Social Media Tips for Muhammad Yunus' Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony

I wanted to share a few notes from the training call last night about utilizing social media to highlight the Yunus Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony. The ceremony is this Wednesday, 11:00 am–noon. The next couple of days are prime time to contact members of Congress to encourage them to attend the ceremony, and to honor Professor Yunus and fulfill his vision by supporting critical anti-poverty programs during this appropriations cycle. This is also a great time to energize our own personal networks around the ceremony, and Professor Yunus’ work. The ceremony will be broadcast live at http://www.speaker.gov/live/ and the event will be live-tweeted by @RESULTS_tweets and @Yunus_Centre. I’ll also be posting about it on @RESULTS_DC over the next couple of days.

The training call also included some good general tips on how to use social media for advocacy:

• On Facebook, try to always include something visual that will get people’s attention — a photo, video, link to a site with an image preview, etc.
• Include a call to action in your posts. For your friends, that might be a request to share the post. If you’re posting on a Congressperson’s wall or tagging them in a post, you might request for them to take a more specific action.
• The EPIC format works for Facebook posts, too
• Use group accounts for information, education, content creation that group members can then share with their networks
• Personal accounts are most effective for directly contacting your members of Congress on social media
• We can include (or experiment with) social media as one of the ways we contact Congresspeople on various issues, in additional to calling/emailing — we can coordinate the efforts and “swarm” specific issues

Thanks!