There was once a time when promoting your service would have been putting a flyer in your local community centre or passing out leaflets during a coffee morning. While much of that is still in place, the pandemic has forced everybody to explore alternative ways of raising awareness of specialist support services.
When buildings were closed and services adapted to keep everybody safe in lockdown, we still had to find a way to reach survivors of domestic abuse. It was imperative that our communities knew Women’s Aid services were still open, still operating, and still here to help.
Some of our groups across the network were already active on social media, already sharing snippets of their work, sharing details of their service, and asking for donations. Others found this a strange world to navigate, let alone think about what to put on there. But it’s important to learn and experiment with social media, because it is a fantastic way of reaching people you wouldn’t ordinarily reach.
To put it in perspective, around 4.18 million people use Facebook in Scotland – how many of these are women who need your service? How many of these are women who don’t know such a service exists?
Here are a few things I’ve noticed is helpful for support services and Women’s Aid groups:
- Your social media page is your new shop window. People who come across your organisation for the first time now might do so through a search on Facebook. They might scan your page to get a sense of what you are about, what values you represent, what support you offer and how they can access it.
- You can position yourself as the experts – and you should. While we can all share photos of our dinners and Tweet about the weather, you can curate your online reputation. You can share details of your opening hours, job vacancies, support services and more. In fact, anything that reinforces the message that you are the specialists, you can share this online.
- You don’t have to be on all social media platforms. There are many different social media sites that you can sign up to but it’s worth thinking about what you can maintain and update, and where your audience sits. It’s better to pick one or two social media platforms to build an online presence on that to be signed up to everything and spread too thin to update anything.
As you are reading this, it’s likely you will have figured the above out, and it’s important to highlight here that it’s a learning process. You won’t know how to do all the things at once, but maybe you’ll know how to do Instagram Takeovers really well and so you focus on that. Or perhaps you’ve found a way to get people to interact on your Facebook posts and you see this directly linked to an increase in donations, and so you focus on that. What works for one charity might be different to what works for another, so it’s important to be open minded and experiment.
In my work with SWA Groups specifically, I’m learning that many are seeing the importance of communications and building your online presence. They’re beginning to see social media as a tool that they can use to get their message out: we’re still here to support survivors of domestic abuse.
In many cases, some don’t have a dedicated communications worker but perhaps instead a staff member with half an hour of their time dedicated to social media each week. As I mentioned during the Members Conference recently, we can do a lot with half an hour – sometimes we just need a plan.
More than ever, survivors are looking to social media platforms and other online platforms for support and information in crisis. Being able to support the Women’s Aid network across Scotland in making people aware of their services and awareness raising in a digital space, has allowed for the groups to focus on their core work. Making this process as streamlined as possible frees up time to do their essential frontline support and I look forward to furthering this on a national scale going into next year.
Annika Spalding is an independent Creative Consultant at Orsum, with direct experience in supporting and delivering charity communications.
If you feel scared of your partner or if you are worried about someone you know, get in touch with Scotland’s 24 hour Domestic Abuse and Forced Marriage Helpline on 0800 027 1234 email helpline@sdafmh.org.uk or visit sdafmh.org.uk.
