Social Media for Non Profits - Part 2

I had mentioned the Jaagore tweetup in my previous post in this series. I had been invited as a panelist on it :) along with some other very cool people. It was a real fun tweetup,
One cause I met a lot of fellow tweeps who I knew from Twitter and hadn't met in a while.
Two, also cause the discussion about social media and NGO's was quite brilliant, if I may say so myself. Bunch of us didn't realise where the time passed at all.

Some insights from the discussion,

Online to Offline connect
There are online campaigns for social causes but they are all virtual like 'light a virtual candle'. Usually these campaigns are started after traumatic incidents like terrorist attacks and such. So these acts coined 'armchair activism' by some, was questioned and a point raised was

how do we move beyond 'armchair activism' to create actual offline impact?


An interesting point made by @hiyer was that these may not translate offline in terms of providing compensation or food to victims, but it does provide 'solace'. Even though no close person has been affected in these incidents people do get agitated/affected by incidents. Lighting virtual candles can help allay that agitation. Which is great and it will reflect in how these people are offline too.

I have been thinking that actual ground reality problems managing the logistics for the victims, taking steps to avoid such incidents again and so on can only be solved if people move beyond solace. Nothing wrong with solace but solace is not solution. Solution is a different word and would bring about a different world.



NGO's using Social Media

Another point raised probably by Chandni of @fundacause is that while some NGO's that do great work are present on social media they don't get any traction. A few suggestions that came pouring out were,


  1. Use creative language - often NGO's use machine language which really fails to pep people up to the cause.
  2. Objective - Be clear of what you want from the social media campaign!
  3. Realistic - Be realistic or get some opinions from social media consultants/professionals about what sort of realistic objectives you can set for the campaign

These are the few points I can recall right now. Other than that many NGO efforts on social media were pointed out and discussed. Jaagore's online campaign for social 'awakening' was also discussed. What they could improve on and what they were doing right.

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