In response to the ongoing, horrific murders of George Floyd and other people of color, the climate crisis, global pandemic and the anti-democracy movement, the Alliance re-evaluated its work in 2020 and developed our comprehensive Campaign for Sustainability, Health, Equity and Kindness (S.H.E. Kindness). It seeks to bring about fundamental systems change through personal and organizational transformation and impactful public policies. Our strategy is to support and amplify the work of aligned groups to build a diverse, inclusive alliance of more than one million people and organizations working together to shift systems in three critical institutions: education, business and government.
The weekly e-Newsletter and social media cover various aspects of sustainability, health, equity and kindness, as well as promoting the three Campaign Program Areas: Policy, Business and Youth & School.
Goals:
A critical part of the Campaign for Sustainability, Health, Equity and Kindness (S.H.E. Kindness) is to inform and motivate individuals to take action. We strive to reach a wide range of demographics, including ages 12 - 99+. While our e-Newsletter audience skews older, we want to be sure to reach Gen-Z through social media, so we thoughtfully choose a range of subject matter, including sustainable fashion, promoting younger influencers and social and environmental justice.
Working with a staff of 2, several part-time student interns (whose time with us ranges from 3 - 12 months), and some professional volunteers, we reworked our Communications and Marketing Plan, bolstering branding elements and revising strategies. We changed our methods for planning content for our weekly e-Newsletter to increase relevance and interest, and continue to spend a great deal of time creating an entertaining, informative and impactful newsletter with broad appeal. We then utilize that content as a base for our social media platforms. We chose to use Instagram as the focus of our social media outreach, sharing posts designed and composed for Instagram on other platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter). We concentrated on posting every day, presenting an increasingly attractive and coherent feed and sharing valuable and informative posts.
One challenge is having anywhere from 3 to 7 people with limited time creating impactful e-Newsletter articles and social media posts during the week and maintaining a recognizable look and feel. We work hard on consistency in font choice, color and overall structure to build brand recognition. We carefully review every post as a group to see what works and where we can improve. We’ve integrated a robust use of hashtags, given followers opportunities to interact, increased our level of interaction on the platforms and worked hard to build community. We've also integrated reels into our feed.
Another challenge concerns content, which can be overwhelming and frustrating. Our social media and newsletter share the same content, which is painstakingly curated to be timely, relevant, showcase our broad definition of sustainability, invite people into changing to more sustainable ways of living, provide information on important concepts and ideas which may be unfamiliar, and offer our very unique commentary on how it all fits together. Talking about sustainability and climate can be a blizzard of bad news, and we work hard to include good news, offer solutions and give followers the opportunity to take action. We often discuss mental health, self care, resilience, awe and joy to give our followers ways to feel hope in what can feel like a desperate and anxiety-provoking time.
By continually evaluating and focusing on what was most interesting and useful to our community, we elevated our e-Newsletter content and have reached a high open rate of 32% after lingering around 17-18%.
In the past 2 years we’ve increased our Instagram following by 718% (220% in the past year), including an expanding core group of followers. Our number of accounts reached and interactions on Instagram have continued to rise, and we attribute this to consistent posting, selection of subjects, reels, and boosting with a very modest budget of $100 - 150/month.
We have focused on following, sharing, creating posts and contacting aligned people and organizations with the goal of building a community with many different perspectives, ideas and backgrounds. We continue to explore the ideas of co-posting and other sorts of online partnerships.
We are a small but mighty nonprofit that is intern-focused. We are producing a highly regarded, positive weekly e-newsletter about sustainability, climate, health, equity and kindness while motivating people to learn, engage and take action. We are also producing almost-daily high quality social media posts to educate, inform, delight, and galvanize our followers. Our success will be a healthy, just, equitable, thriving, kind and peaceful world that works for everyone and realizes our greatest dreams of sustainability. And our reward will be the joy we have in building the community to accomplish this.
