The Family Place Social Media Business Plan

The Family Place

Business Plan Spring 2019

The Family Place: An Overview

The Family Place is a local nonprofit organization catering to Cache and Rich County respectively. They work with families through community events, provided counseling, workshops, and an emergency/need-based daycare.

The Family Place mission statement, according to their website is as follows, “​The Family Place is all about building stronger families in Cache and Rich Counties. Working with both parents and children, we are here to support good relationships and help develop new approaches to family life. We strive to build stronger families by hosting fun, family-focused events in the community as well as offer a variety of programs such as workshops, counseling, and our Kid’s Place. “ Essentially, The Family Place strives to support families in all shapes, sizes and cultural demographics.

Client Information

Vision Statement: T​ o strengthen families and protect children.

Long Term Goals: ​To increase engagement, specifically with comments. To gain 100 followers on Instagram, to change Twitter content to a more service based platform directed at gaining volunteers, to better utilize Pinterest.

Client’s Concerns: I​ nstagram posts and captions are too wordy, would like to be simpler images. Instagram account is also following a lot of people who are not relevant to the family place. Twitter does not reach target audience (men and women 24-35 with kids).

Unsure how to use Pinterest to their advantage. To increase engagement and content directed at the Spanish speaking community.

Conflict Resolutions: F​ or the first couple weeks we will send Wendi the content that we will be posting and she will let us know if she has any concerns or additions she’d like us to make.

Objectives: 1.) Turn Twitter into a service centered platform.

a.) We will follow more local service accounts such as the USU Service center and retweet/engage with them to create a hub for finding service opportunities in the area. b.) The measurable goal will be to follow 5-8 such accounts and not only engage with them, but try and garner at least one retweet from one of them on each of our service based posts.

2.) Receive more post comments specifically on Instagram a.) We currently receive about 2 comments or less per post. b.) Wendi told us that competitions, polls, and similar tactics work well to get more comments/post engagements. c.) Using our proposed #FamilyFridays, we will create graphic content geared towards that style of posting. Things like “Tell us who you’re dressing your little one up as for our princess party” or holiday candy themed competitions (candy hearts: good or nah?). d.) We hope to gain 2 or 3 more comments a post this way, increasing the average up to around 5 per post. And of course, more the better. e.) It seems like Wendi’s Facebook intern has more say about specific competition posts we are allowed to run, so we are sort of at her mercy as to what and when we can post competitively speaking.

3.) Gain followers on Instagram (Wendi asked for 100 which is a little steep, so we’re setting a personal goal of 30 for this first little bit and seeing how it goes from there.) a.) Post content, like pretty graphic quotes, that users can share to their personal instagram stories so others will see our posts. b.) Partner with other similar nonprofit organizations, such as CAPSA, to share their posts in the hopes that they’ll share ours and their followers will come our way.

Audiences Consistently across all social media platforms and beyond, The Family Place’s audience demographics primarily include lower to middle class women between the ages of 24-34, most with children. There is definitely a broader base that includes men in these same demographics, but typically their audience is 80% or more female.

Potential Audiences Grandparents, legal guardians that may not fit into those niche demographics, volunteers, and donors. We will specifically look at increasing college-aged people looking to volunteer as an audience on twitter.

Current Campaigns Currently, The Family Place is using several hashtag campaigns including #thefamilyplace, #motivationmonday, #thankfulthursday, and #givingtuesday.

#motivationmonday is the most regularly posted campaign. Every Monday across Facebook, Instagram, and sometimes Twitter and Pinterest, they post a motivational quote graphic to each of those platforms. They are pretty successful and by far the most pinned posts on Pinterest.

On Instagram specifically, which we’ll go into a little more in our Social Media Audit, they always post with the hashtag #thefamilyplace. This isn’t necessarily a specific campaign, but they use this as a brand identification. Their posts are easy to find if you search the hashtag #thefamilyplace organically.

#thankfulthursday is a semi-regular campaign in which they thank the organizations and volunteers that help them regularly with their various events. It is a good way to highlight their volunteers and bring a little bit more community engagement in.

#givingtuesday is a simultaneous thank you to donors and a request for further donations to the organization. They give an update about how much has been raised thus far, say thank you, and give information on how to donate further.

Social Media Audit

Profile information Instagram:​ U ​ sername: familyplaceut Password: starthrower1 Followers: 763 Twitter: ​Username: familyplaceutah Password: starthrower1 Followers: 146 Pinterest: ​Email: w ​ endi@thefamilyplaceutah.org​ Password: starF1sh!

Followers: 12, but 8.1k monthly viewers Overview The Family Place mainly uses their social media platform to inform the public about events

and services offered by the organization. The primary demographics across all the platforms are primarily women in the Logan, Utah area between the ages of 25 to 34.

Instagram

The Family Place’s Instagram profile currently hosts ​765 followers​, while following​ 1,149 accounts​. It has 229 total posts and two highlighted stories. These highlighted stories include one called “volunteer” that shows various volunteer efforts and volunteers themselves and another titled “service” which highlights service opportunities and contact information.

As for post styles, the past posts are a mix of photography from events or of staff members intermixed with text-based graphics announcing events, inspiration quotes, and educational materials. The color schemes don’t seem to have a ton of color consistency, but they are all in fun, playful colors that invoke childhood. There are also various stock photos with informative captions, but those seem to be fairly minimal. They have a couple of recurring visual trends, such as “Family Focused Friday” in a circle shape overlayed over seasonally appropriate images, but this style hasn’t been used in the last several months.

Based on Instagram’s analytics, Thursdays and Mondays are the most active days for follower interaction with the most active user time happening around 9 pm. Their event posts with photos seem to be what garners the most interactions. For example, a recent post about a very popular princess theme event performed 95% better than the page’s average posts. It reached 300 people organically and was seen 538 times over a 10 hour period. At the time of this report, it had 48 likes and 2 comments. A similarly timed text post only has 23 post likes, 2 comments, and was seen 450 times. However, it did have a 347 person reach, which was a little more than the princess post. Essentially, it seems that photos are getting better reception on the Instagram page. Stories don’t seem to be terribly responsive, and according to last semester’s team, because of the user demographics.

Popular hashtags that appear on most of the posts include #thefamilyplace, #logan, #utah, #hyrum, #smithfield, #USU, #parenting, #workshop, #motivationmonday, #givingtuesday, #MentalHealthMonday, #familyfriday, and #thankfulthursday.

#thefamilyplace appears on every single post with only a few exceptions. It is used across the country, particularly in Texas where another organization by the same name uses it

regularly, but the first several posts that show up when you search the hashtag are the Utah Family Place’s posts. It’s by far the most effective hashtag they use.

Twitter

The Family Place Twitter is a hodge-podge of informative tweets about events, motivational quotes, and retweets from various local organizations and applicable events.

It boasts ​147 followers​ while f​ ollowing 209 accounts​. It has tweeted 681 times since December 2013 and only liked 155 tweets. The account currently isn’t using lists The profile page is completely filled out with a consistent profile picture and header. The profile also has the yellow theme applied to it to reflect their brand color scheme. It has The Family Place website linked from the profile, as well as their location and a decent bio explaining their purposes. It doesn’t currently have a pinned tweet.

The tweets themselves use a decent amount of multimedia. ​There are 240 media posts​, most of the media being pictures/graphics. There are a few videos intermixed. At the time of this writing, their most popular tweet to date was tweeted last semester and had the USU Hockey team mentioned in the tweet. The last semester group tweeted this and said the success came from the fact that the USU Hockey team retweeted it. They also said Twitter is The Family Place’s least popular social media platform. They only average about 1,000 tweet impressions a month​, which isn’t a lot, even for an account with a small following like this one. According to Sprout Social, Twitter impressions are essential because it shows how far an organization’s tweets are reaching. The more people reached, the more engagement potential is there.

As for retweets, The Family Place shares tweets from accounts like “Healthy Children,” an organization that is umbrellaed under a national pediatrics association, and local in the valley organizations such as the Smithfield Library, or various USU accounts. They are partnered with the USU Greek life association Kappa Delta, but they seem to promote that relationship on Instagram more than they do on Twitter, which we thought was interesting considering Kappa Delta members are typically very active on Twitter.

The audience breakdown for The Family Place Twitter is a little less cut and dry as their Instagram demographics. The primary gender following the account is female, but only 59% are female. Males make up a much larger percentage than on Instagram with 41% of followers being male. An interesting stat from their audience analytics says that 99% of their followers really like dogs. The breakdown for the income demographics is really weird, and we feel like it might not be fully reflective of who The Family Place is trying to

reach. 20% of the followers are making between $75,000-$99,000 and 8% make $40,000-$49,000 dollars a year.

The general hashtag usage on Twitter are as follows, #FamilyFriday, #GivingTuesday (they also follow and retweet the #GivingTueday twitter account), #MotivationalMonday, #ThankfulThursday, and a smattering of relevant holiday hashtags throughout their history.

What we thought was interesting is that they haven’t taken the #TheFamilyPlace that is used so much on Instagram over to Twitter.

Facebook

Facebook isn’t a platform we will be running because The Family Place has their own social media intern in charge of Facebook. However, we still want to take a look at what their Facebook presence looks like so we can ensure a cohesive brand. We were not provided the logins for Facebook, so the analytics will not be as precise as the other platforms.

The Family Place’s Facebook is by far their most successful social media page. ​3,860 people like the page, while 3,802 people actively follow​ the page and its posts. They primarily emphasize events on the page using Facebook’s event application. Their profile picture and header are matching and display their brand logo, however; the pictures differ from the ones they are using on Twitter and Instagram respectively. They are also listed as a nonprofit and have an active “Donate” button listed on the top of the page.

Posts outside of the event pages tend to be reflections of what’s posted to Instagram.

There is a mix of photos, graphics, and text posts accompanying various information to do with the organization. There are fun facts, information about what The Family Place does, and additional event information outside of the event page. From what we can ascertain without specific analytics, the p ​ osts receive roughly 5-30 likes​ per post and ​3-7 comments per post​. Events seem to show a decent amount of interest. The current event they are publicizing has 240 people interested and 36 attending. There is some activity asking questions with quick responses back from the organization.

From an audience standpoint, most of the commenters and followers seem to be women particularly in the mid-twenties to thirties age range. That’s just based off of observation.

We will inquire further during our interview.

They don’t seem to be using hashtags on the Facebook posts, even on those that they use on Instagram as well. This isn’t necessarily surprising seeing how Facebook doesn’t have an

adequate way to utilize hashtags. However, for branding purposes, this lack of even their main hashtags, like #thefamilyplace seems off brand.

Pinterest

Pinterest is the newest addition to The Family Place’s social media presence. The team last semester set it up and got the ball rolling for the organization. According to the last semester’s team, the goal for the Pinterest page is to cultivate a collection of both original content and relevant content from outside organizations. The Family Place currently has 10 boards with subject matter ranging from sweet treat ideas, DIY craft projects, parenting tips, service ideas, and feel good quotes. The boards are very on brand for the organization and seem relevant to the demographic and followers they currently have. T​ hey have 171 pins in total​, which is fairly small but considering how new the profile is that makes sense.

They have ​12 active followers​. 5 of those 12 followers are companies, while the other 7 are women. T​ he Family Place follows 24 people/companies.​ Of those companies, there is a mix of local companies and national brands. They also follow several “mommy blogger” types.

The actual pins they are posting, like their boards, are widespread but still brand conscious.

Like they do on all their other social media profiles, The Family Place pins motivation quotes, informational and educational family-themed things, recipes, and occasional event graphics. They use much less photography, focusing more on “pinnable” graphics. The pins created by the organization itself average about 10-350 views per pin and 0-1 shares per pin. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of consistency on what/when pinning brings about more success. The most successful pin is a motivational Christmas quote. It was a simple text graphic that garnered over two thousand impressions and 31 saves. There are many other pins that follow this format without the same success, so we’re not sure what about it garnered so much more attention.

On average, The Family Place Pinterest account receives about 1​ 6,000 impressions a month and 300 engagements.​ 84% of their users or people who view their pins are interested in quotes and 94% of the users are interested in educational materials. Heath is another subject 75.6% of their users also are interested in. These are all things that The Family Places excel at and that their audience responds to across the board. The majority of their users are between the ​ages of 18 and 24​, which is younger than any of their other profile demographics.

They use keywords like motivational quote, DIY, words to live by, and crafts. They don’t really use hashtags. However, every pin they’ve made has a good description that will assist with searches and keyword SEO. There is a lot of growth opportunities and brand identity creation.

Proposed Campaigns & Social Media Initiatives

Interact more with other social media accounts, creating or involving an online community within Cache Valley. This will help KPIs in terms of likes and possibly followers, as we have seen in the past with posts. It appears that top posts for this account are ones that involve other users in some way.

We want to implement Tasty Tuesdays on Pinterest. This will be a pinning campaign based on kid-friendly recipes/food activities. We will find applicable recipes, create an original graphic that reflects the activity, and pin accordingly. We will also share the recipe links on twitter and our instagram story.

We also want to implement an event graphic/calendar to be posted on Sundays across all the platforms highlighting the events and workshops that will be coming up in the follow week. We feel that it will help with community outreach and general information so people KNOW what is going on and when.

Proposed Hashtags & Current Hashtags We propose 3 major hashtag additions and promotions.

We would like to implement #familyfriday which is already established, but we want to give it more focus and bring a more cohesive branding across all the platforms. It also will make for educational pins, which we know from research is what our audience wants on Pinterest.

We’d also like to propose #TastyTuesday for posts about recipes you can make with your children. People really like recipes posts and we think it will be a great way to garner more Pinterest interaction.

Finally, we want to implement #TipThursday to highlight parenting tips or services that The Family Place provides. These will be pulled from the organization’s regular texting tip line as well as highlight the various blog posts for the week.

Proposed Social Media Networks We proposed revitalizing Twitter and focusing on college aged people looking for service opportunities with links to our blog posts in the news style that characterizes the platform.

Post Calendar & Major Events (the calendar doesn’t transfer from sheets perfectly. Here is a link to the actual sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jUFIKa0MFERVc8ZRNY9jzHcIEu8ZO78qvr3PhU djM58/edit?usp=sharing

Blog Stories 1.) Live Event - The Princess Party a.) We will promote the event via Instagram every day leading up to the event through a mix of princess themed posts that match our weekly calendar schedule & hashtags. b.) The day of the event we will start a livestream using an Instagram live story.

We will highlight what’s going on at the event, talk to the volunteers, interview the princesses, and remind people on the platform that the event will be happening again later in the day at 1:30 pm. The event is princess themed so visually it will be a really fun event to highlight live.

2.) Healing Horses a.) Healing Horses is a new class they are offering to children that have experienced trauma. They get to go and hang out with horses at a local ranch. b.) We will write a blog post promoting the class and talk about the healing quality of animals.

3.) Multicultural Center in Hyrum Location a.) They just opened a new section of the Hyrum location to be a multicultural center specifically with the Latinx community in mind. We will highlight this addition in a blog post and on a #familyfriday Friday.

4.) Parenting Tips a.) We have been asked to write several blog posts on family rearing tips. We will use Parent’s Magazine, NCTSN, Utah Legislative Session, and other similar resources to inform what stories we write. b.) These will posted to their blog and then disseminated through Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest specifically using the #thefamilyplace.

5.) Finance Class a.) They are doing a several part series teaching the community about finance.

We will write a finance specific blog post and then post it as a #familyfriday post about family finances and teaching children about managing money.

6.) Parenting Tip Line a.) The Family Place has a tip line you can text and receive regular texts from with daily tips on parenting and such. We will highlight this service on a #motivationmonday as an educational service. We’ll highlight it under a “services” story on Instagram.

7.) Grandparents a.) We will do a blog post geared towards grandparents specifically. It will talk about balancing a role as a grandparent raising a grandchild. We’ll use it as a #familyfriday post or a #givingtuesday post depending on what Wendi feels is appropriate.

8.) Volunteering a.) We will write a blog post on all the ways you can volunteer with The Family Place. It will include resources on where to sign up, etc. b.) This will be a Twitter specific story using #motivationmonday as the hashtag.

Sources: https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-audit/ http://thefamilyplaceutah.org/events/