Best bits: Charity careers in social media

Kate Maunder, senior consultant, TPP Not for Profit Take a portfolio to an interview: It's all about tangible examples on your CV – you have to be able to say that you have increased your Twitter followers from x to x. Lots of unemployed people are using their time to improve their skills and work on tangible examples of their work. NFPTweetup is an excellent event to attend to keep abreast of new developments in the social media field. Digital marketing recruitment has increased over the last few months: More and more charities are dividing their marketing teams in two: one digital marketing team and one more traditional. Social media is having a massive effect on most roles within the marketing and communications field and tends to be a part of most job descriptions. Social media is slowly creeping into a lot of areas within the sector. Rob Dyson, PR and online engagement manager, Whizz-Kidz Areas to watch: Audio is one to think about – there has been a focus on the written word and images, but Whizz-Kidz has had a little success recently using audioboo. Flickr and YouTube are also great ways to share engaging content created by users, so you'll see a lot of videos co-produced and collaborated by service-users in future. Succinct communication skills are essential: A proven ability to communicate succinctly in social media is vital. It would serve people new to charity communications to have an idea about how to make campaigns catch on, but also simply how to communicate to people without broadcasting. Test the mediums: deconstruct them, make mistakes, and learn. You can also get some expert advice, for example, Sounddelivery do social media courses . Concentrate on where your audience already are: Focus on where supporters have integrated social media into their daily routine. I used to try and join every newfangled platform. Put resources where supporters are contacting you or already talking, not in echo chambers. Social media should be integrated: More staff are using social media to champion their work, "flattening out" digital engagement and not making it one person's job. This is vital to storytelling, demonstrating impact and hopefully fundraising. There should still be a strategy (of sorts) in place, but only in so far as there is a telephone or email strategy. Sarah Espiner, digital marketing manager, Media Trust Show a willingness to be in both social media and the third sector: Volunteer or do internships with charities if you're starting out and keep updated with developments in both sectors. It's difficult to be completely up-to-date at all times and do your job, but you have to have a personal interest and passion for social media. Find people on social media channels who give good information on the areas you're most interested in – both personally and professionally. Follow third sector people (the people on this panel are a good starting point as well as Third Sector and NFPTweetup , etc.), marketing and digital people (including Mashable , Search Engine Watch , Wired , etc). What employers want will vary depending on how the social media is managed within the organisation: Some social media roles will be within digital teams – they may require a more thorough working knowledge of a variety of channels. Others will be within more general marketing teams, which means you'll need a good teaching and sharing technique to enthuse less digitally experienced colleagues. Make sure you have a good presence online – keep it friendly and professional. For a junior digital role, I would expect the applicant to have a personal interest. Integrating social media can cause problems: Having a dedicated social media person ensures activity is monitored and co-ordinated. They are specialists in their area. But it also means colleagues in wider or offline marketing roles may feel removed from their digital audiences and may not automatically consider social media as a strand in their plans. Roberto Kusabbi, community and social media manager, British Heart Foundation Mobile is the future: There are some fantastic figures from charities on mobile – it's going to be a key space and will go hand in hand with social. The uptake of smartphones and how users are engaging on those platforms will mean that a lot of charity supporters will read your content on a mobile device. Optimising your mobile experience and engagement will be essential. Training can be difficult: At the British Heart Foundation, we trained 50 staff to use our community and we are slowly moving some of them into our social spaces. We did some in-house training and some training using SIFT media . One thing that would help is if there were a better piece of software to manage social spaces with lots of people – it's hard to find something that allows you to manage a large scale social presence. We have also led one-to-one sessions and group sessions on best practice, our social guidelines and how it relates to staff. Prove you have a strategic mind: Organisations always need to evaluate social media. You would have an email strategy and contact strategy for email marketing so there should be something that outlines a social strategy. Candidates need to show they have both a strategic minds and a creative spark – being able to see what trends are working in the social space and make them relevant to the organisation's audience is essential. Virpi Oinonen, online engagement officer, National Council for Voluntary Organisations Show social media initiative: If you don't have any social media experience, set up a blog and Twitter account around your interests – this can serve as work experience. You could also volunteer for a charity, join professional social media online groups and follow the conversations to learn about the issues that social-media practitioners face (this is also good for finding job opportunities). Read blogs and websites, for example Mashable , to keep yourself up to date on the ever changing social media landscape. Visual communication will probably become more important: For some people it might make sense to develop skills in visual storytelling – this is not just photos or videos. You will probably see more and more infographics and illustrations because they are better tools to explain complex and often dry issues. There will always be a need for people who are experts at creating written, visual and audio content that will work on social media. Alexandra Goldstein, digital marketing officer, Dogs Trust Specialist and more general social media skills will be required: For larger organisations, moderation is a skilled job in itself, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't develop an understanding of how it fits into the bigger picture. Smaller and medium-sized organisations will need people to be able to straddle different jobs. Increasingly, social-media savvy communicators will be part of every supporter-facing role. Sometimes it's a question of reading between the lines and finding out where you can slot into an existing team – having a second skill can be invaluable to helping you do this. Training: We have presented about social media at relevant team meetings to encourage interest and done one-to-one or small group training with interested individuals. We have also codified policy and written guidelines, as well as monitoring the first few interactions. Steve Bridger, partner, Visceral Business Make sure your charity is serious about becoming a social organisation: Hopefully, in future charity managers will embrace employees as the passionate community they are and reward them for being social. This will need a solid framework – strategy, guidelines and a core group, etc. It's more than just a question of social media adoption: you want those who "get it" to collaborate with others, internally and externally, to build the digital capability of your charity. Being social could also become a HR objective. The written word is still essential: Although we are becoming more and more visual, the written word will become even more powerful. Writing has reasserted itself, bringing people together and articulating ideas, hopes and impact via a phone, PC or tablet. The phenomenon has been nothing less than the rebirth of storytelling. Everyone is having to learn as they go about these new literacies, so have fun with them. This content is brought to you by Guardian Professional. To join the voluntary sector network , click here .