How to define a social media strategy – Part 1:
Put your social media strategy in context

Defining a social media strategy for an agricultural research center

Every nonprofit organisation has its own goals. You might be fundraising for a shelter in your city, or advocating for companies to ban the use of Congo blood minerals in their products. Your social media strategy will logically depend on your “raison d’être”, on your organisation’s goals.

This case study shows how we built up a social media strategy for some of the CGIAR agricultural research research centers. While they were the inspiration for this case study, the approach and process can be applied for many other nonprofit organisations.

Social media in the context of the CGIAR

At the CGIAR, our goal is: “To reduce poverty and hunger, improve human health and nutrition, and enhance ecosystem resilience through high-quality international agricultural research, partnership and leadership. “

The key word in there is: “Research”. We do agricultural research. But what good is agricultural research if it is not “available” and “accessible”?

CGIAR’s AAA strategy strives at making research Available, Accessible and Applicable. It highlights that “research for the sake of research ain’t worth the value of the paper it is written on”. CGIAR’s research, funded by public sources, needs to be readily available and accessible by the very same public, and not locked up in copyrighted scientific journals or in file cabinets. Sure, as scientists, they need to publish our articles in peer reviewed journals, but it can’t stop there in order to convert “research” into “impact”!

Social media plays a critical role in this.

Social media makes research “available” and “accessible”

In the past years, the CGIAR has made great progress in getting the research material “out”. Research data and publications are readily available on most CGIAR’s research centres websites and public repositories. Check the efforts of two of the CGIAR centres: the CIAT publications, or the ILRI publications on Google Books for instance.

But… a website or a web repository can be just as difficult to access as a massive filing cabinet in an obscure room… Unless if you know the information is there, why would you look for it on a website? How do people know the information is there?

Sure, search engine optimization (SEO) and other mechanical tools can optimize the “find-ability” or “access-ability” of our data, but, ladies and gentlemen, social media has an even more crucial role in this: Social media can help in getting the research “out there”.

With several CGIAR research centres, we made these the corner stones of our social media strategy:

• Making research available and accessible, AND
• Documenting the research processes

With those overall social media goals in mind, we are ready to move into the details: On to the “candy store”

Continue to part 2: Social media strategies- about candy shops
This post is part of our case study How to define a social media strategy.

This case study is based on my work with the Consortium of international agricultural research centers, who kindly allowed me to share our work on this blog.

Picture courtesy Neil Palmer (CIAT)

Tagged as: social media (general)