The possibilities of Social Media in Campaign Mobilizing & Outreach

We're getting ready to offer an exciting new workshop for BCCIC members. It will focus on "hands on" skills for social media tools like Facebook and Twitter.

I know, many folks in "my generation" are a bit leery of social media, and some think its a bit of a flash-in-the-pan, whose importance will soon fade. The more I find out about though, the more I think its actually a tool that is going to grow in importance, and those folks who have not tried to dip their toes in the water might be missing a very valuable new method of reaching out to people and getting them connected to your campaigns and issues.

I actually just started working as the new Program Officer at BCCIC in December 2009 (doesn't that seem like years ago now?) - and jumped right into the International Development Week campaign for 2010. CIDA was very clear this year - they insisted that we use social media tools to reach out to youth about global issues. They wanted us to create "You Tube" videos of young people who are role models of global citizenship, and to find creative ways to reach out to youth to get them listening and learning from these role models. If you haven't seen it yet, here is your last chance -
bccic.ca

The result was the on-line campaign that you hopefully saw at some point during International Development Week - a very cool website with videos, podcast interviews, written profiles and photos - and also a contest that would help us get feedback from viewers about the impact this info was having on them (was it inspiring them to take action in some way?). We promoted the website through our "Fan Page" on Facebook, through Twitter posts, through online ads on The Tyee, Georgia Straight and Facebook and through print ads in 5 newspapers across the province. Overall, we got about 2,600 visitors to our website during the campaign, tripled the number of people following us on Facebook and Twitter! We think that's quite the accomplishment, and puts us in a great position for all our future work, as now hundreds more people will be reading our posts and updates about all our work, not just IDW work.

We think these are the kinds of tools that BCCIC members could really use effectively, if people just felt more comfortable using them.

So folks, we are planning a training workshop for the second week of March. Watch those "In Boxes" for the exact date - but for sure it will be in Vancouver, so plan to make that trip to the Big Smoke (for our friends "from away").

Hope to meet you all soon!

Darlene