Social media training the 92 minutes way

Director Becky has been delivering social media training to a charity client recently. Here she writes about how it went.

On the hottest day of the year, I delivered my first in person social media training session since before Covid. It was quite a way to return to ‘normal’!

I’d been contacted by the amazing team at CLEAR Project Southampton, a truly astonishing organisation supporting people through the asylum-seeking process and helping them to rebuild their lives and integrate into the UK, after meeting their Project Manager Pete when he attended a previous social media course I ran. He wanted two sessions to work through aspects of CLEAR’s strategy, audience and content planning, and then to turn this into an actionable plan, which I was more than happy to help with. I love this kind of work - working with a truly brilliant organisation to find ways to share their stories with people who want to support them - it brings together so many things that matter to me, and that I enjoy. (Don’t tell anyone but it almost doesn’t feel like work.)

That Pete had attended a charity social media training course of mine before made me think - was it a failure on my part that Pete came back for more? Did it mean I’d not covered enough?

I decided that the answer is no. On the previous course, I was training a group of 14 and there wasn’t much time for 121. But more than that, in the limited time of that previous course, I’d been able to share a high level view of a number of aspects of social media work, different parts of which would resonate with different people depending on where they were. What Pete wanted this time was to dive into some hands on, laptops open, nitty gritty stuff. What do we write, how often, what times of day, where do we post it?

I’ve been told that training should be about helping people find their own ways. I agree with this to a certain extent - but I actually find training that doesn’t direct me really frustrating. If I’m starting from zero knowledge, sometimes what I actually need is a real hands on ‘how to’. I want to know what someone else does, how often, and how. After I’ve worked with that, and understand the dependencies and priorities (what has to happen first, before the next three things can happen) I can and find my own ways - but without some kind of structure, process or map, what happens is nothing. It’s hard to start when you don’t know what your first move is.

I spent two half days with Pete and Laura from CLEAR discussing minute details of their ideas, plan, aims and processes. We talked about how much time they actually have each week, who has it, and what can and can’t be done. We talked about what they want to achieve and what a future wish list might look like too. It was fantastic to hear Pete say that after attending my previous course, he went away thinking, ‘wow, this is a lot, I’m not sure I can do that’ but very quickly he got into a flow of spending just 30 minutes a week creating and adding content - and suddenly got compliments from his boss for the huge amount of work he was doing on social media!

‘It’s amazing’, said Pete - it really can be done that quickly.’

We finished up by looked at tools (I recommend Buffer - I’ll write more about that another day), confirming a posting plan and actually writing some content together. Our sessions were full, chatty, thoughtful and rooted in practicality. I learned how to do social media when I ran a social enterprise - I had no time and no money for advertising or promotion, and just had to get on with it. The skills I learned there are the skills I love to share - every organisation that’s doing good in the world deserves to get heard (perhaps more so than those doing less good, even if they have bigger budgets…)

It was wonderful to leave the CLEAR office hearing that the team feel empowered to get started with this. I look forward to seeing them and their incredible work pop up more on social media!

If we can help your charity get heard using social media, do get in touch - we’d genuinely love to help