What worked
Social Media
SM is a crazy crazy world, but in 2017, we thought we had a good balance between promoting Nyaaya, and also making sure that we are sharing things which are useful for everyone. Facebook was definitely the Sachin Tendulkar of our social media traffic, and most of our social media traffic came from here. We also experimented with FB ads, and found it to be a very efficient way to showcase the website to people who are interested in learning about the law. Quora is more like Rahul Dravid, slow and steady, with consistent returns, though a lot of initial effort is required. Twitter was more of Shahid Afridi. Intermittent traffic, unless something really took off, which is when traffic from Twitter can be crazy! Otherwise, we have realized that people on Twitter may like and retweet your content, but they may not always click on it. Now we see Twitter as less of a traffic source and more of a visibility thing, which is why our Twitter account works more as a curator, where we share content that our users and followers are interested in, even if it’s not our content.
Whatsapp is something we are really excited about. One of the main reasons is because it works with even the weakest internet connection, and we feel it can really help us to reach out to the most underserved communities. We haven’t made a Whatsapp subscriber list yet, mostly been experimenting with family and personal groups to see what works, how to draft content for Whatsapp and how to organically have a Whatsapp subscriber list. From what we have seen, the traffic can be exponential, especially with the Hindi stuff.
Laws and Pop Culture
This might be slightly offensive for lawyers who are reading this, but generally, for non-lawyers (or muggles, as we call them internally!), the law can be very very boring. So we discovered that explaining the law, while using pop culture references, works great. We got a lot of love when we explained stalking with reference to Shah Rukh Khan’s character in Darr. We have also received a lot of love for the legal movie reviews we have been doing for Scroll. That’s definitely something you will see more of this year. Also if you feel that most our focus is on SRK movies, then that is mainly due to the biases of our outreach person. And we are always open to suggestions.
Collaborations
There are so many people and organizations out there that are doing brilliant work. We want to collaborate with everyone! This year we had great online collaborations, content sharing and cross-posting with Breakthrough, Feminism in India and Factly. We hope to be able to do more of this in 2018. If you are reading this and want to collaborate with us, please get in touch, we are very easy to work with. We also got invited onto Meghnad’s really cool Consti-tution show, which was a lot of fun!
Hindi Content
This is something we are really happy about. Conversations about access cannot happen while ignoring the language of the text. When it’s such a bother to get even legal texts available in Hindi, the fact that we have been able to explain laws in Hindi, and reach out to people with this content is something we are proud of. Our Hindi content has been getting a lot of traffic and it has also helped us have an audience outside of the metros.
What didn’t
External media coverage
While we have regularly been publishing blog posts on external platforms, what we have lacked is other people writing about us. We are not sure about what we should be doing for that. Maybe our work hasn’t been that impactful or maybe people feel we are getting enough attention anyways. Whatever the case, this is something we have to work hard on for this year.
Working with grassroots organizations
When we had started, we had bought into the Digital India hype, and naive as we were, we thought our content would be directly accessed by the most underserved and vulnerable communities. We quickly realized that we were mistaken and access to smartphones and internet is still a big issue once you go to the grassroots. So we thought it would be better if we approached organizations already engaged in doing legal awareness work at the grassroots and with communities. Our content is free to use and share and we hoped that it could be useful for the end users if they had a paralegal or a volunteer explaining things to them rather than expecting them to access our website. We had many initial conversations with different organizations, but were unable to come up with something concrete. A big factor was the fact that the majority of our content was in English, while people were looking for content in Hindi and other regional languages. It’s also true that most of these organizations are understaffed and underfunded and this could have been an additional burden on them, or maybe we were just unable to get the utility of our content across. This is something that we will keep working on as it’s the only way to make sure that our content is truly accessible.
Measuring effectiveness
While we have had a lot of feedback on social media, and our email channels, with people saying how helpful our resource is and how it has helped them understand certain aspects of a law, we are yet to come across a situation where our content has been practically useful for someone who is facing a legal situation. Firstly, we see this as a reflection of our content, and we are working hard to make our explainers more functional. We also need to think of a way to document use cases, and find out if our content is actually helping people, otherwise all the work is of no use.
The Future
In 2018, with a bigger team, we will be producing more organic content, and that will reflect on our social media channels. We will continue to operate as curators and share external content, which we think is interesting. We want to be more proactive in initiating and taking part in conversations online and offline regarding issues we feel strongly about. We also want to figure out a way to accommodate people who want to contribute work to Nyaaya, remotely and/or on a part-time basis.
We also want to be more fun, maybe use GIFs, videos and images more, especially on Social Media. In that sense, we are big fans of @HasParlAdjYet, who we think have a good balance between being fun, as well as informative. Of course, they have great material to work with, since parliament proceedings are no less than any bollywood masala movie!
We also want to engage with other government and non-government organizations, who are also looking at questions of accessibility with reference to public information.
