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Living Case Studies: Social Media and Sustainable Agriculture

by Beth Kanter on Jul 27, 2011

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Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pro-soil/4807769472/sizes/l/in/photostream/ Grantees http://www.packard.org/what-we-fund/conservation-and-science/agriculture/
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I wanted to talk today about how grist is using sites like Facebook and Twitter to achieve our mission. Because Grist is, at it’s core, a website, our cases are going to be very different from some of the other examples shared, but I believe ours learning can be applied to your work.
First a little context—Grist’s mission. So our core goals are to help communicate what is going on in the movement around climate and sustainability to a broader, younger audience of people who may not consider themselves environmentalists, help them understand how those issued relate to their lives, and move those people to action. We do this a few ways. One is through irreverence and humor. Talking about polar bears on melting icebergs all day can make you want to jump off of an iceberg yourself. Or even worse, stick you head in the sand and ignore the problem. So we use humor to break through that barrier—we love our punny headlines. And we also reach a wider audience by covering issues that transcend the old-school treehugging of yore. Our food coverage is a great example of that. In this room, we all understand how food and climate are related, but most people don’t associate the two. So food is an important area for us, but it’s also a key entry point into all of our issues; food traffic is one of our biggest drivers. It is consistently among our top-read content—there are usually at least two to as many of four food stories in our “top five most viewed” list. And when we ran a series on nitrogen a year or so ago, we found that people spent three times as long on that coverage than they did on other stories on our site at that time. In other words—food is gold, especially on social sites.
To give you a sense of what success looks like for us, here is our ladder of engagement.
But we also have a similar ladder—moving people from on-ramps to real deeper conversation. Social can hook people into all of these, and works especially well with on-ramps.
So for us, social tools are important for a number of reasons. They are well suited to on-ramps Younger audiences are using these tools. 48% of young people get their news through Facebook. Half of 18-34 year olds check Facebook when they wake up; 28 % before even getting out of bed They help us turn our audience into evangelizers—allowing them to share info with their networks. That drives traffic and it drives the kind of traffic we want—people who might be new to these issues. They allow for personality and humor in a way that traditional online SEO-based tools do not. Food blows up in this space
So I wanted to walk you through a few experiments we have been doing—specifically on Twitter. The first was based on a piece that Tom Philpott wrote about all of the horrific things in soda. We saw huge traction on this story and decided to jump on an opportunity. So within less than 24 hours we convened a twitter chat. [Poll the audience who knows what] I am sure most of you heard about the Obama twitter chat at the beginning of the month—basically they revolve around a hashtag where people can tweet questions, answers, comments. The cool thing is when people tweet to this hashtag, it shows up in their feed. So all of their followers see it and can get hooked into the content—it creates a resonance that doesn’t happen as easily via email, etc. So with a few hundred tweets to this chat, we actually reached 100s of thousands of people.
From that we decided to take the time to plan a more intentional chat around a series we were presenting about the economics of biking. We took the time to promote this chat more widely over a period of about a week. And we saw great results. Once of the best parts of this example is this hashtag is still being used by people and to tag content unrelated to Grist . So we are getting this core idea out there. We don’t control the messaging anymore and you have to be comfortable with that.
Fun example.
You can see exactly on this graph when we hired a social media coordinator and you can see exactly what that means for our traffic.
The great benefit of social media is you can create a campaign in 140 characters or less. You must be thoughtful and plan and connect it to your core mission, but you also should be prepared to jump into action when there is opportunity.
The beauty of social media is, if something doesn’t work—it’s gone in a flash.
You can’t learn until you try. This is a great project for a young, committed, sharp intern of a junior communications staff who wants to “won” something.
- ROC’s campaign was not specifically targeted to get signatures but rather test the different channels of social media and our messaging. In Oct 2010 ROC held the ROC Summit. Nearly 200 attendees representing Food and Ag gathered. It was here were the ROC policy platform was deliberated and approved. This policy work would be the backbone to the campaign Campaign: At a pivotal time when the new governor was being elected it was time for a change. ROC wanted to ensure new policy agenda represented the needs for healthy food and farms
4 Main Tactics: Messaging, Canvassing, Social Media & Non-profit Partnership
The first tactic is to create a plan and how to execute. Action must be aligned with ROC mission, Action must be clear and concise A Timeline is critical because it’s the backbone to the campaign. Here you lay the ground work Audience must care about the cause Define content (message), explain problem, needs and why its important to create a change – ROC did this through video Plan out what means to best deliver message: in this case we created a webpage with embedded video & we emailed our network of supporters
ROC Webpage: Added embedded video directly onto site to engage audience Integrated our CRM platform- Salsa to incorporate i-frame page where our supporters can directly sign our petition
Second Step: Canvassing, hit the streets to build a grassroots movement (mobilize) Interns/Volunteers are extremely important in helping spread the work, distribute petitions and input data Canvassing does two things; allows to create a personal connection, get new emails and gets them on the spot These new supporters were integrated through a similar process called Rapid Donor Cultivation (introduction email (which also also people to connect via FB, Twitter), interactive video, and take action email
Org included: Physicians for Social Responsibility, California Center for Public Health Advocacy, Community Alliance with Family Farmers, California Food & Justice Coalition, Central Coast Alliance United for a Sustainable Economy, Regional Obesity Prevention Program, Hunger Action LA, Food Democracy Now, Slow Food USA -> Partnership was strategic b/c it represented a vast array of orgs from different sectors in the food and farming sector -> At the same time it was difficult because we tired working with some orgs that aren’t so networked and willing to share -> Point our CAUSE (Social Justice) to PSR ( Health) GOING TO THE EDGE OF THE NETWORK
Facebook: Easy way to post and get info out. During this campaign ROC posted our campaign a few times but not a big response Twitter: Another easy way to share info. ROC tweeted the campaign with similar results to FB. Online Petition: Free and easy to use. Here ROC focused most of our energy generating 7,731 signatures. Change.org gives you ability to target audience based on interest
Change.org was a great activism platform/ new tool ROC discovered Allows you to target specific audience: petitions are broken down by specific causes such as: Health, Environment, Education and Sustainable Food They have a very large following and people on change.org are activist looking for causes to support Great helpful tools to set up, widgets are available In this particular situation ROC also used our petition to purchase emails to build our email base
A variety of tools exist to Measure your analytics, ie Google analytics, bit.ly, insights and hootsuite For ROC we really measured our success based on Google analytics and the total number of sign-ons we had We used our CRM platform, Salsa, to view email stats on open rates, click-through and unsubscribe Bit.ly used mirror pages to see if FB generated more traffic or email list Hootsuite: Great tool to follow conversations
Google Analytics: 5,771 page views Facebook Insights: lets you breakdown into detailed info. In the “Daily Activity” Breakdown you can see exact # of likes, comments, etc Twitter: Failed to use hashtag,
Let’s summarize (briefly): What Worked: The partnerships developed in this campaign truly helped ROC emerge as a network working together to create change. It helped reach a new audience that helped spread the word and get more people to sign our petition Webpage: easy to integrate sign on platform Change.org: great site to generate signatures 7,731 signatures – Easy, didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. ROC found a new and successful way to promote our campaign through an online platform, Change.org Improvements: - In our next campaign ROC plans to better use social media as a tool to generate more signatures. -Organizing the campaign itself was very time consuming due to developing these partnership ROC was not as active as we should have been via our social media outlets Need to better direct traffic our site Unexpected things are always to be expected (timing) Challenges Conveying complex messages to the public – especially ROC’s Policy Platform 10 planks covering issues from env, labor, food access and economic viability of farmers Making policy work exciting and interesting
http://rootsofchange.org/campaign/food-movement-rising http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySSbI0ZrNAE&feature=player_embedded
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Living Case Studies: Social Media and Sustainable Agriculture

by Beth Kanter on Jul 27, 2011

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