Globaldev careers: The social media lead

During an internship with a nonprofit in her native Luxembourg, Sarah Gilbertz, now head of social media at UN Women, realized her communications background could lead to jobs in the development sector. Through the United Nations’ Junior Professional Officer Programme, she landed a role with the communications team supporting the World Humanitarian Summit in New York. The U.N. talent initiatives, which also include the Young Professionals Programme and UN Volunteers program, can be great ways for recent graduates to get a foot in the door at the organization, she said. Gilbertz went on to work in various communications roles at the U.N. and became specialized in social media. Her current role is collaborative and creative, involving keeping up with the quickly evolving world of social media and leveraging these opportunities to reach new people. She oversees a small team that manages all of the agency’s social media accounts in English and French, supports the regional and country offices in running their accounts, and liaises with different teams — from the photo team to the policy department — to promote their work. Another part of her job is planning bigger social media campaigns, such as those for International Women's Day or the Generation Equality campaign. Devex spoke to her about how social media professionals can contribute to the mission of development organizations. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. What does your average day look like? I'm based in Berlin right now, and most of our communications team are based in New York, so I have changed my working hours to have a little bit more overlap. My day usually starts with catching up a little bit [on] what happened at the end of the previous day in New York. With social media, everything happens so fast, so the first thing that I do is just see if there's anything that needs some urgent action from me. Once I'm on top of that, I usually approve the social media content that is supposed to go out that day. [The] team that I supervise produces a lot of the content — they write the messages [as well as] the visuals, graphics, gifs. I usually spend a good chunk of my time just reviewing … [the] content that they have produced and giving them feedback so that they can finalize it. Where are there opportunities in the sector for people to work in social media? When I started in the comms work, it was still often the practice that someone in the communications team was also doing social media. [But] over the last years, the social media manager or officer roles have really professionalized. Not just the U.N. and NGOs, but we also see so many governments ... they all know the power of social media … [and] are also investing in it more. It's not just one person who does social media in addition to other tasks but you have whole teams [focusing on social]. What are some of the biggest challenges of the job and the lessons that you've learned over the years to help you overcome those? One of the things that is a challenge with [this work] but that also makes it very exciting is that it's hard to predict where social media is going. I feel like Twitter and Facebook have been declared dead so many times, and they're still there ... or for a long time, we were thinking there's no other player [or] platform that can come and break into the market … But then TikTok came in, or Clubhouse. What I learned is that it's worth trying things out and taking some risks. For this Generation Equality campaign, we really tried to reach younger audiences [via] TikTok. For now, we really love it, and we love producing the content for it and the engagement that we get, but we don't know how it's going to end up long-term. Social media is just changing so quickly, so you have to just try a few things out. We can see from the reactions of people [to our social media content] that it does something to them [and] they start thinking about what they can do. --— Sarah Gilbertz, head of social media, UN Women What skills have you focused on to progress in your career? Looking back at my career — I haven't been working that long — but I like that I have [had] a variety of roles that are all helpful [in different ways]. One of the skills, for example, that I'm looking [at] now because I'm managing this team and also now suddenly managing a team that is working completely remotely in different parts of the world, [so] I'm trying to build those skills [around] how to manage a team most efficiently. I've [also] always liked learning from my team and colleagues. In the U.N. [and] NGO world, we work with so many brilliant people, and I just love seeing how other people work and see their passions and learn from them. How do you see the impact of your work? We look at our social media analytics and do a report every month, [looking] at our growth and what has been performing well and the things that haven't. We can learn and produce better content [based on this], and [it] gives us already a sense of our impact [and] how many people are we reaching around the world. When we have big campaigns, like the Generation Equality campaign, we also look at, for example, the spread of the hashtag — how many people in addition to UN Women have used this hashtag and have been creating content around it. Over the course of the last two years, we've seen that the Generation Equality hashtag has reached [around] two billion people. Seeing something like that is just amazing. Then it's also sometimes smaller things, for example, when I look at our social media content and see someone commenting on it [saying] “I didn't know this” or “I hadn't thought about it like this before,” and that's also where I can see that we are making an impact. [Or] when we share some of our very powerful stats, for example, that 1 in 3 women experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime, and we can see from the reactions of people that it does something to them [and] they start thinking about what they can do ... that's great. What advice would you have for other professionals interested in this type of career? Even if you didn't study international relations or if you see the U.N. as this abstract organization, there are so many interesting jobs [there], especially if you're a communications professional. [Something] I like about being a communications professional is that we can sharpen our skills no matter where we work. Even working for a private sector [company] or for academia in a comms team, you're sharpening your skills, and you will be able to use these skills [in other sectors]. I think it's the same with the U.N. [and] I feel like the more people we have that come from different backgrounds and with different experience, it benefits the organization so I hope no one is [too] intimidated to apply to jobs in the U.N.