Amnesty’s social media guidelines

 

Action groups are welcome to create a social media account that uses the Amnesty name and brand. It’s important to know that if you are posting on behalf of Amnesty that you need to remain impartial. This includes not supporting any political parties or posting anything that is not an Amnesty position. Also, please ensure a member of your Activist Leadership Committee has admin access. This is so if the group stops their involvement we can still access the account.

 If you are posting as yourself and do not have anything that identifies your

involvement with Amnesty, then you can post what you please.

Email

Emailing is still the most direct way of contacting someone online. It’s difficult to have an online presence without having at least one email address. But, there has been a decrease over the years of people using it for one on

one communication. Instant messaging apps have taken over this space. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but it might not be a lot of people’s preference to communicate this way.

Email is still very useful for sending a message to a larger group of people, a mailing list. How successful those emails are depends on a few things. Are they short and easy to read? Do they have too much information? Do you send too many emails? Is the information you are sending relevant to the people receiving it? Bad email practice leads to low engagement. People will

see your email come in and not want to open them. Or worse, mark them as spam.

Here are some suggestions to use email well.

If you’re going out to a regular mailing list don’t send them from your email account.

Use an email marketing app like MailChimp or GetResponse for example. Through these platforms you can set up your mailing list the right way. This will allow you to create segments based on people’s interests. So you’re not

sending everything to everyone when they only want certain things.

You’ll need to get this info from them in some way. You could ask them or you could look at how they engage with certain emails. If they don’t click on emails about meetings, but do about campaign updates you can assume to segment them this way.

If you prefer to send a newsletter style email with everything in it, try only sending once or twice a month. These platforms also give people the option of unsubscribing from the list which is a legal necessity.

In the end think about whether this is the right option for communication with people.

Newsletters, while good for getting information out, can be very one-sided. If your aim is informing people then go for it. But if you want to increase engagement and discussion then you might want to use something else. A Facebook group for example would fit that purpose

Maria Philippa Guimaraes- TUA