Nonprofit Performance 360 Magazine Vol 5 No 1

CARL SETTERLUND Member Engagement

Engaging Your Audience on Social Media

One of the first things anyone involved in producing social media content learns is that there is no strategy for one size fits all.We all have similar objectives – more engagement, more followers – but just as in life, it’s all about learning from others and applying that toward what works best for you. I manage the social media accounts and website for 15-40 Connection, a young but quickly growing national nonprofit based out of Westborough, Massachusetts, that teaches people how to detect cancer early. Before that, I managed social media accounts for a regional newspaper’s sports section, a Division 3 college athletic department, and a technology website. Sure, these are very different industries, but if you treat the basic principles as transferable and figure out how to make it work for you, there are plenty of common threads. Most of us in the nonprofit world are in the same position: we have an important mission that we know can really help people, and we want to expand our audience. The challenge is reaching new people and getting them to connect to our cause. Investment in cancer research and treatment methods is important, and it receives a lot of attention. At 15-40 Connection, we have a different mission that doctors, patients, and people of all ages and backgrounds universally like and agree with. We have identified an

integral role in combatting cancer that doesn’t get nearly as much attention as it deserves, and the best part is that it’s something that empowers you and that you have control over. The earlier you detect cancer or other serious illnesses, the better the survival rates and the fewer the long-term impacts on your life.We have boiled it down to three simple concepts: pay attention to your own health, visit the doctor if your health change persists for two weeks, and make sure to share everything with your doctor, so that he or she has more information to make an accurate diagnosis. These are things people can reasonably apply to their everyday life to know how and when to take action. The hitch is that, although most people love the basic premise, they don’t want to imagine the possibility of their getting cancer. Find your all-stars To borrow a sports term, one strategy I’ve always found effective for social media is to figure out who your all-stars are. Who are your best advocates? Once you identify or recruit them, maximize their impact to get more people to buy into your cause. We are lucky to have built up a community of over 100 cancer survivor advocates who have shared their personal cancer experiences and takeaways with us. People are more interested and open to learning about early cancer detection when it’s about somebody else and, in sharing a survivor’s story, we try

to communicate at least one important lesson that might stick with the reader. That’s the educational side, but there are also two ways we use our Learn From Me stories to expand our follower base. First, we make sure our advocates understand that, in sharing their experience, they are in a unique position to potentially save other lives by teaching people what to look for and how to advocate for their own health. As a result, they’re usually enthusiastic about sharing a Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter post about their story with their own followers. In a way, they provide an introduction to 15-40 Connection and spread our message to an entire micro- community of their family and friends. The other way these stories help expand our base is that we try to find at least one subset of people who will be able to relate to a specific advocate. For example, J.D. is an Iraq War veteran and a police officer who advises people to not try to tough it out when it comes to your health, and there’s a population of men and women who can relate to that. And there’s Maura, who was a working mother with young children when she found a lump during a breast self-exam; there are plenty of parents who connect with her message of making time for cancer screenings. If you are fortunate enough to have a social media budget, you can boost these posts to people who share the same interests with an advocate.

continued on page 38

22 I Nonprofit Performance Magazine