Social Media for nonprofit health care organizations

In September 2019, I was hired onto the Marketing & Events Team at the University of Michigan Health's Adolescent Health Initiative (AHI) as their Marketing & Communications Assistant. AHI is a nonprofit extension of Michigan Medicine's Community Health Services (CHS), and as an organization, their mission is to advance innovative adolescent-centered health care through practice improvement, education, research, and youth and community engagement.

As a brand, ​​AHI's tone is evidence-based, inclusive, youth-centered, and politically neutral. As an organization, they use jargon-free language with call-to-actions, informal, while speaking from a human perspective. They address topics that can be controversial, and strive to communicate complicated ideas with respect to all parties involved, while above all, encourage the agency of adolescents.

My primary focus at AHI is managing the production and distribution of their external communications. This involves coordinating with AHI's interdisciplinary staff to promote their work across their website, social media (SM) platforms, bi-weekly newsletter, and external outreach. This involved managing their 4 social media accounts (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram) with a social media calendar. ​

Here is a sample of the yearly social media content calendar I created and maintained in Microsoft Excel. The purpose of the calendar is to log all of the relevant deliverables in one place (e.g. - alt text and image descriptions, copy, what platforms the content would be posted to).

Content creation

Social media, if utilized correctly, should tell your brand's story in a visual way that encourages action among your target audience. Below is some of the content and social media campaigns I have developed during my time at AHI.

With the racial reckoning that took place in the Summer of 2020, it positioned AHI as an organization to think more critically about what resources and information we create and share to better reach all members of their community.

As the Marketing & Communications Specialist, this meant setting intentional goals to reach marginalized healthcare professionals through our communications channels.

With the support of the AHI Team and my own ongoing unlearning of white supremacist culture, I began integrating racial justice-centered resources and supporting trainings into the social media calendar. Additionally, I led our #AHIforRacialJustice social media campaign that expanded Black History Month into Black History year - diving deeper into topics such as intersectionality, social determinants of health, and medical mistrust. 

As a result, I disseminated resources to nearly 10,000 health care professionals to better prepare them to center anti-racist practices in their work.  

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Copy: LGBTQ+ youth are a diverse, vibrant, and resilient population that deserve to feel valued and heard.⁣
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Young people in the LGBTQ+ community have specific health care needs that need to be supported and affirmed. ⁣
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You can learn more about adolescent-centered LGBTQ+ best practices here. #Pride2021

Graphic was created with Adobe Illustrator. 

Leveraging AHI's interdisciplinary community on social media

My role as a communicator is to uplift the voices and work of experts. At AHI, I worked towards this by encouraging members of the team, youth council, and larger community to share their expertise on social media. Thus, the influencer guide was born.

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Tracking social media metrics

Develop an SOP for tracking and analyzing social media, newsletter, and website metrics to better understand our audience and their behavior by expertise, teamwork, and diversity and inclusion.
Developing a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for tracking and analyzing the success of our external communications (social media, newsletter, and website) has been a goal of the Marketing Teams for a while. Specifically, we want to implement a social media metric tracking process that allows us to understand who our audience is and learn more about their behavior (taking capacity into account).

In preparation for establishing our social media metric tracking SOP, I enrolled in the American Marketing Association’s 2022 Social Media ROI Strategy Virtual Training and took LinkedIn Learning’s How to Be More Strategic in Six Steps course. Based on the best practices outlined in those professional development opportunities and our FY21 Marketing & Events goals, I then selected the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) we wanted to track across platforms: audience growth (followers, page likes), engagement (shares/retweets, saves, likes, comments, engagement rate), and brand awareness (link clicks, page/profile impressions, total reach, mentions).

Once AHI acquired a Hootsuite account, we began tracking our baseline metrics for Quarter 1 (January 2022-March 2022). I pulled the averages from Hootsuite to form our baseline to measure future data pools. I collected social media website referral data from Google Analytics. Then, I synthesized the data into a PowerPoint presentation at the bi-annual marketing retreat and AHI Team Meeting.

I learned Instagram had the highest engagement rate (9.55%) across all of our platforms. According to Social Insider, the industry average engagement rate in 2022 is 0.83%. Twitter had the lowest engagement rate, which I found unusual as traditionally, it is our highest referring platform to our website. Additionally, I observed we had less engagement on Facebook posts. The decline in Facebook engagement and overall organic reach seems industry-standard due to consumers’ shift in their app preferences, like TikTok.

The overall learnings from this analysis emphasized that we still do not quite understand who our audience is on social media. However, we know who we want it to be (physicians, nurses, social workers, students, health educators, behavioral health professionals, and MDs). Based on this information, our next goal is to collect audience demographics from each platform for Q1. Moreover, I inferred that by not posting consistently, as well as not leveraging our Twitter account, we lost out on opportunities to engage with our audience.

Moving forward, we will begin collecting metrics quarterly. Since we are already exceeding industry standards across the board, I set a couple of different growth benchmarks for our KPIs between 2-5%. To achieve these goals, for Q2, I leaned into creating entertainment posts (such as the AHI Teams as Teens campaign, or any kind of content featuring AHI Team members), which seem to perform well in terms of brand awareness and engagement. Additionally, we will be sending out surveys to the 2022 Conference on Adolescent Health speakers, sponsors, and exhibitors with the opportunity for their work to be highlighted on our social media accounts.