Non-governmental vs. Social Media

In this week’s blog, I am going to talk about how non-governmental organization using Social Media to create benefits and achieve their mission. According to McKinsey Global institute, social sectors could get benefits based on five functional Social technologies value levers, they are Collect in formation and insights, Mobilize resources, Execute mission, and Organization-wide levers. And in the following blog, it is more focused on World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and how they use value levers to execute their mission by educating the public and engaging supporters.

The WWF is an international non-governmental organization working on issues regarding the conservation, research and restoration of the environment. It is the world’s largest independent conservation organization with over 5 million supporters worldwide, working in more than 100 countries, supporting around 1,300 conservation and environmental projects (Source from Wikipedia). Their mission is “to stop the degradation of the planet’s natural environment and to build a future in which humans live in harmony with nature by: conserving the world’s biological diversity; ensuring that the use of renewable natural resources is sustainable; and promoting the reduction of pollution and wasteful consumption.”

Based on the research, WWF has massively integrated social networks within its campaigns and projects. For example, a WWF’s social spot is aiming to share links and sites worldwide to largely keeping in touch with participates and/or supporters, and share their newest information through these SNS. Furthermore, its latest mobile digital campaign “Little Things That Mean the World” has engaged Facebook to promote a new way of supporting WWF in UK.

• Educate the public

WWF has widely use YouTube to promote its educational campaigns and projects. High click/viewing rate helps these educational video widely spread.  In the example below, the video starts from a cup of latte and trying to educate the public in increasing awareness of using less of our nature resources, as stated in the title, Change the way you think about everything. And it is exactly the magic power of using social media, which influences audiences’ potential awareness and encourage them to change behaviour in the end. Also, it is noticeable that, SNS like YouTube has its wide transmissibility, as a part of important platform of social network in nowadays, people would like to transfer/share anything useful/interesting they think to their friends or family. All these benefits WWF to close to achieve its mission.

• Engaging supporters

Based on using social technologies, it is possible to engage huge amount of supporters at the shortest and cost efficient manner. For instance, WWF holds a global event “Earth Hour” on an annually basis. It is encouraged people/business/ governments to participate by switching of non-essential power for one hour at the end of each March. In my self-experience, I first noticed this event through a friend’s share link on Facebook. After registered the website of participation, I am now receiving a monthly newsletter via email from WWF Australia about anything news and ongoing event/ votes/ volunteers information. Even though this event has some critical site like “it does not help at all with merely one hour power saving”, this event could still build a huge database of supporters in a very friendly way. Furthermore, they also created the Google+ to share the information regularly, which has more than 126,166 followers.

To conclude, apparently, WWF is a sort of social media master in achieving their mission and goals. Also, they did more than I wrote. Hope you enjoy this reading.

Thanks for any comments.

Chuan