These weekly calls are where the Edgeryders communication crew coordinates the work of supporting project teams, community managers, fellows and community members to get the word out and engage people in the exciting work everyone is doing.
Gathering input on what is happening in the different projects and what content should be promoted in the next weeks : POPREBEL and NGI and OTHERS
Building a unified campaign to highlight our Climate work and draw participation in the different activities and platform conversations (Deep Green/EarthOS) needs @ilaria’s input
Making visible what people can get out of participating to the conversations and activities hosted on this platform.
Project Update 1/2:
POPREBEL
Please prepare to describe updates & share urls to platform content you especially like/want pushed out:@alberto@marina@noemi@nadia@natalia_skoczylas@Jan@amelia@matthias @natalia_skoczylas@Jirka_Kocian@Richard
1. UPCOMING ACTIVITIES WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT
Weekly community calls:
Autumn: Serbian and German Legs Later in summer/autumn - what help needed?
Hi, I will have to skip this, but here is from my end:
From POPREBEL:
We, @natalia_skoczylas and @Jirka_Kocian do not feel confident to keep pushing the call for local connector through social media, to not burn (more) trust in the project. We will try to recruit by the end of summer but going through personal networks and messaging.
I also wish to ad that I spoke to two community members in POPREBEL this week - from the Serbian/Croatian side, and the feedback is generally that we are not very clear in communicating about Edgeryders in the context of this project, the language can be divisive, especially that which is about populism.
I think Nadia also mentioned it: let’s stop with POPREBEL social media calls/campaigns for the summer until we re-convene. This means we can promote stories from the agreed spreadsheet, but no calls for participation or paid ads cc @anon82932460.
We will have the new funnel website as referal in our personal outreach, but nothing more from Edgeryders official channels.
Regarding unclear messagins, I’ve got the same input from czech friends, am waiting for an update from a czech HR person with proposed updates on how to make it more clear.
We don’t have any running POPREBEL campaigns, we are running updates with stories from the platform (just content from the spreadsheet). Stories we should keep going as that keeps the account alive because if we don’t, Facebook (and Twitter) will degrade our account (we’ll be less visible to people), and then when we start again, it will take time for it to show to people.
We have some pushed with a tiny budget just to show it to a bit more people, but nothing pushed aggressively.
besides the messaging issues: didn’t we agree weeks ago that it needs to be holistic? Both personal networks and social? (I don’t know what the serb/czech messaging is, as I do not speak the languages)
The reason I am saying this, is because frankly, I am very surprised to hear that, somehow, the idea was that only social media would be a successful strategy? As both me and @anon82932460 have mentioned several times, in calls, on riot, and here on the platform: you can’t expect miracles from only social media, in any outreach strategy you use different strategies including in-person. But as we can clearly see from the numbers @anon82932460 shared, the ads are actually finally getting some traction.
Now, I would be the last to argue that this means we’ll hire through the ads, who knows? Likely through our networks, but it’s not necessarily true.
Ads are not my speciality, I am more of a comms kind of gal, and less of a marketing kinda whiz. But I do know both go hand-in-hand, and with ads you can broaden reach, and in-turn, increase conversions. But this won’t be (unless we have several millions like Trump does) of immediate effect. As @anon82932460 notes, this will take some time.
So, I do argue in favor of ads for local connectors, especially as they show to be more effective than other posts. But I do agree with everyone that if the language seems to be off to people native in the languages and living in those countries, that we need to change them. As I know, @anon82932460 is already on this, but do help him with this @noemi, @natalia_skoczylas and @Jirka_Kocian
I have another opinion: in POPrebel we agreed internally on a deadline for the Czech position of 31st of July and I’d ask for us to stick to it, unless in the past two weeks one of you had an incredible response and you think there is a person worth a wait. As for now we have one candidate, @Jirka_Kocian mentioned one possible, who might make it on time by tomorrow, and if we keep on postponing, we risk losing the only person who is interested in this position and responded.
Since I spoke to several Czech people, had the add shared in a big facebook group, and had many other conversations with Czech strangers on fb who seemed like good fits but weren’t interested in the position, we’re only losing time - and we have events coming up in November which have to be prepared, starting now, with these people onboarded. I’m not sure who is the final person to take these decisions - @nadia@noemi ?
The situation with Serbia is a bit better as we have two candidates, one very strong, so we can basically hire the moment EC okays the changes. And I am confident this person will be able to organize events and get stories, as that’s what she does anyway (Same for Kuba, who organizes events and talks to people as a profession).
I will keep on preparing weekly shareable summaries from the Polish community for you guys.
Inge, to your remarks above : its not about social media achieving miracles, its about the fact that no single contribution in the forum came from someone who joined through there. Maybe some created accounts, but I welcome pretty much everyone who can be connected to this project and have gotten no reply. Which means, again, no conversions for our purposes. Actually, there is one, Serbian. All of the contributions came through manual outreach, if you will.
This is not to put any responsibility on a persons shoulder, it means that collectively we need t be aware of what works and doesn’t, and when to sound the alarm and rethink.
Natalia: The purpose of the social media advertising of the calls, and any recruitment Edgeryders does, is not only to find a person. Open recruitment is also to build social capital, interest in the project, new stories through the applications etc. You know this…
That said, if we agree to stop and hire those who did show up, that’s OK, we just need to be clear about the failure points. For me, this is mostly: you don’t go into a foreign and perhaps conservative context with an experimental approach and language. You hire people, and then hope that they can build adhesion and community locally. And the communications are shaped with their help.
@noemi I do really like how you phrase this, and I think we can learn from it: “you don’t go into a foreign and perhaps conservative context with an experimental approach and language.”
I was skeptical about trying to reach out to a conservative group, without having anyone on the ground. As I know these things need to be holistic. Lesson learned: we need to first reach out to people on the ground through our own messaging, not doing copy for groups we don;t know without having up a landing side that matches this kind of language.
But I think this deserves more attention then this single comment here. Let me post something longer later.
Regarding conversions - we already agreed on what needs to be done last week, that current social promo didn’t work (my mistake for not flagging numbers) and will re-launch paid promo once landing pages are done as it will be more clear to end users what we do and why should they care about what we do (and how it benefits them).
This will give us the ability to clearly track who is coming to the platform from where. Again, we cannot expect 100 clicks and 100 conversions, different people convert differently. They need to see it a few times, see more stories, more events (that’s why it’s important to have regular posts). Its Edgeryders branding
That’s why I am working on gathering data on re-working the social media approach (I’ve added a post on what I’ll focus on, you can see it here, to re-think the persona and everything else connected. All these things will be shared with everyone by the end of the week.
I really appreciate your ability and willingness to rethink this, and share a bit what the rest oof us don’t know about how Facebook works and why it’s important to understand different ways in which people convert. Looking forward to actually see how it works, this engagement and brand building through consistency and winning the fight with algorithms sigh.
I hadn’t announced the call yet - but I am not well and unable to do/lead the call today.
@anon82932460, if you’re up to it, perhaps you can gather the band together? If not, we’ll regroup next week - in the mean time, please add what you want to go out here in the comments:
(Same for Kuba, who organizes events and talks to people as a profession).