How Does ONE do it? Behind the advocacy group’s massive social media success

Inspiring quotes? Check.

Interesting factoids? Check.

A chance to make a difference? Check.

When you follow ONE on Facebook and Twitter, you get those – and more.

For instance: “#ONEAct: Test your global hunger knowledge,” the anti-poverty campaigner tweeted on Oct. 29. “If you get all the answers right, you could win a FEED bag. bit.ly/uP8lnr.”

Past winners of the ONE Act a Week contests received a box of signature ONE goodies and an opportunity to write for the ONE blog.

Aside from pushing out its microcampaigns, ONE has used its Facebook and Twitter pages – where it has a total of 800,000 followers – to score successes for its larger campaigns. In June, the group says, a flood of tweets from ONE supporters convinced the Obama administration to pledge $450 million over three years to the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization.

“Here’s a question I hear a lot from folks who are on or just starting to use Twitter,” said Garth Moore, U.S. deputy director of new media for ONE, in a blog post earlier this year. “Is Twitter a good tool for online advocacy? Can tweets help get the word out to raise awareness and catalyze change? Does anyone in D.C. or on Capitol Hill really use or listen to what’s being said on Twitter?”

He continued: “The answers are yes, yes and yes. Twitter is a great action tool for grassroots outreach and a lot of leaders in Congress, D.C., and beyond follow what’s being said about them and to them on Twitter.”

And there are more benefits to the smart use of Facebook and Twitter, Moore and his colleague Lauren Balog tell Devex in this exclusive interview. They note that social media has also enabled ONE to build partnerships and reach new audiences, such as “mom” bloggers.

In less than 140 characters, describe your social media strategy or vision.

Moore and Balog: We try to share stories that inspire real ppl to takeaction & engage in meaningful conversations abt #development in their own networks.

What has your social media presence allowed you to do that you may not have been able to achieve otherwise?

Moore: The first part of that, I think, really is working with our partners. ONE has a number of different partners. Of course we don’t do any fundraising, so we really try to work with our partners’ efforts in what they’re doing. … I think almost every department here in ONE is connected to a partner in some way, whether it’s communications, or development, or policy, or legislative. And social media just adds another dimension to that partnership. It enhances their messages and their voices and also gives us the leverage for our partners to broadcast our messages.

For example, with our new campaign, “Famine is the Real Obscenity,” we have some really great partners – high-visibility partners – tweet our campaign live; these including Bill Gates himself, the Gates Foundation, and … executive director of the World Food Program Josette Sheeran tweeted out directly as well to WFP channels. So, they bring attention to what we’re doing.

And of course every chance we get, we spotlight their efforts, whether it was this summer when WFP was starting work in the Horn of Africa, we not only published social media messages from them but also use our Facebook and Twitter channels to inform our audience more about WFP’s efforts.

So really, as a partnership builder, social media is a wonderful tool to kind of spread the message and in turn, when it’s time for you to spread your message, we’re really working as partners to make sure that you are receiving getting out on all fronts.

And ultimately, what social media has allowed us to do is enable us to find niche audiences where we might not have had audiences before.

We know from our recent membership surveys: A lot of the 18-to-24-year-olds who come to ONE … are supporters because they’ve seen our booth at a U2 show but are also interested in development work, particularly in Africa. So, as we’re broadcasting our campaigns with our blog or answering questions from our members, we’ve got a lot of people seeing us in a new way, we’re reaching these audiences that are interested in development, or people who are interested in policy, or people who are interested in advocacy, that we might not [otherwise] reach. …

Balog: We have this program here at ONE called ONE Moms. It got started about a year ago. We sort of realized that we were missing a key audience, that our membership isn’t entirely young or college students or your typical activist. There’s a large group of moms who want to make a difference within their own community.

Through that desire to reach that demographic, we realized there’s an entire community online of 3.5 million bloggers who also happen to be moms and have children under the age of 18. And so we started engaging those bloggers. First we spoke to one blogger, who then led us to two bloggers, who then led us to three, and then finally we had a group of 10. And we created a mom advisory council, where we brought six traditional mom bloggers and four regular moms, or moms who don’t have a huge presence online, and asked them how we can reach their demographic.

We asked ourselves how we can make these moms advocates for ONE, and especially for those hard parts of the developing world. We decided the best thing we could do was to take them first-hand to Kenya, and we spent one week on the ground. And we decided to create a mom-focused program all around the trip and beyond. We didn’t want it to seem like these 10 women were somehow elite over the rest of the moms that we were trying to reach. We wanted it to be a very inclusive versus exclusive program. So, we engaged these 10 women but we also enlisted 40 plus mom bloggers plus mom-friendly sites such as BabyCenter, MomsRising, Mothers of Preschoolers International, et cetera, and asked them to sign on as community partners.

And through the community partner program, we had daily postings from women who were in the United States either posting their reaction to what the women were seeing on the ground in Kenya, to reposting our moms’ blog from their own blogs, to tweeting, to everything. We have a great gamut of reporters.

And that program really brought the community in it. It allowed us to sort of, we didn’t have any negative feedback, we didn’t get a single negative tweet, a single negative Facebook comment. Because of the larger-scale campaign, ABC picked us up as the “Person of the Week” on “ABC World News” after we got back from Kenya, they actually sent a crew to the trip with us to document what these women were seeing in Africa and development work, specifically the success stories of development work through the lens of a mother and making one-on-one personal connections with personal stories.

The neatest part about that was as our partners were tweeting and blogging from the ground here in the United States, our bloggers were relaying their stories to the people on the ground in Kenya. So they might mention at a meetup or visit that we’ve got this question from this particular partner back here in the United States; we really were sharing these stories of our partners with the women in Kenya and sharing the women’s stories in Kenya with our partners. So that’s a really interesting way to use social media to bridge that gap between the United States and people in the developing world.

Through that program also, we reached a demographic that we wouldn’t have been able to otherwise. Membership-wise, out of the women who signed up to be a ONE mom, 65 percent of them were new members.

The program continues, and we see this as a beginning of a conversation. We continue this program; we [had] an advocacy at the end of the month. The moms [were] coming back to D.C. to lobby on the Hill and with the administration on the programs they saw while we were in Kenya. We [again made] that inclusive and invited the entire community to participate virtually from their own community, whether that’s a real-life community or online community.

In November, we’re gonna be having the moms profiling members on the frontline of HIV/AIDS in Africa. And in December, we’re gonna be asking moms to tell us ways that you can give back without writing a check. It’s a program, it’s not a one-off event. It’s not a one-time thing. It’s to start a conversation. …

Give an example or anecdote for how you’ve used social media in an innovative way.

Moore: We can actually give you a few examples. One is we like to get people involved in using social media. We would like to get them [to use] social media more to [act in parallel] with our regular actions, with our big campaigns like our fall agriculture campaigns or our budget campaigns.

But we also have an opportunity to do kind of almost microcampaigns if you will. And this is something we do every week with our ONE Act a Week. This is an idea that we put out to our members earlier this year to say that everybody can do something to fight extreme poverty and preventable disease. And every week you can take a small action, whether it’s online or taking a few minutes offline to make a difference. So we really use social media to spread this action every week. We post a blog on our site every Friday and use Facebook, Twitter and some other channels to really try to push this action out.

A good example of this is when the new [International Monetary Fund] leader Christine Lagarde … mentioned in her acceptance speech that she wanted to keep promises to the world’s poor and raise awareness about issues like the Horn of Africa and she wanted to thank young women leaders in Africa. So what we did was we asked our members to send a message directly to the IMF and to Lagarde through Twitter. We literally had hundreds of tweets sent out that morning of the announcement and received word back from us by our members.

So it was a great effort of a microcampaign to get world leaders to see that … we’re watching. … That was a great campaign, and again we didn’t have to [create] a lot of publications … for our members to engage on social media. Our members can grasp the concept.

I think another good example is more U.S.-based. Earlier this year, … in a single day, we had more than 3,500 tweets directed at the White House’s Twitter account. We had very specific message about funding for two vaccines for diarrhea and pneumonia. It’s a very wonky message that typically you wouldn’t put in a tweet. It was calling for an amount that we wanted the White House to pledge over a certain amount of time. … So our members were tweeting this out, and we had a web page where you could see a map of the entire U.S. and see where people were tweeting from across the country. The social media folks at the White House took notice and eventually we heard through other channels that it got around that they were starting to make policy decisions about that funding level.

Seeing a number of these tweets not only helped [the White House] recognize that people were interested in how the U.S. was giving to the GAVI replenishment, but that we really had a specific “ask” in order for this replenishment to be worthwhile from the U.S.’s point of leadership. So not only did they meet that level, they actually went above it when the GAVI replenishment was announced in June. So it was really a great, small action. It only lasted a day or two, but it was an important action in helping people recognize that beyond all the other great things you can do, that you can use social media to help make an impact. …

You can also use social media to be inspiring. A great way to do that is through sharing a photo, sharing a video, trying to relate a small story as much as you can, and sometimes on Twitter that’s difficult.

But one of the things we like to do occasionally is to pull out an inspiring quote, and around Nelson Mandela’s birthday, we put a quote on our Facebook page, and we had thousands of likes. It was just a really great quote. We actually received a number of new members to our Facebook page that day.

We also recognize that part of our advocacy work beyond giving facts and directing people to take action, it is really to inspire them about what they do. I think using that space, that social sphere to send an inspiring quote or to show an inspiring video – really kind of staying on the positive, forward-thinking thing and really trying to get people to latch onto to feel-good about our efforts – is important. And it’s the day-to-day work, it’s not something that you really need to plan throughout the year, but as you’re working with social media, you know there’s going to be these moments where an inspiring call to action [is useful], something that gives people an idea of what they can do to keep going with their efforts in support of your mission. It’s really helpful to anybody doing this kind of work.

Balog: One of the things we did on a trip was we brought whiteboards with us. And while we were traveling through different parts of Kenya, we would occasionally stop at an important landmark like the Great Rift Valley or the house that Karen Blixen [the woman who wrote “Out of Africa”] owned, and we held up the whiteboards calling out the partners that we were supporting back in the United States.

We did it individually, so we did 40 whiteboard posts, and we even did one from a game reserve that we were driving through. The response on that was great. We would say, “Hi @bostonmamas from Great Rift Valley, sending you love to Boston.” They would then retweet that and their followers would retweet that, and it’s sort of a nice way to thank them from Kenya and really prove that they were there with us. And we actually had some partners tweeting back at us with their own whiteboard messages saying, “Hi #ONEmoms, you inspire, love @parenthacks.” It’s really cool way to have a conversation through social media.

What do development organizations, whether bilateral and multilateral, nonprofit or corporate, need to know about social media and how it can help them?

Moore: It’s really about creating dialogue. You can’t just use Facebook and Twitter to broadcast your messages. You need to engage, you need to ask questions, you need to listen to what other people are telling you or tweeting at you, or posting on your Facebook page. You need to respond to questions. And you need to create content that is actionable. So are you asking people questions to answer? Are you giving them an action to do? Are you giving them something to aspire to and want to keep moving forward? If you constantly make it about what you’re doing and putting out a blog or a press release every single time you use social media, you’re really missing the overall effect of what you can do. …

There’s also social media tools that Facebook and Twitter tools to track new members, to get new Facebook fans and to get new Twitter followers that they’re probably not using, like the “Join us on Facebook” button or “Follow us on Twitter” button. These are free tools that organizations can stick on their website and people can immediately click on it, connect with their social spheres. And this is because most people keep a persistent connection on Facebook and Twitter. That means once they log in, they rarely log out. So they’re all connected. …

And also tools like Facebook Comment. For our blog, we’ve instituted a Facebook Comment [plugin] earlier this year. … This is a small bit of code that you could get for free from Facebook and just stick on the bottom of your blog post, and people can comment right there. It’s a really simple tool to use. Not only have we tripled the number of average comments that we get in a week, those comments have been posted back on the user’s Facebook page. …

I think the other one is posting media on YouTube. A lot of people use those but they really need to recognize how to use them – doing things like making a video channel on YouTube. When you post a YouTube video, your YouTube channel actually goes up: The more people view your video, the higher up it goes on YouTube page rankings.

YouTube channels are free. You can create a nonprofit YouTube channel in literally five minutes and once your video is loaded up to Youtube channel you can use embed code to post a video on your blog or post a video on your Facebook page, and a lot of your partners can post your videos, all those are driving your channel up.

The last thing is really experiment. And that’s what a lot of groups don’t recognize that they can do. If you want to post during the day, is it better to post in the morning, or is it better to post in the evening? Where are your friends and followers going to be if you engaging at those hours?

We know from some new media studies in the United States, more people are reading tweets at 8 a.m. to 9 a.m., at 12 to 2 p.m., and 4 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. So we know we should always try to get new posts on Twitter during those times. And so, if we’re going to recognize a partner during the day or we’re going to post a new video or a new campaign, we try to shoot for those times that we know we can maximize our audience.

For some groups, their audiences might be different. So, really try to engage more with your social media tactics and figure out what are the best tactics to increase your reach and also to increase your depth so that people are commenting and they’re sharing.