Sometimes you can be a victim of your own success. We’re feeling that way a little bit at work at the moment. It’s great and I’m not knocking it but man it’s exhausting!
On a personal front I’ve been crusading for social media and its been slow going. When the first question is always “will it bring in money now?” and you know that the answer is a resounding “no…but” it is hard to get people past those dots and beyond the but.
In the non-profit sector we’re always chasing the next pound/euro/dollar especially in the current climate when funds are hard to come by so it is difficult to look at the big picture. I’m from a business background and I can see both sides of the argument, why would you want to waste resources ‘chatting’ to people online when you could be out there getting the pennies in?
The answer for me always lies in having a balance, there’s no point in concentrating solely on the short-term or before you know it the future is upon you and you’re completely unprepared. Equally there’s no point putting all your energy into long-term goals because if you don’t get those pennies in now you’ll not be there in the long-term.
Here-in lies the problem – how do you get the balance right? At the moment I feel like I’m waging a one woman social media war! I’m chasing people for input constantly, I’m on the phone to colleagues reminding them to tell me what they’re doing, reminding them to take pictures, reminding them that our supporters want to hear their stories. I’m raiding the archives to show people the sort of things we can do with the sort of things they’ve done. I’m sharing on Facebook, I’m retweeting on Twitter, I’m uploading on Flickr and I’m finding favourites on YouTube.
It will be interesting to watch over the next few weeks as we hit World AIDS Day and launch the Evening News Christmas Appeal – Positive Care for Kids, just how much we use social media to drive our message and how successful we are. Now I better get cracking as I’ve got blog posts to write, Facebook tabs to code and video’s to edit…..all appearing on a Waverley Care social media outpost soon!
Photo credit: Thiophene_guy
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