Those who came to the last NFPtweetup on 4 March are sure to remember Rob Dyson‘s presentation on the first steps he had taken to monitor and measure the impact of Whizz-Kidz social media engagement. If you missed it, you missed out on Rob’s uniquely engaging and humourous delivery, but you can still see his slides on slideshare:

In our fifth blog post in the run up to NFPtweetup on Thursday, we hear from Rob, Pam and Jess from Whizz-Kidz with a preview of the update they will be giving us on Whizz-Kidz social media journey, including some of the tactics they use to engage with events fundraisers:

At youth mobility charity Whizz-Kidz we’ve been steadily increasing our social media and real-time web use over the last 18 months; trying and testing different platforms for different communications with our supporters and users.

However it’s only recently that we’ve really begun to evaluate and measure the reach of this experimentation. Pleasingly, the feedback and engagement levels kind of shows that, erm, we’re not experimenting anymore; we’re actually getting rather good at it.

There’s no room for complacency though, and there is constant demand for innovation in terms of how we harness our supporters, and importantly, how we subscribe more people to our bottom line: donating or fundraising so we can support more young disabled people year on year.

At the NFPtweetup on 10 June, we’ll be giving a brief overview of what works for us (it may not work for you).

Specifically:

Having a Facebook profile as a person – “Jess Whizz Kidz”, has proven an incredibly popular way to engage with our London Marathon runners. Participants may not always pick up the phone, but they do like using Facebook: you’re on their turf and building great relationships. Plus it’s on a Facebook wall (not stuck in an email) so can be shared, added to, and built upon by other runners.

Twitter is a fantastic viral tool, so we use it when we want to get messages out quickly and to a wide audience – we have loyal ambassadors who retweet us. We also talk a lot – chat, converse, ask questions and have discussions. We make friends.

YouTube (promoted via Facebook and Twitter) is the bees knees when wanting to paint a picture of the impact of our work. We have a growing portfolio of videos made by our young people telling their own stories, in their own words.

We hope you get some ideas from our short session, and we’re looking forward to hearing your successes to! We’re all learning.

Rob Dyson, PR & social media Manager – @robmdyson & @whizzkidz;
Pam O’Brien, Events Fundraising Manager;
Jess Leigh, London Marathon Project Manager and Events Fundraiser – @whizzkidzevents
Whizz-Kidz