Let’s ruin the joke for everyone by analysing charities’ use of humour as a brand-building tool, yay.
Charities, on the whole, are pretty bad at being funny on social media.
There are reasons for this. We depend so heavily upon an earnest, sincere tone of voice that we can find it difficult to move beyond it. We’re often agnostic about the benefit in the first place, too — worried that we’ll end up trivialising our cause by making jokes (a problem Wendy’s never has) or alienating our supporters through glibness.
And because we do humour so rarely, we end up overcooking the opportunities that do come along. After three members of the digital team have discussed the exact wording of the joke at length, then gone to seek sign-off from a senior stakeholder who’s chimed in with feedback like ‘Can we watermark it in case it goes viral?’ or ‘Can we link to our website in the tweet?’, the final product is butchered, compromised, and barely coherent.
And so we end up with humour that never really rises above the steady reliability of “We’ve got some extra PAWS helping out with our social media today, ;)” (Picture of a confused dog seated in front of a computer)
‘How about we create some viral memes?’
Memes tend to make things worse, because memes are wrongly interpreted as licence to unimaginatively jam your brand into an existing format and call it a day.
‘My face when people don’t sign up for the Virgin Money London Marathon to support lifechanging research.’
(gif of someone looking unhappy)
Which, of course, is exactly the kind of bland, desperate, look-at-us effort that’s going to be completely ignored by the segment of your online audience that actually likes meme humour.
Hang on, I’m getting to the big sheep
The lack of ambition is unfortunate for a number of reasons. Because charities are often so incredibly good at harnessing sincere, serious emotions on social media. Because humour is such a crucial part of online life.
Because we should be using every emotional tool at our disposal to build our communities and reach a wider audience — but you’re doomed to fail if you collectively half-ass the joke.
I look to museums and art galleries with envy, because funny social media content seems to come to them much more naturally: they have a greater variety of raw material at their disposal, and humour feels less inherently dangerous to their brands. Even the nerviest internal stakeholder would probably concede that it’s OK to joke about the Horniman Walrus.
And that’s why, at their best, they end up with legitimately funny, silly-but-undeniably-cause-centric content that can actually take off on social media in the short term while helping to build their brand in the long term.
I’m thinking of the LA County Museum of Art, which is forever on my very short list of Charities Who Have Actually Made Snapchat Work with their karaoke singalongs using their own art pieces.
And I’m thinking of the Museum of English Rural Life at the University of Reading, which last week created a masterpiece of its own:
Let’s start with the obvious. 30,000 retweets — and a large volume of new engaged followers — is incredible stuff for any brand, let alone an on-campus museum which isn’t based in South Kensington, and which deals with aspects of everyday life rather than dinosaurs.
Adam Koszary, the MERL’s digital project manager, has mentioned that the Absolute Unit’s success was by no means planned; he’d tried a couple of ‘fat cow paintings’ on Twitter before, but this was the one that really took off.
I think it’s important that we don’t confuse that with ‘freak accident / they got lucky’. Rather, it’s a great reminder of the importance of spontaneity and flexibility within your social media plan — especially when it comes to humour.
Because ultimately, this is a piece of content which could not have survived if it had passed through a round of stakeholders asking unanswerable, earnest, joke-murdering questions like, ‘So why is it funnier if it’s all lower case?’ and ‘So the humour just comes from the fact that it’s a heavy sheep?’
It only works because it’s completely uncompromised by the brand, or any call-to-action…but nevertheless, in a single five-word joke, it implicitly, elegantly says everything the brand needs it to.
English rural life is not stuffy and dull — but funny, weird and fascinating. Don’t you want to find out more?
And MERL, wisely, have put a considerable amount of work into backing up the original joke with supplementary content that more explicitly underlines just how interesting they really are, and how you can get involved with them: want to know more about livestock rearing to learn why this sheep was so stocky? You can. Want to virtually pore through an extensive archive of rural photography? You can.
This stuff pays off — and beyond salutatory Buzzfeed articles, too. At least one visitor from overseas has announced her intentions to stop off at the museum while she’s in the UK, in order to see some absolute units. Other, bigger museums are paying attention. I imagine they could make a hefty amount from T-shirt sales, too.
A little silliness is going to have some serious consequences.
What can we learn from this?
- Stop thinking that humour is something to be scheduled. If that smattering of likes on April Fools Day for your crowd-sourced wackiness works for you, fine; but I suspect for many of us the only tangible outcome for all that effort is ‘appearing on a charity sector listicle about charity April Fools content’. Online audiences are laughing every day of the year…they’re really not anxiously waiting for that one calendar date when every brand decides it’s OK to be a comedian.
- You want to be able to move quickly and unhindered when something funny does come up. So write a few flexible principles into your content plan; when is it appropriate to use humour? Could you start a silly but impactful banter with a celebrity supporter, for example? Establish agreement on when it’s OK to goof around, rather than seeking to-the-letter sign-off in the moment.
- Be patient and selective; a well-chosen joke based on original content is infinitely more likely to lead to success than lamely shoehorning yourselves into something just because it’s trending. (This also applies, so, so heavily to hashtags.)
- You will probably never be as funny as a Reading museum about rural life. Go and follow them now to see what they get up to next.
