Who is in charge?

[rub1e]

It's Ada Lovelace day and Women in STEM is trending on twitter... and FAC's account remains silent.

Would it be worth formally putting someone in charge of social media / marketing so that opportunities to participate in relevant public conversations don't pass us by?

I also think a marketing calendar is essential - I know @freelancedad did one for dwyl a while ago, perhaps he/someone could do one for FAC?

[rebeccaradding]

@rub1e great question. This repo, actually, should probably be deleted as it's a relic of business development groups. To answer your question - we haven't had someone formally in charge of social media, as it's a hefty role and I'm only available for part-time work. We've had students/alums take it on for short periods of time but...as it's time consuming it tends to get dropped when people are busy.

That being said, we've just begun an engagement with Digital Mums who are planning a social media engagement campaign for us for January-March. The process of working with the Digital Mums fellow will also upskill myself and @sofer and will give us a chance to sort out whether social media is something we want to make time for internally or whether it's best to budget money to hire someone externally.

[rebeccaradding]

And in the short term - if you Gitter/WhatsApp me with trends you notice/ideas for posts, I'm happy to get them up with pretty quick turnaround as I have access to all of the accounts. I'm very much looking forward to learning how to put together a social media strategy from our Digital Mums fellow.

[rub1e]

@rebeccaradding cool!

TBH I massively agree that we need a social media strategy, certainly before we can really think about how to resource/budget this side of things.

But my understanding of the Digital Mums thing was that we'd get a trainee working part time, rather than someone experienced who can teach us things? We discussed this at the last Finance Committee meeting and I think we all came to the conclusion that we'd really need to get some people together for a proper strategy session before we could give a brief to a trainee to develop a campaign around.

For a start, we'd need to define what we actually want out of social media - and what our goals as an organisation are more generally. (I used to work in a strategy role when I was a researcher, so I'd be bang up for getting involved with shaping this.)

But in the more immediate short term, I guess I just was expecting to see more activity from (the millennials of) FAC online - certainly things like announcing TechForBetter and not relying on the newsletter for everything. And this only gets starker when you compare to other similar groups - we've amassed only half the twitter followers of Gaza Sky Geeks in exactly the same time period, for example.

Anyway, like I say, bang up for getting involved!

[rebeccaradding]

@rub1e we may not have a social media strategy, but we do have an organisational strategy. We had our initial call with our trainee from Digital Mums this week, discussed our current strategic priorities as an organisation and how social media might help us achieve them, and decided to focus on using social media to reach potential clients for Tech for Better, as we all agreed this group is least likely to know we/someone like us exists and can help solve their problems. Our trainee will be supervised throughout the process by her mentor, an expert in the field.

Our lack of activity on social media comes down to both time and expertise. GSG, for example, has a full-time employee focused on social media. Apart from an engagement strategy, which is what DM will be doing, I agree that our events should at the very least be advertised across social media platforms.

Part of the problem here is process - new students on the course may want to advertise something but don't have access to our channels, and we don't necessarily want the passwords floating around. Do you have any idea for a simple way to have people within FAC submit posts to a designated staffperson who would make sure they get posted with a quick turnaround? A repo hasn't worked well in the past.

[rub1e]

Thanks for this, Rebecca - very good to get the background to this.

The way I was seeing the social media strand was more proactive than reactive - so rather than have someone waiting around for FAC people to submit posts, this person/team would be actively sharing news and updates from FAC, actively commissioning blog posts etc, actively looking for relevant online conversations and "moments" to participate in, making friends, spreading the good word of FAC and so on (not to mention getting FACsters to actually bother retweeting us)

I just think that if we can spend £479 on fonts, we should be able to find a way of prioritising marketing.

So if no one else is willing, I'll do it! £20/hr, 2 hrs a week - a year of social media for the price of four fonts!

First order of business: promoting existing content that we've already invested in - like the interview series you've been doing on medium, which I think more people could be reaching more people if properly marketed

I'll even line-manage the trainee if you like - the last workie I line-managed went on to study computer science at uni!