Recommendations

After putting our methodologies into action, we developed an accessible best practices framework. We hope our experiences offer insight into climate change communications. After ten weeks of developing our own campaign, we believe the City of Eugene should consider the following recommendations when designing sustainability-related outreach programming:

Social Media:

  • Steer away from Facebook in your social media campaign. Instagram and Twitter are more popular among the 16- 24 year old demographic.
  • Creating a solid social media campaign takes a generous amount of time and work. The city should hire one full- time employee or a paid intern to take on this task. 
  • Profile sustainable businesses in Eugene on social media to create a personal connection that fosters responsible consumerism.
  • Consistency/ frequency are crucial; see the following Weekly Social Media Schedule Example

Social Media Best Practices

Management Software:

  • Crowdfire allows easy tracking of followers, provides a convenient avenue for unfollowing, and the ability to schedule content. There is a cost associated however we believe this is an incredibly valuable resource. https://www.crowdfireapp.com/.
  • Hootsuite is a good resource, but it does not offer the same following capabilities that Crowdfire does. However, it is excellent for cultivating personal connections through media. https://hootsuite.com/plans/free. 

Use of social media:

  • Each platform has a different specific demographic it appeals to
    • Instagram: younger generations, more visual
    • Twitter: mix of audiences but harder to engage
    • Facebook: older generations, information sharing
  • An active account is a successful account
  • Twitter: keep it short  
    • The best way to gain exposure on Twitter is to get retweeted
    • Room for humor when appropriate
    • Requires the most content (3-4x daily)
    • Tweets with media are preferable
  • Instagram: Images need to be unique and custom!
    • Requires a lot of prep! Posts for the week lined up at the beginning of the week/month
    • Hashtags are super important
      • attach to the end of every post to be consistently getting traffic
      • Some of these should be unique and others can be larger more general hashtags

Gaining followers:

  1. Find accounts based on the audience you want
    1. Ask if they would share/shout-out social media accounts
  2. Go through the followers of these accounts. Why?
    1. Find other accounts/groups/clubs you may not know about. Potential partnerships/field trip ideas/inspiration
    2. Easy way to find wide variety of people
    3. Exposure is everything when first building a following
  3. Use original hashtags and already existing hashtags with words similar to content on your page
    1. Keep in mind that hashtags may have multiple meanings and should be researched before being used
  4. Take advantage of the search feature on all of the platforms being used
    1. searching using “Eugene” can give you results of people who have what you’re searching for in their bios on Twitter or within their tweets
  5. Follow minimum 50 people total per day:
    1. the more people you follow directly, the more followers you will gain
    2. Instagram has some limits on how many people you can follow in an hour
    3. Twitter has a similar limit but 10-20 at a time is perfect.
  6. Either manually or using an app/third party platform, unfollow inactive followers or people that don’t follow you back. Ratio is key! Accounts look strange if they are following a huge number of people with a small following.
  7. Think about how you use social media and what you personally enjoy in accounts.

Engagement with followers:

  • Engaging with followers is what makes social media so successful and popular.
  • Liking/retweeting/reposting things followers send in is a perfect way to interact and keep up engagement.

Tabling Recommendations

We found tabling to be an inefficient use of time and resources. Overall we do not believe tabling and social media created a cohesive outreach campaign. Therefore, we recommend putting more resources toward social media which is a more proficient method of outreach within the 16- 24 demographic.

For events where tabling is necessary, we recommend the following:

  • Providing incentives to event attendees invites engagement
  • Select events for tabling opportunities that will generate high volumes of foot traffic
  • Generalize tabling activities to approach a wide range of demographics.
  • Research table location to ensure that placement will generate traffic
  • Asking an individual to participate in an interactive activity creates an opportunity for discussion more effectively than a handout