Case
study – Sekakuoro Kulkuset
I think the
easiest organization/association to tell about for me is my choir. I am a part
of the board and the marketing committee so I am (or at least I should be)
pretty on top of things.
Our
Facebook page was created on March 15th 2011, a little less than a
year before I joined the choir. And for these past 4.5 years Facebook has been
the only social media site Kulkuset has been using. The posts didn’t get a lot
of likes and if they did, most of them were from the choir members themselves.
Of course the focus wasn’t to use Facebook actively for marketing.
But when we
got a new conductor, everything changed. It reminded us that maybe change is
good! Our website was horribly outdated - as were our attitudes. We started to make
changes. We changed up our board members and activated the marketing committee
which had been dormant for years. Now we’ve held regular meetings at least once
a month.
We started
to actually think about marketing. I was the one responsible for updating our
website and designing the look for all of the printed marketing material such
as posters, tickets and the program for our concert. Under is the poster design
I made.
On May 7th
we had a meeting with the marketing committee and we decided to create an Instagram
profile for our choir. That has also been a real journey because the responsibility
of managing it has kind of also fallen for me now. Luckily my father (yes, I
share a hobby with both my parents) learnt how to update the website so at
least some of the pressure has been lifted. But my new task has been
interesting because I only started using Instagram a couple of day before we
created the profile for our choir! Luckily the app isn’t too difficult to use
so now it has been more about learning to become a more organized person so I
actually remember to post! :D
So now we
have a website, a Facebook page and an Instagram profile! We have also been talking
about filming some videos and posting them to Youtube. That would be an ideal
social media site for a choir like us, because then people could actually hear
what we’re all about. We thought about using Twitter, but that just doesn’t
work for us since we don’t have enough things to post about for the rate of
which we should be tweeting. But I think three channels is enough for now! We still
have to first learn how to use those effectively and how to get people
interested in us. Luckily it is easy to measure our success – how many people
are coming to our concerts!
For
internal communication we’ve been simply using email and telling to people directly
in our practices. But that doesn’t really work since people forget to read
email and there are always some people absent from practices, so information
still gets lost. Luckily we are changing to Microsoft Office 365 as our
intranet, so all internal communication would be in there and wouldn’t get lost
in the piles of email most of us get on a daily basis.
We don’t
have a proper strategy for social media yet but we are having a meeting about
it next week, so this is a good opportunity to think about what I’m gonna
suggest in the meeting! Because as it is, there is a serious need for some
guidelines. People post whatever they want on Facebook on their own profiles
and that means that none of that person’s friend come to our page to see our
posts. It is like an employee from Apple decided to just blab about an upcoming
product on their own channel – it just isn’t how thing should be done! All official
pictures and ads should be posted via Sekakuoro Kulkuset and then our choir members
share that post on their own timelines. That way it would be more controlled
and most of the visibility would come for our choir’s page.
We also
need a proper strategy on what to post, where and when. Right now we tend to
post only when something is either just about to happen, happening or has just
happened and then there is a long pause. And that is not good because people
forget in that time. We should have something to post in-between concerts so
that people have the time and opportunities to get invested in us! I am trying
to post a picture every Wednesday about our practice that is held the night
before – although after seeing that Slideshare presentation, I think I should
start posting them straight after our practices even though they end at 9 P.M. But
that one Instagram post a week isn’t enough. We did talk about starting a series
where we would have a “choir member of the week”. We would post a photo and a
teaser on Instagram and then direct the readers to Facebook to read more. That
would allow us to have at least two topics to post about every week.
We have a
lot of ideas but progress is slow because there are such few active members – a
common problem in all associations. But we are trying our best! And we have big
plans for the next two years since 2018 marks our 100th anniversary!
:D
- Viivi
P.S. You are
more than welcome to follow us! ;)
Facebook: Sekakuoro Kulkuset
Instagram: @kulkuset
This was really interesting to read because you're part of this choir so it was from a different point of view than others' social media strategies like mine :)
VastaaPoista