The British Red Cross has been working with LBi’s digital PR service since 2008, helping the organisation to leverage online PR and social media to reach and engage new audiences. Here, Jill Lloyd, ePR Manager at LBi, looks back on her work with the British Red Cross and shares what the team has learnt from it.
The objective of the British Red Cross is to “help people in crisis, whoever and wherever they are”. Whilst almost everyone is aware of their international work, their domestic activity is perhaps the lesser known - and certainly less televised - aspect of their work. At home, one of the key areas of the BRC’s work is advocacy “advocating on behalf of those in crisis, and working to improve the humanitarian situation of individuals, families and communities.”
It is to this aspect of their work that the BRC has particularly applied social media approaches. In my opinion this is where social media becomes not just a means to an end (such as raising awareness to increase donations), but an end in itself: making people think, empowering individuals and building connections, and in so doing delivers the greatest value.
In this sense their work is actually quite closely related to that of the forces operating alongside the Red Cross in conflict zones: a sustained approach to winning hearts and minds.
So let’s look at some of the learnings from The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual which (based on our experience) could equally well be applied to social media.
1. Counterinsurgency (COIN) is “a mix of offensive, defensive, and stability operations, conducted along multiple lines of operation."
The British Red Cross came to us with the challenge of improving the situation of refugees living in the UK by tackling the stigma that is often attached to the label “refugee” and to counteract the picture painted by the tabloids of the vast influx of benefit scrounging refugees and asylum seekers.
Our defensive approach was 2-pronged: tackling misconceptions head on through debate on Yahoo! Answers and showing the other side of the picture by empowering refugees, letting them tell their own stories through online video. All well and good, but there’s no empowerment in giving people a voice if no one listens which is where “multiple lines of operation” were needed.
• Firstly we seeded the videos across relevant online channels (video sharing and contextually relevant blogs).
• Secondly we secured support from a mass media partner (Yahoo!) to showcase the videos by providing related engaging content across a range of their properties ( a Yahoo! Trip Plan of the most common countries of origin of those seeking asylum in the UK, a list of the top albums by refugees and a debate on Yahoo! Answers – covered by the Answers blog) – all driving traffic to/ showcasing the videos
• Finally, having created some initial momentum we used peer to peer recommendation to spread the message virally by creating on online social media movement.
The online movement asked people to show their solidarity with refugees by putting themselves in the position of refugees and giving up their public (online) identity, changing their profile image and changing their status message to “is looking beyond the label www.lookbeyondthelabel.org ”
We know that people have compassion fatigue so in simply asking people to listen to refugee stories we would only be preaching to the converted. The status message was therefore designed to create sufficient curiosity to drive people through to the site. Once on the site they would see the videos and be presented with the real facts and figures on the refugee situation in the UK. Naturally getting people to pass this on themselves required a very high quality engaging experience on the site.
2.“Design inquires into the nature of a problem to conceive a framework that can be used for solving that problem"
When LBi was approached with the task of helping the BRC to recruit more young volunteers and improve engagement with them our first step was to understand the problem. There were several key factors: the type of work young people were able to be involved in; the hours and level of commitment required and a sense that the BRC didn’t really speak to young people. Our approach was therefore to create a new way to volunteer using the tools that young people know best: their own social networks.
The scheme was designed to give young people a voice in the organisation and channels through which they could engage directly with BRC staff as well as helping to develop advocates amongst young people able to help spread messages for the BRC via their social networks in their own language.
3.“...requires a flexible, adaptive force led by agile, well-informed, culturally astute leaders,”
The key learning from this campaign is the need to be able to relinquish control and to be ready to adapt to the requirements of the audience. Perhaps foolishly we began by thinking that like-minded individuals would want to engage with each other and that they would want to be involved in group discussions with the BRC. With this in mind we had built a group-based community.
What we found was that they were more interested in one on one communication and many were quite shy about commenting in discussion boards, attending webinars and had very specific interests.
4. “..campaign design must be iterative because, by their nature, COIN [Counterinsurgency] efforts require repeated assessments from different perspectives to see all the various factors and relationships required to gain adequate understanding.”
The result has been that we have: brought in a wider range of individuals across different departments at the BRC; we offer a range of communication tools so they can spread BRC messages in a way that suits them and more effort has been focused on individual communication.
5. “Design should reflect ongoing learning and adaptation and the growing appreciation COIN forces share for the environment and all actors within it, especially the insurgents, populace, and HN government”
What the BRC learnt from their previous campaigns around HIV and Refugee Week was that active involvement was crucial to engaging young people. Equally it was clear that gaming was one of the main activities of young people online.
So when it came to looking at raising awareness of the plight of civilians living in conflict zones an interactive solution seemed the natural solution, so the BRC worked with Enable Interactive to create an Alternative Reality Game (or ARG) which put the player in the position of being the sole person who could help the protagonist (by using the internet and the resources available to them to find clues to help the protagonist).
Having achieved a goal of creating the educational experience, the remaining challenge was to actually get people signing up to play it. To get people playing it we needed to get people talking about it. What this campaign revealed more than anything else was the power of controversy to engage an audience.
Whilst the news of the BRC launching an ARG was working well in securing coverage, it wasn’t really compelling enough to get significant numbers actually playing. What tipped the balance was when Yahoo! Answers started blogging about the game (we had set up a game character within Answers) and facets of the community were outraged and confused: Why was the BRC only supporting this one boy? How dare they make a game of such as serious situation?
6. Consider initiating a dialogue with the opposition. This ...is an attempt to open the door to mutual understanding. There may be no common ground and the enmity may be such that nothing specifically or directly comes of the dialogue. However, if COIN forces are talking, they are using a positive approach—and may learn something.
Whilst many brands might have run away screaming at this, the BRC stood firm, corrected misconceptions where necessary, but largely allowed the debate to go on. The result was that the game’s “talkability” increased and people starting playing the game to see what all the debate was about and increasingly people started contradicting the criticism and praising the BRC for this approach.
7. “Subjective assessment at all levels is essential to understand the diverse and complex nature of COIN problems and to measure local success or failure against the overall operation’s purpose.”
Whilst traditionally negative comments would have been perceived as measure of failure, social media requires a far more complex evaluation system from a longer term perspective. Here again the manual has some helpful suggestions.
Assessment tools help commanders and staffs determine—
• Completion of tasks and their impact.
• Level of achievement of objectives.
• Whether a condition of success has been developed or established.
• Whether the operation’s end state has been attained.
• Whether the commander’s intent was achieved.
If we look at the youth volunteering campaign this is still more applicable. The BRC’s desired outcome was to secure a valuable commitment and input from volunteers. Whilst the online volunteers number in hundreds rather than thousands: when one volunteer results in securing a free film crew and kit, another in raising thousands to help combat an epidemic in her native country, we can see that by attracting a few highly engaged, committed individuals the objectives have been achieved and most importantly we continue to see steady growth in support.
Ultimately, like an insurgency, social media engagement “is a protracted struggle” and “the operations needed ...are necessarily of an intensive nature and of long duration.”
Author: Jill Lloyd, ePR Manager, LBi