Using Digital Communications to Create Change
On February 15th, 2017 Global Washington hosted a digital communications workshop in their fantastic new office space, shared with Seattle Foundation. Led by Joel Meyers of FuseIQ, along with Tyler LePard of Wondershop Communications and Amie Newman, writer/blogger for Our Bodies Ourselves, the attendees were treated to an information-packed session on creating digital storytelling for the greatest impact.
The essentials of best practices were covered: What are your objectives? Who is your audience? What is your message? How are you going to measure success? These are key questions for organizations to keep in mind while building out the details of their communications strategy.
In particular, when figuring out your messaging, have you done your homework and figured out who your audience is? Of course we’d love to have everyone know about and support us, but we need to be realistic and recognize that the more detailed we can be about who we’re trying to reach, the more successful we will be in creating content that they will be inspired to read and even act upon through some type of support of our organization. We must know what type of social media they use – remember to take a look at those Google analytics! And by being more specific, we can also remove unnecessary competition for our audience’s attention.
In order to build these relationship based on trust and respect with our audience, Tyler LePard recommends creating a journey map in order to get “inside the shoes” of those we are trying to reach. Once we have gotten their attention, what are you trying to get your audience to do? Using simple calls to action and great visuals are key.
As final takeaways workshop, attendees were encouraged to appeal to hearts, not minds (personal stories are more effective than facts), be creative and think boldly!
