How charities should handle online abuse

Having a strong internet and social media presence is absolutely crucial for most NGOs and charities — but even though these groups may have a positive mission, abuse and trolling often comes with the territory of online advocacy and campaigns. In a small survey of charity professionals last year, 61% said they had experienced online hate while working with their current organization, yet the vast majority said they had not received any training to help them deal with this. While the Charities Against Hate coalition is calling on social media companies to do more to tackle the issue, in the meantime organizations must figure out how to respond. So how should charities — and particularly the communications teams and social media managers who are on the front line of the problem — respond when they are on the receiving end of online abuse? A panel of experts at Charity Digital’s #BeMoreDigital conference last week weighed in. 1. Keep your cool Nana Crawford, social media manager at the British Red Cross, said trolls often target the organization for its work to support refugees, sending messages that can be upsetting to read. But the first thing to remember if you are receiving or moderating abusive comments is that “you’re speaking on behalf of your organization,” she said. “Sometimes you see a comment and you really want to go in on someone but you have to think ‘no, take a step back’ … Before you respond to a comment, breathe,” she said. She noted that the charity’s supporters often mobilize to defend the organization in ways it cannot do itself. “The more we’ve talked about refugees [on social media], the more we’ve actually had people in support of our work counteracting those [negative] comments and actually hitting back at people ... and being able to say the things that maybe sometimes we can’t say.” 2. Personalize your responses All the speakers emphasized that personalizing your responses — so that the troll recognizes they are speaking to a person and not a faceless organization — can be really effective. “Whenever we have comments like that, we’ll always take them into our DMs [direct messages] and just talk to them and say ‘look I’m going to try and help you ... I’m Nana,’ and just bring that human voice into it,” Crawford said. “Some people are really angry when they post but as soon as you reply and you pull them to the side … they flip immediately and they actually start apologizing.” Hannah Graham, head of digital at Tearfund, said that offering personal voices and stories instead of “corporate speak,” can also help. Think about “amplifying the voices of the people you’re supporting” on your channels, she said. “People will be a lot slower to criticize somebody who’s saying ‘I was struggling and they helped me’ rather than you as a charity saying ‘look at what we’re doing.’” 3. Know when to engage — and when to block or report On some platforms, it’s possible for organizations to delete abusive comments posted on their pages, while on others they can block or report trolls. But knowing when to do this can be difficult. Alex Hodges, head of corporate communications and public affairs at Help for Heroes, who is also involved in Charities Against Hate, said: “You’ve got a duty to protect your community. It’s your space, it’s your audience … so the bottom line is, if [a comment is] harmful to members of your community, if it’s individual and direct, [it’s] definitely better to get rid of it.” However, she said, “if it’s a society issue that you can actually play a role as a charity, as a brand, in addressing, then we would favor engaging with it and trying to have a meaningful conversation, trying to educate.” Charities should always report abusive comments, she said, but you can do that at the same time as engaging with the user. “Have really clear guidelines for your community and your pages and if they’re violated then make that clear, but wherever you can, even if you are hiding content, try and engage with the user anyway via direct message and try and unpick the issues and tackle myths and stereotypes so that we are all contributing to improving the issue.” 4. Preparation is key The experts stressed the need to anticipate potential flashpoints and have plans in place to deal with them. “With any campaign that we put out, we always try and make sure that we have our Q&As ready, and we try and think about the types of stuff that people are likely to troll us for or question us about … We put on our troll hats and act as trolls so that we can ... prepare as much as possible,” Crawford said. Hodges agreed that “preparation is key.” That includes “having as many planned scenarios in place [as possible], FAQs … identify what the potential issues could be ... and plan some responses,” she said. When you’re working with external partners, also make sure to brief them about these issues in advance so that they’re prepared if it happens, Crawford said. 5. Protect your staff Dealing with a barrage of abusive comments can have a serious impact on an employee’s mental health. Communications professionals need to know their limits and what works for them in terms of winding down, but organizations also need to recognize and enable this. At Tearfund, the fact that the social media team is exposed to abusive comments is explicitly identified within its risk assessment, Graham said. “That means that every quarter we’re reviewing it and trying to mitigate it ... It’s just simple [things] — are we having well-being check-ins with the team on a regular basis? … Are we identifying trigger points that certain people find harder to deal with?” “One thing that’s really hard with social is that it follows us everywhere — it’s really hard to switch off from it,” Graham noted. As a result, the organization has a clear out-of-hours rota so people “don’t have to feel like they’re on call all the time,” and ensures that social media managers have separate work profiles on their phones. It’s also important to consider when moderators or community managers might be particularly affected by an issue. For example, when the British Red Cross was communicating in support of Black Lives Matter, Crawford decided to take a step back from managing the comments. “We did get really personal comments and, for me … I would feel personally attacked,” she explained. On the days that the posts were being published, “I brought other people from the team to community manage those comments … I think it’s always really important to look at having back-up support for your team so that you’re not always relying on one individual,” she said. 6. Learn from it For some of the speakers, abusive comments had provided a learning opportunity for their organization, in terms of understanding potential flashpoints. “I think social media is often the quickest feedback loop that we have in our charities — we’re getting instant replies when we put messages out there,” Graham said. “And so actually we can also then be informing the rest of the organization ... saying to our media team ‘this is what people are asking,’ or saying to our supporter care team ‘you might get phone calls about this’ ... We can really support the rest of the organization and come together and look at the messaging around specific topics because of that,” she said. The communications team at the British Red Cross has thought about “how we can take some of the ... perceptions that people [have] about refugees and actually introduce education so … putting out content before we talk about a particular refugee story that helps people [understand that] this is the current situation ... That’s something that was really missing before, that need for education,” Crawford said. “Through looking at the comments, through replying to those comments, we’ve been able to kind of put together a strategy around our refugee work, especially for our online community management.”