It can be hard when you’re the sole person responsible for digital marketing in your organisation, especially when everyone around you either doesn’t get it, isn’t interested or thinks it’s a waste of time. The lack of support can be detrimental, not only to your work but to your mental health.

So how do you get your colleagues to be a bit more involved in your job?

Get senior staff on board

First of all, you need to get senior staff engaged. If senior staff get it, they’re more likely to encourage other staff and colleagues to value its importance too.

Run a session with them that communicates the importance of social and digital marketing for your organisation. Don’t forget to include:

• The potential reach it has
• Case studies of success you’ve already had
• The opportunities to find new customers or donors.
• The ways it can shine more light on your organisation and the work it does.
• The way it can build reputation and be a key communication channel in a crisis

It doesn’t necessarily have to go into the nitty-gritty of each social platform so long as they understand why your work is so important. Often, senior staff are risk averse and they might have heard some horror stories, so make sure you also address any concerns they may have.

You could then follow that up with training or workshops with other members of staff. Why not run some lunchtime drop-in sessions. You can show people what channels your organisation is using, the kind of things you post and suggest ways that they could get involved.

Keep communicating internally

Your internal communications channels are a great way to highlight the successes you are having. Do you have a regular staff newsletter or intranet? Work with whoever in your organisation manages them it (unless that’s you!) and supply regular content. It could be the top social media posts from that week or posts they may find interesting.

It might sound obvious but putting posters up in the kitchen, lift or other common areas to highlight your work and why your colleagues should be following the organisation’s channels will also work to regularly remind people about what you do.

Show what’s working and what’s not

If you collect monthly analytics for your channels, a regular report sent around might be a good way to remind everyone what you’re up to, the impact you’re having and what type of content is finding success online. Remember, most people won’t understand raw data, so keep it simple and share with them key facts i.e What posts had the highest engagement and why that’s the case. It’s important to also be honest about what types of content aren’t working and why.

Incentivise contributions

Come up with fun ways for your colleagues to contribute. This could be a small competition where staff have to come up with an interesting story or a campaign idea to post online. For example, a nice anecdote from a volunteer, an interesting fact to share or an old photo dug out from the records. The winner then gets a small prize. This gets people thinking about the kinds of content you are looking from them on a regular basis. You could also hold a photography competition which will once again get all the staff involved in your work whilst increasing your photo selection from around the business.

Don’t forget to make it easy for all staff to submit content for you to use and let them know when you’ve used it. People really do enjoy seeing their ideas turned into reality.

Help them to help you

Finally, sit down with each department or business area and look for ways you can help promote their work through social media. There may be interesting facts or stories they’re holding on to because they didn’t realise they were of interest. There may be innovative ways to share their work that they hadn’t considered. Building up these relationships with departments will encourage them to come to you with content before you have to go to them. Even if they don’t know what to do with it, you probably will!

By taking these ideas on board and with your enthusiasm for digital, staff will be able to see the impact of their contributions and how important it is for all staff to be involved in digital marketing. If it all goes really well and you end up with lots of staff members using social media themselves, don’t forget to have an office-wide social media policy in place!

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