It can be hard when you’re the sole person responsible for digital marketing in your charity/organisation, especially when everyone around you either doesn’t understand it or isn’t interested. 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?
First of all, start with some training for the senior staff or board members. The training should help them understand the importance of social and digital marketing including the reach it has, the opportunities to find new customers/donors as well the way it can shine more light on your organisation and the work it does. It doesn’t necessarily have to go into the nitty-gritty of each channel so long as they understand why your work is so important. If your senior staff members get it, they’re more likely to encourage other staff and colleagues to value its importance too.
You might also want to then run some 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.
Secondly, use your internal communications to highlight the successes you are having. Do you have a regular email newsletter that goes out to all staff? Work with whoever in your organisation creates that (unless that’s you!) and supply regular content. It could be the top social media posts from that week or interesting posts they may be interested in. If you collect monthly analytics for your channels, you could send that around to everyone each month too so they can see just how many people you are reaching.
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.
Thirdly, come up with 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 for you to use on the organisation’s social media channels. For example, a nice anecdote from a volunteer or an interesting fact to share. The winner 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 other staff to submit content for you to use and feedback to them when you’ve used it.
Finally, sit down with each department 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!
Got any more suggestions or have any questions about this topic? Add a comment below.
Looking for more digital marketing advice for your business or charity? Check out my marketing advice tag to view all blogs on the subject.