Jan Owen
To affect social change, you have to believe that change can happen, believe you have something to contribute, believe that collective action and bringing people together matter and believe in conversations that elevate the voices of those who don’t have a platform of their own.
Social change is not for the faint-hearted and neither is social media. Finding your voice in the cacophony of white noise is a core twenty-first-century skill and capability for those wishing to influence public policy, drive conversations forward and affect social change.
As the CEO of the national, for-purpose, Foundation for Young Australians (FYA), I am asked daily to connect meaningfully and often with our stakeholders, partners and participants, to build value-adding collaborations and embody the spirit of our organization.
With a diverse audience of millions, spanning the length and breadth of the country, social media is a key way to stay connected, responsive and relevant.
Beyond this, we live in a digital age where many significant conversations and influencers are active online. Long gone are the days where a CEO could send out some media releases and wait for a press call to engage in the conversations that matter to their organization. Today’s CEOs must proactively invest, monitor and participate in online conversations, not only about their organization but also about the broader world in which they operate, to be seen as credible and reliable.
This is especially true for CEOs of NGOs and for-purpose organizations today. According to the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, we are facing a society increasingly distrustful of NGOs and leadership, with 84 per cent of people expecting CEOs to inform conversations and policy debates on one or more pressing societal issues, including jobs, the economy, automation, regulation and globalization.
I joined Twitter in May 2011. Before that my social media use was limited to Facebook, opinion pieces and traditional media via mainstream news or current affairs.
So, how does a CEO who’s new to social media become good at it? Where do they begin when it comes to new media as a tool for connecting with such a significant audience?
For me, FYA’s brand and content strategy is a driving force behind how I approach being a social CEO.
Using social for good
FYA has been around in its current form since 2000. Over this time it has evolved from a strategic philanthropic funder to a leading research, advocacy and social enterprise organization.
With a mission to grow and support generations of young changemakers to create a more sustainable and equitable future, FYA works with thousands of young Australians each year to unleash their potential. We also work with the people and institutions who make decisions that impact young people’s capacity to thrive and create the world they want to live in, from educators and parents to policy makers and employers.
We do a lot of things face to face at FYA, but with 79 per cent of Australians checking their social media at least once per day according the 2018 Sensis Social Media Report, online is where we can engage with the largest, most diverse audience.
FYA now brings together one of the largest digital communities of diverse young people in Australia, with a social media community of over 150,000 on Facebook and Instagram, as well as regularly over 50,000 visitors to our website each month. Our audience of educators, policy makers, parents and employers are made up of over 30,000, mainly from Twitter and LinkedIn. As CEO of FYA, my own Twitter and LinkedIn accounts also have close to 30,000 followers.
It wasn’t always this way. A few years ago, FYA had a social media community of 4,000 and under 7,000 visitors to our website monthly.
So, how did we get here?
A strong community can only be built and maintained when there is a shared vision among your team about why you want to reach your audience, who you are specifically trying to connect with and how you are going to connect with them. A lack of clarity regarding any of these questions within your team will lead to confusion for your audience and, ultimately, disengagement.
At FYA we want to see young people at the centre of decisions that impact their future. We also want to engage those who support young people to ensure they are equipped to navigate and thrive in a rapidly evolving world.
To do this we had to get better at putting our audience at the centre of our strategy.
Probably the most critical decision at any point in time is this: What strategy do you need to adopt for what result? Information dissemination is different to driving conversations, and different again to running campaigns. Once your strategy is clear, then choosing which platforms support this approach and measuring the impact are important.
People, platforms and posting
Put your audience at the centre of your content.
This sounds obvious, but previously our site and social media were simultaneously trying to reach young people as well as our partners and funders. By trying to cater for both, through the same channels, we weren’t really hitting the mark with either. Young people didn’t feel like the content spoke to them, while stakeholders wanted to see how we brought our strategy to life online – recognizing the agency of young people, putting their voices at the centre and hearing about how they could help to do the same.
At FYA we are fortunate to have an extremely talented group of young people leading our digital work. This includes creating our content as well as building a network of young contributors. Our most popular content are articles written by young people from within this network, proving you don’t have to be a writer or journalist to create content that resonates.
We put young people at the centre of discussions for our stakeholder audience too. But the topics are tailored towards their interest in FYA’s research and policy work around the future of work, education, learning and social entrepreneurship. Similarly, we have a team that creates and curates content from young people and those working with them who can share insights into what challenges and opportunities young people are experiencing at school, at work and in life.
My role as a social CEO
This is where my role as a social CEO comes in – with targeted thought leadership, including a monthly blog and responsive opinion pieces shared across my professional channels. This content has been a mechanism for raising issues, flagging solutions and testing new ideas that demonstrate the organization’s understanding of the broader context in which we operate. The engagement around this content has been consistently strong – in fact it is some of the most highly read content on our website.
Once you’ve got the right content, you need to choose the right channels so that it reaches your audience.
At FYA we have channels primarily dedicated to our youth communications (Facebook, Instagram and YouTube) and separate channels predominantly focused on communicating with our stakeholders (LinkedIn and Twitter). As I primarily talk to our stakeholder audience, I use Twitter and LinkedIn a lot, posting at least twice a day, if not more often.
Importantly, I don’t have multiple personal or professional accounts for Twitter or LinkedIn. I don’t utilize these platforms for my personal views or self-promotion, but only to elevate FYA, our mission and the conversations we are seeking to have by engaging in real-time online discussion about the issues which affect and inform our strategy.
I aspire to be present and to assert my own voice and personality rather than just churning out the same content or that which our official FYA channels share. While it’s important to support this content and be connected to the organization’s ‘why’, it is also important to join live conversations, respond to people in real time and be prepared to demonstrate my own expertise and lived experience.
This clarity of purpose is key to enabling me to stay in the FYA wheelhouse and makes it significantly easier for me to do the bulk of my own posting and responding. My team support me by running campaigns like my ‘One Incredible Young Australian a Day’ which I started in 2018, but I make the vast majority of posts myself.
Cutting through the noise
Once you’ve got your channels straight, how do you make sure your content cuts through and has an impact on your readers?
Our community is looking for expertise, insights and the voices of young people.
Giving young people a platform where they can have their say and voice their opinions, with little censoring or direction, and broadcasting their views to allow them to speak for themselves across our channels are core to our mission.
‘It begins with me’ is a well-known social change adage. As CEO, this means being willing to stand up for what FYA (and young Australians) believe in.
In 2015 FYA received funding to convene the Safe Schools Coalition of Australia to support young LGBTIQ+ people, based on a model from the United States which we piloted in Victoria with Monash University. Much has since been written about the ensuing political and media storm which followed this critically important teacher, parent and student information and training ‘opt-in’ high school initiative.
As the storm raged, FYA stayed consistently on-message about the purpose of this critical program – writing articles and blogs and giving media commentary, despite the avalanche of attacks on the program on social media directed at specific individuals, in emails and commentary on our websites. We stayed the course and worked incredibly hard behind the scenes to ensure the initiative was not shut down during a long and sustained attack. It took fortitude not to fold under the pressure and play into the firestorm created through the media.
What kept us going was knowing that some LGBTIQ+ young people could literally die without this support in their schools. To play into the hands of the critics would be indefensible and mean allowing the program to be defunded two years before the contract ended. It was the right thing to do. We, and our six state and territory partner organizations, received some criticism for this, but we also learned an essential lesson regarding when to use social media channels and when not to.
By 2017 when a postal survey for marriage equality was called, FYA joined the call across all of its social channels for a ‘yes’ vote. As the co-founder and convenor of the Safe Schools Coalition, we knew that young people care about, and want to live in, a society where all people are treated equally.
With a short video and blog post about why we supported marriage equality, we demonstrated FYA’s commitment once again. The content was well received – but beyond that, we were able to continue to stand with our community of young people.
More broadly, not just organizations but young people themselves, from around the world, have found their voice and platforms to build powerful social change movements online.
The recent courage of Emma Gonzalez, Greta Thunberg and Jean Hinchcliffe are no exception. Being under eighteen years, these three extraordinary high school students took a stand to make the world safer, more sustainable and more equitable. These young women led school students onto the streets of cities across the globe to protest inaction on gun laws and climate change.
They’ve had an impact. Not only on millions of their peers around the world but also in changing hearts and minds and emboldening others, across all generations, to stand up for what they believed in too.
Politicians and powerful institutions were enraged and told them to be quiet, to go back to school and study, but these students were awake to the facts.
With over two million social media followers between them, Emma and the March for our Lives movement gained a larger following than the NRA (National Rifle Association) in just a month. Young climate change movements globally have engaged with millions in dozens of countries. Social media has provided a generation of young people a voice and platform for the issues they care about which cannot easily be shut down.
Sharing creates exponential social change
We are privileged to have many of Australia’s brightest and most inspiring young social entrepreneurs, innovators and changemakers in our FYA community. There is nothing I like better than to share the journeys, learnings and wins of our community, partners and stakeholders. In turn our community of young changemakers, innovators and activists share their stories, campaigns for change, outcomes and achievements across our channels.
The compounded effect of sharing other people’s content, starting a conversation and adding value and insight is immeasurable. It is at these times that I feel I am in a deep, rich and connected ecosystem of collaborators, rather than some echo chamber bouncing the same ideas around four walls.
The learning journey never ends
Like most CEOs, I am still learning how to utilize these tools for change for the most impact. I have definitely made plenty of mistakes. For example, when I engage in issues beyond our remit at FYA or my previous CEO roles and experiences, no matter how interesting they are, they rarely gain traction. Also, I don’t always seem to be as humorous as I think I am. I have come to learn that staying focused and strategic is key to success.
However, I am never afraid to enter unknown territory where I can learn and gain new social media skills.
Some skills are transferable offline to online – and not just by utilizing 280 characters succinctly. Being a regular facilitator of groups and communities in my working day makes it a great deal easier to engage with a variety of communities. I have been asked to host Twitter groups and Twitter conversations connected to television or radio shows, and we have often live-streamed launches and presentations and the ‘In Conversation’ events we hold with experts at FYA. These are all fantastic ways to listen, learn and engage in live conversations.
We all know video is huge and I have utilized it across Twitter and LinkedIn recently with my young shadow CEO, Sherry Rose Bih Watts, reporting on our CEO days together and providing commentary from special events and conferences – all with great feedback.
As a for-purpose, nonprofit organization, FYA doesn’t have unlimited resources at our fingertips to execute our work, so our team members have had to be efficient, clever and quick learners. We’ve adopted and are continuing to work on building a culture of testing. We recognize that with an online world that is constantly changing, what worked for us one month might not work the next.
This is particularly true when you think about the volatility of using third-party platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, where you are essentially a user not a controller of the audience data you’ve paid to build. You also have no control over the sometime baffling changes that occur on these platforms or how users will and won’t engage with them. We’re still working through our strategies about how to navigate this constant change.
With a world of choice at social media users’ fingertips, creating cut-through and building a community is work that takes time, resources, commitment, adaptability, genuineness and consistency.
FYA has come a long way in the past few years, but we still have a long way to go, more people to reach and many more ways we can improve our efforts – from influencers and user-generated content to thought leadership across the organization. The social learning journey really never ends. But there are a few essential ways to ensure success.
Five tips for success:
1 Put your audience at the centre of your journey. Make sure you capture what your audience wants to read, see and hear in any of the content you create and distribute.
2 Choose your channels carefully. Pick platforms that you understand, that your audience uses and that are easy for you to be responsive on.
3 Be present, responsive and authentic. There’s no point in a CEO pushing out exactly the same content in the same way as a faceless organizational channel would. Make sure to embed your personality, otherwise what’s the point?
4 Be consistent. Stay connected to your why. Stick to your niche areas of expertise and to the values of your organization at all times.
5 The journey is never over. Watch and learn from others. Be willing to test different approaches and keep changing the content and delivery because social media is constantly evolving.