Vikki Savery explains how Birmingham Children’s Hospital maximised the impact of its social media presence to create a more engaged and inspired audience
In the past, the communications and fundraising teams at Birmingham Children’s Hospital had struggled to effectively engage with supporters on social media: the hospital and charity each held separate Twitter and Facebook accounts; the tone of the messages didn’t correlate with the audience; and there was no thought-out approach for the time and tone of the messages, rendering them sporadic, unemotive and uninspiring.
Joining forces to build engagement
Over the last 12 months, we’ve dedicated ourselves to maximising our strategic use of social media to actively engage with our supporters and raise the profile of the hospital and charity brand. It began with merging the hospital’s and the charity’s social media accounts, bringing them together under one united brand. The teams have worked closely together to create more content, provide new platforms of communication for supporters and give our audience the opportunity to engage with us and share their stories, as well as demonstrate their support. We interact with our supporters online, responding to their posts where appropriate, which has helped cultivate a much more engaged audience.
A key part of our social media strategy has been pulling together a ‘daily content diary’ at the beginning of each week, which sees time-sensitive, topical and emotive messages posted at those times of the day that we’ve identified as engaging with the biggest audience (usually between 4pm and 6pm).
In just one year (January 2013-January 2014) Facebook likes jumped from 4,000 to over 22,075, and by April 2014 had reached 26,145. Twitter followers have rocketed from 600 to 7,420. Furthermore, as a UK children’s hospital we are also now outperforming other NHS children’s hospitals in the UK in the social media stakes.
Facebook follower trends in 2013/14
Twitter storm
Last year, when we were selected for the first time to be a part of national campaign The Big Give, we decided to base our whole campaign around Twitter. We took a strategic approach to the build-up to the campaign, posting consistent messages throughout and continual updates across the three days. We tied the campaign into the story of identical twin patients, Ethan and Kai Thompson, to create an emotional pull through the local media.
After three days of each donation being matched pound for pound, an impressive £28,000 was raised for the Children’s Cancer Centre Appeal. This is the first time that the teams have actively and strategically used Twitter as a tool to raise funds through a specific campaign – with impressive results.
Viral success
August saw our best performing Facebook post ever: the Princess Poppy post went viral and was seen by over 600,000 people in 48 hours. This was thanks to careful planning – including linking the royal birth of Prince George with the hospital. Heart patient Poppy Mason was born on the same day, and transferred to BCH when she was just a few hours old. The tone, timing and context of the post was perfect, with 24,000 likes and over 700 shares.
To highlight and measure how successful this was, below are some comparison posts from other huge national and international brands including Guide Dogs, Oreos, Pampers and Coca-Cola – who all posted on the same topic of the birth of Prince George. Each image shows the amount of likes each organisation gained, and the amount of people who liked the post. Coca-Cola are the only organisation that was more successful than us when posting about this topic.
Guide Dogs: 31,927 page likes & 730 likes for this post
Oreos: over 34 million page likes and 18,833 likes for this post
Pampers: 1.7 million page likes & 3,501 likes for this post
Coca-Cola: Over 71 million page likes & 33,964 likes for this post
Most recently, in April 2014 we had great success on Twitter with a tweet about one of our patients, Connie, achieving a reach of over 2.5m. The message was retweeted by several national newspapers and celebrities – including footballer Stilian Petrov and Comedian John Bishop – who were inspired by the story of Connie and her battle with leukaemia. This allowed us to reach an audience that was unprecedented for us on Twitter.
Outperforming the competition
Our new social media presence means that BCH’s Facebook page is now outperforming national charities that have ten times the fundraising income, earning us the status of being one of the leading NHS organisations in the healthcare and NHS charities sector.
The growth of these channels aligns with the increasing proportion of time we’ve dedicated to creating more content and interacting with our audience. To conclude, by taking a thought-out approach and cultivating an engaged audience of supporters, in just one year we have completely revolutionised our social media presence.
Vikki Savery is public fundraising manager at Birmingham Children’s Hospital
