Social media pays off for Canada's World - have you joined Facebook/Twitter yet?

We had a great members' meeting on Thursday, March 9. The morning meeting session was an ideal lead-in to the afternoon workshop, which was on engagment through the use of social media. The morning focused on making and sustaining connections within the international development community in BC and we received very helpful feedback for the work done in the last 12 months and suggestions for the next 12 months. Notes can be found here.

Joining us for the afternoon session were Shauna Sylvester and Kaitlyn Braybooke from Canada's World.

Shauna shared some lessons learned from Canada's World's use of social media. Despite her initial reluctance, Canada's World has established a strong presence online and has used it to fulfill their mandate of 'engaging Canadians in developing a new story for Canada in the world'. This culminated in the highly successful ForeignPolicyCamp event in November 2009, which was interactive not only for the physical participants, but the virtual ones as well!

Having been sufficiently pumped up by Shauna's talk on her experiences with Facebook and Twitter, Kaitlyn taught us to use them. Kaitlyn is, according to her website, "a writer, editor, graphic/web designer and [she's] fascinated by how social change & activism can be fostered through digital worlds." Her hands-on workshop introduced us to this very idea of building an online community to support real-world change.

Sad that you missed all this excitement? Here's the recording from the afternoon social media workshop! Let us know what you think!