World Autism Day with Autistica
In honour of World Autism Day, Social Misfits Media’s Community Manager, Biba Maya, spoke with the UK’s leading autism research charity, Autistica.
Ahead of this global day of autism awareness, I had the pleasure of chatting to some of the team at Autistica. We discussed their approach to staff advocacy and competition to drive their online presence, their change of work culture during the global coronavirus epidemic and the impact this global event has on the autistic community.
Thank you for the incredible work you do raising awareness of autism. On this important global awareness day, what one key message would you like to share with people?
Autism means different things to different people and can bring both challenges and strengths.
You have a great social media presence and use staff advocacy to fundraise and increase awareness really successfully. Can you tell us how you use fun incentives and rewards to encourage staff to post about your cause?
Our audiences are extremely varied — from researchers, and policy makers through to corporate donors and autistic people young and old, so it is really important that our staff are connecting with them on different levels. We’ll constantly be finding ways to encourage our team to get behind a campaign — and competition usually helps. For example, we’ll have a leader board pinned to the wall of the office for the team who score the most supporters on LinkedIn for a Charity of the Year staff vote. I’ve given out our social media growth award (a plant that normally doesn’t live very long) to various members of the team who have gone above and beyond to share our campaigns. We always show the team how successful campaigns can mean that everyone wins. Increasing our donor base and profile through social media leads to bigger and better research, policy and communications work, so it’s not just the fundraising or communications team who benefit.
Fundraising or awareness-raising is often a challenge on social media for charities and non-profits who might not have a big budget to spend on ads. Can you tell us how staff and trustee involvement has contributed to the success of your fundraising campaigns?
Winning enough staff votes to be the Deutsche Bank Charity of the Year for two years was a huge turning point for us as a charity and at the time we had less than ten members of staff, so we all had to use our networks to find votes. We armed our staff and Trustees with message templates to personalise and they reached out to all of their connections on LinkedIn and Twitter. Our Chairman knew a lot of people at Deutsche Bank and played a major role. Leading by example, he really rallied the other Trustees to maximise their contacts. These approaches cost nothing and won us a partnership worth more than £1million.
Social media was also crucial in engaging staff once we won the partnership. We focused on creating simple eye-catching graphics with key messages that helped us to let Deutsche Bank staff know what we do and raise our profile within the company. We used ads targeted at employees so that only they saw this messaging — it was a low-cost way of developing a supporter base when we didn’t have the capacity to get out and meet staff personally.
What has been your favourite social media platform to use for staff advocacy and why?
LinkedIn is great for our corporate team. It’s helped us to secure corporate buy-in for fundraising within companies and for our new employment research offer: DARE. We are definitely more professional on LinkedIn but that works for that audience. We’ll often use LinkedIn almost like a digital business card — to make an introduction that then turns into a coffee or a call.
Our Director of Science and CEO are both major players on Twitter and so that is where they have the most influence. In fact, our Director of Science won a Third Sector award for his social media activity. We also have a growing number of autistic staff who have built a great community of supporters on Twitter. Georgia Harper from our policy team has over 4,000 followers and is a great advocate for our work — and funny with it! Twitter is where our community are, so it’s where we show our more personal side and build more human relationships online. We often don’t meet our Twitter audience face-to-face, but the relationships are still as strong.
What advice or tips would you give to an organisation wanting to encourage staff advocacy through social?
I think it comes down to two things:
1. Help people to understand how their involvement matters and how it can benefit them. You might want to draw a stakeholder map to prove how unique their audience is — and how much they are needed. Telling someone that they are the only person that can fulfil a role on social media helps them to feel important — which they are! Everyone likes to feel important.
2. Find out what motivates people. I nominated my Director of Science for his social media leader award at a time when he was focusing on leadership skills, so it seemed like an appropriate reward. Other people respond well to competition or silly prizes. It’s likely to be different for different people.
Considering the current coronavirus epidemic shifting our global work culture, how are you maintaining your strong communications across the board?
We know that many in the autistic community are really struggling at the moment. Uncertainty, anxiety and change are all particularly difficult for autistic people. We have paused our original social media plans for this week and instead we’re focusing on providing the expert advice our community need right now. We are working with top researchers from around the company to compile evidence-based information and we’re running live weekly webinars on more detailed topics such as connectedness & belonging, structure and routine and relationships. On World Autism Awareness Day (2 April) we’re sharing a positive film to show how our team are coping during the lockdown — were hoping this will encourage our community to share their strategies too! This ‘behind the scenes’ content should be a nice way to show our personalities and build rapport with our community at this unique time of shared experience.
You can follow Autistica on Twitter & LinkedIn to learn more about the work they do.
