Devon Community Foundation takes a strategic approach to social media

Laura from Devon Community Foundation talks about how she helped start the organisation on their social media journey

We decided to get started with Twitter and Facebook last July partly because we had just launched our new website, it looked fantastic and we wanted to make sure that all of the technology was up to date.

We were already working on trying to simplify a lot of our procedures using technology i.e. Doodle to schedule meetings and Survey Monkey so wanted to do this across the board for example with our communications. We wanted to reach different audiences, contact people in a different way, ensure we were marketed in every way possible (social media is such a huge segment), be aware what was being said about us, create an instant and two way communication with our customers.

Two of our staff members had been keen to work on getting more youth involvement with the charity and had suggested that social media might be one of the ways in which to do this. The Chief Executive gave the go ahead to research what other Community Foundations were doing (which wasn't much) so we decided to get ahead of the crowd and at least set up some accounts and look into it. We had been to visit Manchester Community Foundation who were very ahead with technology and communications and they also helped to inspire us. We wanted our technology to simplify things for us, and open up new doors.

We decided to start with Facebook as both of us involved with it already used it personally so understood how it worked. We then moved on to Twitter which took a bit more learning as neither of us had used that before. A few staff members also signed up to LinkedIn, but haven’t taken that much further. We are a small organisation and need to stick to the most popular forms of social media so that it would not take a huge amount of time out of our working day. We are extremely aware that it is something that needs constant attention and cannot be done half heartedly but we needed it to fit in with our workload.

We didn't receive any training on how to use the tools. We taught ourselves by reading a few books and by doing! Since using Twitter and Facebook one staff member has been on a social media training workshop which was useful but we think the best way to do it is to learn by doing. Using social media hasn't impacted too heavily on our workload as we were conscious to ensure that it didn’t.

I think that social media has helped our organisation in many ways: to connect with our customers (groups we have supported and potential funders), helped secure sponsorship, ensure that we look like an up to date and indeed forward thinking organisation, it has raised us some money, helped put us in touch with potential ambassador’s for our organisation, helped to spread the word about grant programmes and or events, secured a great raffle prize for an event, helped rejuvenate relationships that hadn’t taken off (the fact that we were on the ball regarding social media helped them to see us in a different way). We now have 994 followers!

Find out more about Devon Community Foundation at http://www.devoncf.com/.