Working with influencers
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Influencer section =)
- The question to ask is: "Was the video an effective vessel to bring people into our work"
- The scales are completely different than what we are used to in the non-profit/justice community
- For example, 50k views seems like a lot, but expensive - like $1 per view you could pay people to view the video instead
- For influencers having 1M views is standard so a much different definition for success
- So, it becomes a question of "what's best way to spend our resources?"
- Bring in a specialist - Full time and part time content creators are often better at doing this than the "experts" in the organizations
- The scales are completely different than what we are used to in the non-profit/justice community
- Example from an influence when they reached 20M subscribers
- Crowdsourced a question - what should I do do commemorate the event
- Idea to plant 20M trees - did as a partnership with a nonprofit to get $1 per tree to make it happen
- Grassroots org structure would do this:
- Set up rallies worldwide and gather stories from distributed actions into a single story
- This also gives local orgs a hook into gathering local media exposure and highlighting the local impacts
- Applied this model to content creators
- Partnership between two big influencers
- Created a shared call to action for other influencers to use their own creativity to mobilize their subscribers and then point them all to a single resource
- Incredible successful - raised all money in 56 days
- Crowdsourced a question - what should I do do commemorate the event
- Activist creators have a ceiling and this helped them break through those numbers
- same principles apply for political, big tent climate action, "sandboxed" action with positive spill over for partners with influencers
- Cultural divide between non-profit/justice work and funders and new generation of content creators that had stunted the relationships being developed
- Huge potential in partnerships and requires organizing work
- Need to get the message out
- We tend to think about influences not as partners, but as distribution channels, but there is a large potential and high ceiling for these type of relationships
- Power in these partnerships between organizations and influencers
- Look at Joe Rogan and DT there is some real loss opportunity for this
- Right has been building channels and partners for these upcoming right wing influencers and how these partnerships have power
- Left has not done his
- Minimizing this opportunity is a loss for real growth, outreach and messaging advantage
- Big companies
- Right wing politics are taking advantage of this
- Look at Joe Rogan and DT there is some real loss opportunity for this
- YouTube is the second largest search engine - so missing out there you are missing out on an enormous audience
- Different level of manipulation given influencer market
- What are the different niche influencers given men and women
- i.e. the MAHA (make America healthy again vax questioners) moms getting into feeds in other countries
- How is this different
- Launch strategy rested on a single video to launch the campaign
- There was an unlisted video only for influencers to get involved
- How would they get the volunteers - they sent a tweet - which seems weak to get that many people involved
- It got 1000 volunteers with wrong date and wrong place
- This is a much different response than then Hollywood celebrity tweeted about ocean health
- Replies were "marry me" and not about the call to action
- So, this is different in ability to get mobilization
- Who is talking, parasocial relationships, is part of the brand
- It creates a relationship between the speaker and the listeners
- The speaker doesn't know you, but the fans feel they know the speaker
- Identify with the shared values
- Replacement for the sense of belonging
- I.e. we used to have Sierra Club memberships
- Creators are constantly creating a sense of belonging and membership - they are constantly replacing members
- Erosion in trust with institutions and media -
- Tilts the advantage to those that are best at getting attention
- Example with GenZ for change for Biden
- leader is 24 years old and all people on the staff are influencers
- It's not 1 person who is the leader and rest are support
- It's one influencer with a network of others on whatever media platform of their choice
- Lessons learned:
- Good features:
- Have a lead influencer that has others who want to participate with them
- When they signal broad based values others will show up
- Need:
- More support in social infrastructure to support those that raise their hands
- Some of the communities of practice like the science influencers have an invite only gathering once a year
- Theres are good to partner because they do longer format
- Values aligned coalitions of influencers like
- Environment
- Progressive values, etc
- How do you authentically talk to audience
- Space for creators to talk to others with support of experts (so like science blogger and his gov't geek sidekick like Dr. Trayourus)
- This makes content feel authentic
- Need time to think and build an approach
- Must support the popularity of their posts
- 1 bad post, punishes your rank and visibility in the algorithm
- Show up in places where new influencers are learning how to do this
- i.e. VidCon
- Give them as place to use their platform for good
- How to compete with "sponsored" posts or their own company posts, but you need their popularity to boost yours
- This has to be promoted from within the community else it will not work if done for external sources
- Understand the secondary spaces for their superfans
- I.e. Patreon - where have longer more personal interactions with people
- Search
- Look for your thing on whatever social media platform to see how people are looking for things there...even where to go for lunch
- Editing is a skill, but AI might help
- Algorithms that prioritize discovery are great, but holding onto people is hard
- YouTube is where people go to build longer term audiences
- Resource: Ashoka & Social Good Club's playbook "Partnering with Creators" - a guide for campaigners thinking about how to strategically work with influencers.
- Good features: