A masterclass in NGO tweeting

I recently wrote a short piece on NGO use of Twitter which I’ve now shelved as a result of the above.

It’s a masterclass. There is so much that bugs me about the way NGOs misuse the platforms. Firstly your life may be workshops and conferences but that isn’t the end product of what you do. Don’t tweet the work, tweet the results. I’ve lost count of how many NGO people I’ve unfollowed because they’ve decided that a conference is the most interesting thing they can find to share.

The other problem with personal Twitter accounts of NGO employees is that all they do is retweet the corporate feed. If you’re following that then you don’t want it subsequently retweeted by every employee. One senior NGO tweeter I recently unfollowed would retweet messages two or three times, obviously trying to get hit numbers up.

Scott’s a mate and I was priviledged to work with him briefly at WCS. By his own reckoning he’s no techie. He’s still trying to work out how to get films off the internet. But what he does have is the ability to work out what’s interesting and what isn’t and he responds to others. Missed out here are the tweets from an FT correspondent and assorted retweets from those of us cheering on from the sidelines.

It seems obvious to tweet events like this and yet I’m not seeing it anywhere else, not in Vietnam at least. Most NGOs are too paralysed by fear of getting something wrong that they instead continue to share only retweets from head office.

This is storytelling, brilliantly done. Typos, blurry pics etc – it doesn’t matter. It’s live and more effective than a hundred multipley signed off, written by committee,  statements that only find their way to this platform once sanctioned, old news and having had all life and interest well and truly trampled from them.

Finally, the tweets are giving us something. In the past I’ve tried to explain to an NGO comms boss that their tweet feeds are like a bloke who only turns up at the pub when he wants a favour or to borrow some cash. Nothing for weeks on end then suddenly you want us to retweet, or write to our MP or donate cash. Many of us will give to the right people at the right time but you have to give a little first.

* NB, this is my first time using Storify. I was impressed but not all the functionality would work in embedding it here. That might be my lack of expertise, it may be the tools or it might be the clunkiness introduced by assorted social media blocks in Vietnam. In the end I’ve got a screen grab instead – click it and it’ll take you to Storify with the full functionality.