Net Change Week: Social Mastermind from SiG @ MaRS on Vimeo.

Last week Toronto was alive with innovation and new ideas with the events of Netchange Week taking place at the innovation hub of Toronto – the MaRS Discovery District.

Net Change is Canada’s first week long, city wide event designed to dissolve the divide between digital professionals and social change-makers. With a full five day schedule of sessions helping learn more about leveraging technology to aid awareness of their causes and as a catalyst for social change.

I had the pleasure of participating in the Social Masterminds session as one of the social media experts donating our time to working with a Charity in developing a social media strategy to help them take a different approach to their goals using social technology.

I worked in collaboration with Trilby Bittle from Humber and Richard Carmichael from Frank Speaks and a representative from the Hospice of Toronto. As an active Hospice volunteer myself I really relished the opportunity to combine two of the passions from both my personal and professional worlds.

Looking at the issues faced by the charity we noticed they shared similar problems that many for-profits and small businesses faced. They had limited marketing resources, need to reach out the people that need their services and increase awareness of the good work they were doing.

For those that are not familiar with Hospice, they are volunteer run organisations that care for people that are in the last stages of their lives and give both the families and person some relief and hope. It is a free service for the families that is not treatment but rather care and support to help the person and their families deal with the end of life experience. The problem faced by many hospices is that few people know what a hospice is and far too many people suffer in pain without taking advantage of the care available.

The challenge we faced was how do we increase awareness so that doctors might recommend more patients, more families might reach out for support, people are more engaged to volunteer and at the end of the day increase donations.

After spending several minutes analysing target audiences, strategic approaches and tools we came the conclusion that the greatest resources we had at our disposal was the passion of all the people touched by hospice care, both their motivations for getting involved and their personal stories.

Instead of targeting ‘everyone’ they looked at how they incite and drive awareness by going to the people that firstly wanted to tell their stories, were most passionate about the Hospice and were the best advocates of the charity.

We looked at how with a simple web cam or flip camera we could share the strongest messages that people needed to hear.

The people that were helped by the volunteers, the families and caretakers, the donors that give all that they can because they believe in the cause and the volunteers that are out there giving their time and experiencing the gratitude of the people touched by the service.

Now I will be the first to admit that this sounds all well and great from a brand strategist point of view. With a World Vision-esque budget you could make a feature length film telling those stories but with a tight budget and many people in need you need to find practical ways of rolling out a ’social media storytelling strategy’ – I put that in quotations because I can’t help but ridicule myself as a result of the synergistic deployment of that lethal combo of buzz words.

For a small local charity or even a small business, the most important social media tools can be email and a blog. Not nearly as cool as hiring a 16 year old to sit on the internet twittering all day but these tools are important for four reasons.

In terms of strategy, social media can be an effective way to increase the reach of existing business strategy. Social media strategy needs to be adopted by the whole organisation not just by someone who is technically savvy.

Click here for more information on Hospice of Toronto.

This summer I am hoping to help out the Hospice I volunteer for – the Hospice of Peel with some web strategy. If there is anyone that would like to get involved please drop me an email or leave a comment.