ILRI Comms project insight 2014:
Storify
Susan MacMillan and Paul Karaimu
CKM Team Meeting
Addis Ababa, 2-4 February 2015

About this project or activity
1. Why is it important
• Offers new format for collating our social media posts (publicity)
and re-cycling them as blog posts, which gives new life to the social
media postings
• Way of curating the best-quality ILRI social media mentions
(including those of our partners and donors) into stories
2. What is it
• An online tool that ‘helps make sense of what people post on social
media and allowing users to curate important voices and turn them
into stories’ (storify.com/about).
3. What we want to achieve
• Extend the use, presence and reach of our social media posts in the
form of stories we can post as blogs
• Use Storify to collate and disseminate materials in Livestock
Matters (and maybe Corporate Report)

Our activities
1. What we did
• Susan started using Storify 2 yrs ago to collate tweets and pix on
essays she was reading (e.g. Economist on poverty) as well as
events ILRI heavily participated in (e.g. FARA in Ghana) and
continued this kind of ‘collective’ coverage for ILRI40 stories
2. What we did
• For the last ILRI40 Storify, Tsehay set up an ILRI Storify account and
Paul used it to compile a final ILRI40 highlights post, with inputs
from others in the comms team

Our activities
3. What we plan
• Get enterprise version that has more features (pdf, embedding into
blogs, etc), including one that easily allows many people to
collaborate on a Storify story. That would have been useful for all of
our ILRI40 Storify stories!
4. What we plan
• Explore use of Storify further to see how can support
blogging/comms, particularly to greatly extend the usefulness and
presence of (short-lived) soundbites, facts, links, recommendations,
etc., posted on social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn,
Facebook, Flickr, Pinterest, Slideshare

What we learned
1. Learning
• Great way to bring together images, tweets, posters, presentations
all in one place and turn these social posts into a story with more
lasting presence
2. Learning
• Can create a new ‘presentation’ by recycling ILRI social media
‘voices’
3. Learning
• Works well with Twitter, but has some issues showing PPT
presentations?
• Enterprise version needed to access full features

The presentation has a Creative Commons licence. You are free to re-use or distribute this work, provided credit is given to ILRI.
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