Goodwill Case Study: Creating High-Level Engagement With Social Tools
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In November 2012, IABC/DC Metro welcomed the Goodwill Industries International communications team who spent three years building engagement and developing content strategy for the nonprofit’s social media channels. Members of the Goodwill team shared lessons learned about critical components to success, their strategy for engaging audiences and connecting them with Goodwill’s mission. They also provided specific tactics and unique campaigns that helped build online engagement, highlighting the importance of leadership and organizational buy-in, online relationships, content strategy, and rules for engagement.
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Goodwill Case Study: Creating High-Level Engagement With Social Tools
- 1. Goodwill® Case Study: Creating High-Level Engagement with Social Tools Goodwill Industries International @GoodwillIntl IABC/DC Metro Thursday, November 8, 2012 Beth Perell @bcperell Arlene McCrehan @amccrehan VP Communications and Senior Director of Digital Media Information Management Adam Stiska @adamstiska Lauren Lawson-Zilai @laurenllawson Online Media Manager Director of PR
- 2. Goodwill and Social Media
- 3. Agenda • Intro to Goodwill • How we began and built our social media channels • Important things we‘ve learned – Leadership buy-in – Collaboration – Relationships – Content Strategy – Policy and Guidelines
- 4. Value shopping for people Employer of people with with low incomes disabilities Clothing and other goods Job training and employment for people in emergencies. services
- 11. 2010 2012
- 20. Engagement • It‘s not just exposure to a message or a piece of content. It‘s not just an impression. • It happens when the viewer‘s level of interest in a message inspires them to take an additional step after consuming the content. » Clicking on a hyperlink » Sharing » Commenting » Reposting » Favoriting
- 21. In the beginning… Strategic alignment – defining how we could most impact our organizational goals • Grow number of people served • Grow revenue to support mission • Strengthen brand, mission awareness • Strengthen public policy Influence
- 22. What did we know? • Females, ages 25-64 more likely to donate • Females, ages 25-64 more likely to shop » (and make a special trip to Goodwill®) Goodwill® Brand Study, January 2010, Market Decisions Corporation
- 23. What did we know? • 77 percent believe shopping at Goodwill® supports the community • 85 percent trust us • Fewer than half understand our core mission services role Brand Survey, April 2009, The Ad Council of Rochester
- 24. What did we know? Shopping represented the largest single topic of discussion, followed closely by discussions of donations. Nonprofit Benchmark Study prepared for Goodwill® by KDPaine & Partners, LLC, Berlin, NH, September 9, 2009
- 25. What did we know? What were people already saying about us on Facebook?
- 26. Identified our purpose • Build mission awareness • Increase customer base/brand ambassadors and advocates • Drive sales/increase donations • Educate customers • Reach new influencers • Support partnerships • Establish thought leadership • Drive traffic to our web sites, build e-mail lists, and enhance SEO
- 27. Strategy • Deliberate targeting of messages to our demographic around the topics of » Shopping at Goodwill » Donating at Goodwill » Our Mission » Partnerships • Editorial calendar
- 28. Goals • Increase Likes by 125 Percent • Increase Impressions by 150 Percent • Increase Post Feedback by 150 Percent • Boost Share of Conversation* • Increase Traffic to Website • Increase Traffic from Website to Facebook * Now ―Share of Conversation‖
- 32. Engagement tactics Partner Offers Goodwill FB fans: 30,000+ Gap FB fans: 1.5 million
- 33. Engagement tactics Start with engaging content. Trust our fans, let them talk. Be a customer service rep when required. Be patient. Repeat. Don‘t worry about derailments. Get conversation back on track if it seems natural. ―I give away good stuff—I buy good stuff. The ultimate in recycling = Goodwill. Thanks.‖
- 34. What did we learn? We needed: • Ongoing leadership buy-in • Organizational collaboration and buy-in • Online relationship building • Content strategy • Social media policy, community guidelines, social media response matrix • More meaningful measurement
- 37. Collaboration
- 38. Collaboration
- 39. Collaboration
- 40. Collaboration
- 41. Collaboration
- 42. Collaboration
- 43. Collaboration
- 44. Collaboration
- 46. Build Relationships ―I couldn‘t have done this without (a) Goodwill, (b) social media, and (c) everyone spreading the word.‖ @allthriftystate
- 48. Build Relationships #150Jobs….
- 50. Content Strategy Continue to Evolve Your Content Strategy “Content should be platform agnostic.” Global Webex Trends, February 2012
- 51. Content Strategy
- 52. Content Strategy
- 53. Content Strategy
- 55. Policy and guidelines We needed a social media policy to answer five questions: 1. Who is authorized to represent our brand? 2. What is appropriate content? 3. What is the line between professional and personal posts? 4. Is it okay to participate at work? 5. How do you handle a crisis in social media?
- 57. Policy and guidelines • Others personal information – • ALL CAPS Delete/Screenshot • Irate or Ranting • Criminal claim • Continued commenting • Discriminatory claim • Misc. Sign – Best Judgement • Disgruntled Employee • Delete all hate speech, attacks on • Noticed Groundswell followers and spam - Screenshot • Misc. Claim – Best Judgement Assess if PR or Is tone of management commenter needs to get approachable? notified? Is topic a repeated issue Respond * • Speak in first person to combat with response corporatized messaging • All sensitive information requests resources? • Is it about pricing? Refer to <Link> should be privately messaged • Is it about donations? Refer to • If complaint is about a member <Link> organization email and tag • Is it about a store? Refer to <Link> appropriate parties. • Is it about CEO salary? Refer to • Encourage member organization to <Link> take customer care over with local account If comment is positive, respond with a thankful, personal, real remark.
- 63. Recap Critical factors for growing social media engagement: • Get your leaders onboard and participating in social media • Get your entire organization on board and showcase the talent among your staff who can generate content • Watch and listen online for people who align with your brand, tap into their networks and spread our messages • Make the most of your content by repurposing it for different channels • Establish tools (policy, guidelines, matrix) that clearly outline a workflow for social media responses
- 64. Goodwill (No. 23)–a newcomer to the list–is another ―outlier among so many high-power business brands…‖ ―Consumers are really appreciative of the Goodwill retail stores and the perceived feel-good value they are bringing to local communities.‖
- 65. Insert my photo here holding up ‗why Goodwill inspires me‘ page
- 67. Q and A • Beth Perell, beth.perell@goodwill.org • Arlene McCrehan, arlene.mccrehan@goodwill.org • Lauren Lawson-Zilai, lauren.lawson@goodwill.org • Adam Stiska, adam.stiska@goodwill.org
Editor's Notes
- Title slide
- In Spring 2012, Fast Company’s blog ran this story that featured Goodwill’s work in social media. Note that in 2009, Goodwill had 200 followers on Facebook.United Way and Red Cross were the other orgs featured – 100+ yr old organizations
- Agenda
- People have these common perceptions about Goodwill. Which is closest to our mission?Mission Statement: Goodwill® works to enhance the dignity and quality of life of individuals and families by strengthening communities, eliminating barriers to opportunity, and helping people in need reach their full potential through learning and the power of work.Since Goodwill is a social enterprise, we rely on our retail sales to provide mission services. That is why we don’t typically give away clothing and goods, and why we try to set prices at what the market will support locally.
- Goodwill is a social enterprise -- an organization that uses business to improve human and environmental well-being, rather than maximizing profits for external shareholders. It’s that triple bottom line, in Goodwill’s case, of people, planet, profit, where profits are reinvested in our social services programs. We’ve been offering social services – job skills training and placement – for 110+ years, as a result of the social innovation begun by Goodwill’s founder Edgar Helms. In the early 1900s, Helms saw that by networking in Boston’s more elite communities and selling the items he collected in these burlap bags door-to-door (rather than giving them away), Goodwill could create jobs, and give people in need the employment, dignity and confidence to sustain themselves through difficult times and get them back on the path to financial independence.
- Goodwill is an innovative social enterprise made up of 165 local and individual Goodwill headquarters, each of which tailors its career services to meet the needs of its local communities. This shows our headquarters and store locations.Total revenue $4.43 billionTotal number of retail stores: More than 2,700Total revenue spent directly on programs: 82 percentTotal number of donors (includes repeat donations): 79 million
- Our Results for 2011The best stat? People who earned a job with Goodwill’s help: 189,000. That is the stat we’re most proud of.
- Immigrants We help them become part of the community through language and cultural awareness classes.People with criminal backgrounds We them you reintegrate into society and become a contributing member in your local community.People with disabilities We help them live independently, get a job, and advance their careers by providing access to support services, specialized training and assistive technology.Seniors We coordinate job readiness programs and supportive services to help seniors live independently, pursue employment goals and gain economic security.Veterans and Military Families We help veterans and their military spouses find employment, health services and skills for entering or reentering the workplace.Youth We prepare young people for a successful educational and financial future.
- The stories of the people we help best illustrate our mission. Here are three:Ann Rindfleisch, (at left) from right here in Milwaukee, was born without arms and legs, got her college degree, but couldn’t land a job. She went to Goodwill and received computer training. Today she manages a computer room at a Burlington Coat Factory.Jason Tobey from California, a Marine and veteran of Desert Storm and other engagements of that time, found that employers didn’t always think highly of Gulf War vets; there is often a stigma about PTSD and service men and women from those theaters. After some time searching for work, he enrolled in a 15-week Goodwill microenterprise training program. Today, he has his own successful security company – Semper Fi -- and is providing employment for 8 other veterans. I’d like to relate Janie Marsh’s story that she tells herself, as featured on our website. She was our award winner in 2010:I was a methamphetamine addict, an alcoholic and a thief. Physically, I was sick; mentally and spiritually, even sicker.I was convicted of various crimes and sentenced to almost three years in prison. I thank God that Goodwill Industries of the Columbia Willamette offered a six-week course inside the prison for people like me. I learned how to fill out applications, how to look for a job, how to dress appropriately for an interview, how to address my felony record and more.They directed me to sign up for the Goodwill Job Connection Program in my local area upon my release. They treated me with warmth and respect. I was connected with a landscaping job that I never would have thought I could do or would have even applied for without the Job Connection specialists’ encouragement and help.I started my job two weeks after walking out of prison. I love my job and have been there almost three years. I am now attending college to become a landscape architect. I have a life and dreams of a future. I have my dignity back.
- Because we are a social enterprise, there is a great deal of diversity in what our online team does. We’ll look at the digital assets that we work with and leverage in social media. Our first-person, weekly My Story features front and center on our main web site. This site is visited by about 6 million people yearly, and the locator (on the right) by about 7 million.
- Innovation is a core value at Goodwill. Here are some examples. Our mobile site launched in 2010. Mobile visitors to our online locator exceeded desktop users in May of 2012.Our mobile app will launch by year-end 2012.“An app is a brand bookmark” Mark Hendrix @ Google
- In addition to the web sites, Goodwill has created several online tools to help promote our mission.Undecided donors look for the impact of their donation, and how it’s making a difference in people’s lives. The Donation Impact Calculator (patent-pending), and the ticker at the bottom that shows how many pounds of usable goods are kept out of landfills, demonstrate the real impact of donating to Goodwill in local communities. For us, it embodied a tool that communicated local impact. There are more than 600,000 unique users. A person can also share their impact on Facebook and Twitter.To date, more than two billion pounds of usable goods have been diverted from landfills.For example 2 bags of clothes could provide someone with 2.1 hours of job search classes. We also use the My Story profiles here to demonstrate the impact on an individual’s lifeBag of Clothes: Approximately 1 Jacket, 3 shirts, 2 sweaters, 2 jeans, and 1 pair of shoes.
- Our iPad game teaches children about making good choices for our communities and the environment. It helps us meet a goal to educate more youth about Goodwill. The game offered an interactive way for moms to explain that just as there are things we recycle, there are things we should donate. Factoid: 570 Years of Angry Birds is played daily.
- Content strategy was another learning. This site, launched in 2010, is geared toward entry- and mid-level job seekers who may need to develop skills relevant to jobs available today. They can access online mentoring in topics around high job growth industry sector, such as health care and retail. Currently, there are more than 12,500 registered users. Without this tool, we would not be able to connect with this demographic.
- Through our unique structure, our Goodwill agencies have the freedom to innovate. We encourage innovation throughout the Goodwill enterprise. Here are few examples. This site, run by Goodwill Industries of Orange County California, had more than $33 M in sales in this year alone. Items that are unique can earn more revenue to support our mission on this site such as musical instruments, antiques, paintings, etc. Since its launch in 1999, more than 19 million items have been posted to the site. The site has been featured in Time Magazine and on The Rachael Ray Show. Normally, a member Goodwill operates within its own territory. This is an example of how online, it becomes national and international in scope.
- This online learning site, operated by Goodwill Industries of Eastern North Carolina, has had 14 million visits since its launch 2 years ago. Many local Goodwill training sites use these tutorials to help people learn basic and intermediate skills in a variety of topics.
- Each of our 165 member agencies manages its own web and social media channels. Typically they use these platforms to share content about sales, special events and promotions, and stories of the people they provide services to. October is our biggest sales month because of Halloween. You’ll see the various promotions a few Goodwills have created to promote purchasing costumes at Goodwill.
- Current project on Pinterest: Curating local Goodwill content and pushing out one new costume idea per day on Twitter. Leverage the right tool for the right message.
- We maintain a census of social media participation by local Goodwill agencies. This is a map using Google Fusion Tables to illustrate Goodwill’s footprint in social media. Since each Goodwill has the autonomy to develop their own social media strategy, our team tracks our digital footprint, so we can better understand our reach.
- In 2009, these are (and still are) the foundational goals that drive our work online.
- Our customer demographic
- More about our demographic
- In 2009, Goodwill only had 200 fans on Facebook. We worked with Katie Paine, author of Measuring What Matters, monitored online conversation over a period of time to understand how people were already talking about us online.
- We did our own monitoring to listen to conversations about Goodwill.
- Then, we laid out a framework for our goals.
- How would we achieve our goals?
- We met or exceeded our goals. (This presentation doesn’t focus on measurement: although it is critical in our work, it would be an entire presentation on its own. I’m happy to talk further with anyone interested in how we set goals and metrics around engagement.
- On Facebook and Twitter, we began tapping into the great resource of people who know us and love us for our stores and our ‘reuse’ philosophy; we listened to them, gave them some good online customer service when needed, and at the same time, helped them get to know us a little better. We knew that this group presented the potential to extend awareness of our mission and engaging this audience on a personal level was crucial in helping a broader public connect with and support Goodwill’s mission. These are a couple of sample conversations on the topic of shopping at Goodwill.
- Sample conversation around donating to Goodwill.
- Sample conversation related to the Goodwill mission: job training and career services
- This partnership that we promoted in social media gave us an indication that we were doing something right with engagement. Gap had more than a million fans, and got 100 likes. We had 30,000, and got 30 likes. Our fans WANTED to engage.
- This derailed conversation ended with the comment at bottom right.
- So we did that for about a year or so. Reached 20,000 or so followers. We learned that customer service demand grows as our fan base grew. We begin to understand the common questions and issues people raise. We needed fresh, relevant content.We needed a strategy for consistent responses, and for posts that were potentially harmful to our brand. So, these were the things that became important to us, and I’ll walk you through these now, with a few examples.(Again, I am not going to talk too much about measurement in this presentation. I’m happy to talk further with anyone interested in how we determine engagement goals and metrics.)
- Our president and CEO was unfamiliar with social media in 2009 but he knew it was important, he was supportive of our efforts and he wanted to engage. We taught him how and when to use Twitter as well as LinkedIn to promote our initiatives. Jim is the first blind person to graduate from Harvard’s MBA program so there were additional considerations given that he is fully blind.During Jim’s two year term on the White House Council for Community Solutions as appointed by President Obama, he used social media as a means to communicate with fellow members of the Council such as Jon Bon Jovi as illustrated above.
- Our team secured two blogs on the Huffington Post for Jim to engage with audiences around our major campaigns and policy issues. He blogs for the impact section as often as he would like about our mission and lifestyle issues. He also blogs for the “Opportunity: What is Working” section spearheaded by Ariana Huffington’s chief of staff to take a critical look at perspectives from both sides of the aisle on the current unemployment situation. And now, I’ll turn it over to Arlene to talk about our collaboration efforts.
- We also needed our entire organization to buy-in to what we were doing online and in social media. Part of this was sheer self-preservation. We are a team of four, and we needed to increase our staff resources without increasing our head count.Blogger Park Howell says, “Stories bring meaning to our lives, when we are so overwhelmed with so much information coming in.” We knew we had the potential for thousands of stories of the people who Goodwill had helped and had experienced firsthand the power and dignity that work brought to their lives and their families, and we wanted to tell those stories. In 2009, we launched MyStory as a weekly blog. We asked our local agencies to help us find the best stories of the people they were helping; they prep the people they choose, who call in their stories by phone; we create the web narrative and podcast. More recently, we have begun to document these more frequently in video format as well. This has given us a treasure trove of content. And it is originated and created among our network of Goodwill marketing and communications professionals. They in turn are reposting and promoting the content locally. The map shows our web users how real people in their own communities are being impacted by Goodwill.
- We also had a great wealth of job counseling expertise across our enterprise, so we worked to gain authors across the organization to offer job training tips through this new weekly blog. First sought expertise within our office, then expanded to Goodwill job counselors across our network of agencies. We conducted blog writing training for these authors.
- We offer video format for those that don’t want to write, or were more comfortable with this format. This video features a soft skills lesson about how to appropriately dress for the office when the weather is hot.
- We have a collaboration withFamily Circle magazine in its fourth year for its September Back-to-School issue. During these partnerships, Family Circle asks its 19 million readers to donate gently used items to Goodwill. In addition, we added Facebook contest alongside the donate goods message.Last year, we conducted a photo contest on Facebook using a customized third party app, with rather tepid results. Plus, we ran in difficulties authenticating contestants.
- This year, we knew we needed something more engaging than a photo contest, and decided to leverage a digital asset that we already had – the Donation Match Game, which you already heard a little a bit about. Family Circle resonated with how the game could teach its readers (families with children) how the choices they made to donate and recycle certain items benefit their local community and the environment.
- A sample of our Facebook posts throughout the four week contest.Family Circle promoted similarly through its digital channels.
- We also developed a Facebook ad campaign to drive results, which was key to fostering engagement on Facebook. Previously, we experimented with cross-channel ad campaigns (using Twitter’s Promoted Products to bring people to Facebook, for example), but that didn’t drive the results we hoped for.2011Total Ad Spend: $10,122 Average CTR: 1.9% Number of Photos Voted Upon: 55 2012Total Ad Spend: $8,850 Average CTR: 4.3% Total Players: 7,507 (2,384 from ads) Contest Entrants: 3,582 Through this collaboration, we earned 226 media mentions in national and local media outlets. Generated 36 million opportunities for people to read or view news about the partnership
- With each public-facing collaboration, we engage our network of Goodwill agencies by providing them recommended message points and schedules.We use similar messaging for our regular blog contributors, which Lauren will talk a little about, to help them stay on message.
- We also learned the importance of growing our online relationships. We had a growing need for content, and reached out to bloggers and others that already had a following in social media and in mainstream media to serve as our ambassadors. Three of those bloggers include: Evette Rios, Puerto Rican lifestyle expert, roving reporter and correspondent to ABC’s “The Chew,” the only Latina on daytime television, and design and entertainment expert for Rachael Ray. She writes our bargain shopping blogs, which are the most read blogs on our public site. In addition, she serves as our Hispanic spokesperson. Lorie Marrero, CPO® Certified Professional Organizer, is author of the best-selling book, The Clutter Diet, and founder of an organizing program by the same name that has a presence in more than 18 countries. She is the organizing expert for Good Housekeeping. Lorie became our spokesperson in 2010 when we launched the Donate Movement, a public awareness initiative to teach people about the impact that donating has on both people and the planet. Lorie participates in interviews on behalf of Goodwill, tweets about us several times a day, stars in PSAs, and incorporates us into any of her media opportunities. She blogs on a monthly basis on our public website. In fact, each of these bloggers follows our editorial calendar, which maps to our seasonal and holiday calendar. For instance, Lorie recently blogged about organization tips for scaring away Halloween clutter. Jenna Isaacson is a photo editor at AARP, visual journalist, former reporter and professor at Catholic University. In the summer of 2010, she embarked on a project called “All Thrifty States” to educate the public about the consumption in America and encourage reusing and shopping at thrift stores. Within a period of 7 weeks, she visited 32 states and 30 Goodwill stores.
- Speaking of Jenna, Jenna represents a relationship where she found us, and it has since evolved into an ongoing offline/online relationship. Jenna was like so many in 2011 who lost their jobs. She was frustrated by the unstable economy, and empathetic for those who were worse off than she. Jenna was a journalist with a passion for photo essays. Jenna grew up thrifting with her grandfather in Illinois and Florida, and he was a big fan of Goodwill, so this was an activity that was close to her heart.Jenna decided to try reinventing herself and creating a job at the same time. She proposed totravel across the United States, documenting in photographs and blogs consumerism and the toll it has taken on the nation’s resources. She wanted to document what Americans were discarding by what was seen in thrift stores across the country and provide a window on the story of America's communities through the observation of things they once owned.She named her project, All Thrifty States: A Visual Journey through America’s Collective Closets, and used the online funding platform,Kickstarter, to promote it, saying she would focus on how thrift shopping is not only a choice that is healthy for the planet, but an answer to the consumerism that has pushed Americans’ spending habits to the max. She would turn her project into a book or documentary at the end.She raised her $7,000. Jenna reached out to us for our support, and we immediately resonated with the value of this idea, it aligned with our strategic goals. We agreed to pay for her RV rental fee in exchange for putting the Goodwill logo on the vehicle and visiting and blogging about the Goodwill stores on her journey. As Jenna traveled, she blogged about her escapades, which were many. We worked with the Goodwills that were on Jenna’s route to promote her trip through mainstream and social media. We created the template news releases and social media messaging that I mentioned earlier for local Goodwills to use. The story landed us more than 240 million media impressions through social and earned media as many local news outlets picked it up, as well as national outlets, including the Chronicle of Philanthropy, Earth 911, the Huffington Post, and Living Green Magazine. The exposure was worth more than a $41,000 ad buy.
- This concept of blogging about the culture of thrift shopping resonated with our readers, and we decided to invite Jenna to blog for Goodwill on a regular basis, which she now does monthly. We’re continuing to mutually benefit from our online blogger communities. And now I’ll turn it over to Adam.
- Since 2009, Goodwill Industries International posted weekly first-person success stories and podcasts called “My Story.” This summer, we realized we were about to publish our 150th story on Labor Day and decided to develop a simple campaign to showcase the 150 stories. With the election cycle in full swing and the unemployment rate still near 8 percent, a lot negative conversation was being had online around jobs and employment.We wanted to transform the topic of employment into something positive by demonstrating the life-changing impact that finding a job can have on individuals and their families. We also wanted people who were currently unemployed or looking to advance their careers to view Goodwill as a resource for their career and education needs.Because of the project’s scale and timeline, we opted to use Twitter as our communications channel instead of Facebook. We timed the campaign to draw increased attention to our mission at a time when people were naturally talking about employment and jobs. We used a unique hashtag to curate the conversation (#150Jobs). We crafted 150 tweets with compelling (and shareable) quotes that linked back to the individual’s full story.We bulk uploaded those message using HootSuite for deliveryone time per hour and began counting down to Labor Day one tweet at a time.We also previewed the 150 tweets with our network to let them know when their local success story would be featured and gave them campaign messaging to encourage participation.Finally, we added a live Twitter feed to our Goodwill.org homepage and an ad on our My Story landing page.
- To broaden our reach, we notified a few influential bloggers with whom we had a previous relationships. One of those bloggers was Beth Kanter, which many of you may know. For those unfamiliar withBeth, she was named by Fast Company as one of the most influential women in technology. We first found Beth Beth through KD Paine and the work we commissioned with her during our early days using social media.At this point, Beth hadrecently interviewed us about our work in the mobile environment for a new book of hers that has just been published. So, the connection was warm and we asked her to help push out the #150Jobs campaign. At this time, she had over 400,000 followers on Twitter.The resultsof this campaign totally blew away our target number and delivered nearly 4 million impressions on Twitter, as measured by our social media monitoring tool, which was more than quadruple our projections.Many of the tweets had two to three times their normal reach and several supporters went above and beyond simply re-tweeting to send us positive comments and brand mentions.
- Here’s one takeaway for success we found: continue to evolve your content strategy. Content can and should be platform agnostic, and you have to know how to a good story for any given platform.
- One way we’ve been evolving our content is through our weekly My Stories. Originally, we asked our FB supporters to click through the stories posted on Facebook to read more. We saw decent engagement, but didn’t really see the web traffic we hoped for. So, we made a strategic shift from using social media to build website traffic to focusing on growing engagement on the channels themselves. On Facebook, we repackaged our stories as compelling images with inspiring quotes and saw a much higher engagement rate.
- We’re also seeing the benefits of creating more video content for our My Stories, including the ability for more dynamic content on our mobile site, since video content is so consumable on mobile devices.
- Another strategic choice we made was to match the content delivery channel to the interests and preferences of our audiences.For instance, people who are interested in our jobs and career information prefer to receive email from us, so every month we push out a digest of our blog content.We also promote new content and events to job seekers through weekly SMS messages.Beth will now speak a little on how we ensure our all this work continues to align with our overall organizational goals.
- While our philosophy is to encourage conversation and collaboration online, we still need to have some rules in place.We designed a policy for our office, and provided a web platform for local Goodwill agencies to share their policies. Factoid:A recent study by PayScale revealed that only 53 percent of companies share a formal social media policy. Why is this important?
- We researched social media policies online from all types of organizations and borrowed the most relevant concepts to create our own. I highly recommend this for crafting your own. www.socialmediagovernance.com has curated a wealth of policies – you can find an organization that has similarities to yours and begin there.
- Community guidelines set the tone for engagement and reflect your brand personality. Our intent was to be open, caring, family friendly. These guidelines hold for participation across all of our digital assets, including Facebook and Twitter.
- As we grew, we knew we still wanted to be good listeners and respond to our community. But the volume continued to grow, and we needed to distribute responsibility to more people to be able to respond. A social media response matrix can be shared with staff who use social media, and help everyone understand when and how it to respond, when the community can step up and respond, and when it needs to be escalated to someone internally. This tool gives a level of freedom to staff handling posts. (If time, review four quadrants, mention bottom line)Benefits of a response matrix:Gives a level of freedom to more staff to handle postsGives a consistency of voiceShows alignment with your overarching business goalsEnables quicker response time
- A social media response matrix is useful in situations similar to this incident in early March of this year. Nationally syndicated radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, made a series of derogatory remarks about Georgetown University Law Center law student Sandra Fluke. Widely described as inappropriate, Limbaugh's comments provoked large-scale criticism on national news programs, and spurred several campaigns on social media. On March 5, a radio ad produced by a local Goodwill ran during the Rush Limbaugh radio show on a local station. Soon, several websites reported that Goodwill “advertised” during Limbaugh’s radio show and that Goodwill was a supporter of the talk show host and his politics. Discussions on this topic then began appearing on Goodwill Industries International social media outlets, primarily on Facebook and Twitter. Additionally, our national office began receiving negative comments via our800 number and ‘contact us’ email through our web site.We learned that the local Goodwill had purchased air time on a sister radio station, but that the station that aired Limbaugh’s show borrowed the ad to air during his programming, suggesting it was a free PSA.
- These are some of the statements that had already started to escalate the issue on Facebook.
- We quickly posted a corrective statement on our social media platforms, stating that the ad was run without permission and emphasizing that Goodwill is a non-partisan nonprofit organization that does not endorse a particular political or ideological point of view. We also worked to respond to hundreds of emails and tweets that were personally directed at us. In addition, our team quickly worked with local Goodwills to ensure that their PSAs were not placed on stations running Rush’s program, and the conversation begun to turn around.
- The team also worked to either remove or correct statements on the various blogs, news sites and web sites listing Goodwill as a “Rush supporter.” Some of those included:The Atlantic Wire http://www.theatlanticwire.com/Capitol Communicator http://www.capitolcommunicator.com – local to DCThe Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/The Moderate VoicePolitico http://www.politico.com/StopRush.org http://stoprush.org/Topple Bush http://topplebush.comPeople began to show their appreciation for what we were doing.
- On March 6, we introduced new messaging on Facebook to shift the conversation and emphasize our mission highlighting a success story of a female veteran served by Goodwill:RESULTS: No significant loss or gain in followers. The end goal was to diffuse and isolate. Had we not been responsive, our reputation could have been severely impacted. And now, I’ll turn it over to Arlene for our recap.
- Goodwill was recently named to this list for 2012. Others on the list include:1. Apple2. Wal-Mart3. Target4. Google5. Microsoft6. Amazon8. Starbucks9. McDonald’s10. Coca-ColaWhole FoodsTom’s Shoes
- Borrow good ideas! We’re going to launch a campaign, similar to the ‘99 Percent’ campaign, and give people a platform to say why Goodwill inspires them.
- I’ll leave you with an inspiring quote from our president and CEO, Jim Gibbons.