’s not useful. But the party is still happening, whether you want to be there or not, and it’s still where everybody is. Just like you wouldn’t “be cool” at a party just because you’re there, you won’t be significant on social media just because you’re there. You have to know and understand the culture of the people you’re around to be relevant, and so you have to watch and you have to listen to figure out how your particular audience wants to interact with you. If you’re at a party and you’re telling a story, you’re gauging your audience and you’re looking at their facial expressions and their feedback to see if they think you’re funny. Our audience is primarily on Facebook, but that doesn’t mean everyone else’s audience is there. So really understand where your audience already lives: Where is the party that your organization needs to attend? Who else is influencing them? What or who are they listening to? How do they engage? And then constantly evaluate those things. I think that’s the important thing to do as you begin to engage, but it’s also something that you have to do continually because your audience is always changing. Once you know your audience, you can set goals and you can outline what your objective is for engaging in social media, and you can make a plan for that engagement. You can strategize your content and run various campaigns for special events. Then you want to understand how you measure success. What is success to you? And once you know that … all these things play into making more informed decisions about the way you are engaging. I think social media works because as human beings, we want to be connected and we want to be known. It works for development organizations and nonprofits because it allows global connections to be made, even to really remote places, and to people you wouldn’t necessarily reach in your physical daily life. But the digital relationship is still lacking, and so I think we’ll continue to see development organizations and brands using social media as a tool to enhance an individual’s ability to advocate a cause to people he or she actually knows. In other words, the real-life relationships that your followers have are going to play an even more vital role in how your organization engages and builds your audience.