Facebook Social Media Interviews
The Stroke Association creating a community on Facebook
- 01 Dec 09
What is your charity’s name and mission?
We are The Stroke Association and we are working for a world where there are fewer strokes and all those touched by stroke get the help they need. Our mission is to prevent strokes, and reduce their effect through providing services, campaigning, education and research.Why do you use Facebook and which services do you use?
We established a Facebook Group page for The Stroke Association in 2007, which we changed to a Page in early 2009. It began very much as an experiment – we hoped to reach a wider audience of younger stroke survivors and the families of older stroke survivors, and potential fundraisers.
The idea was that, although our main website is an extremely useful source of information about stroke with its own chat forum, it is also a static web page and relies on people coming to it. We wanted to turn this around and take The Stroke Association to the people.
Contact a Family - Using Facebook
- 27 Nov 09
What is your charities name and Mission
We're Contact a Family. Over the past 30 years we have been providing support, advice and information for families with disabled children, no matter what their condition or disability.Our mission and purpose is to remove the barriers imposed by society which prevent families with disabled children achieving their full potential, and to empower these families to live the lives they want to lead.
Why do you use Facebook and which services do you use?
There are over 22 million (and counting…) UK Facebook users in a population of around 61 million people. The service has clearly integrated itself everyday communications so it stands to reason that if a great deal of people are choosing to connect with each other using this platform, we should have a presence so we can tap into this diverse and ever expanding community.Parents of disabled chlidren often report they experience feelings of isolation and with the commitments surrounding raising a child with additional needs, it can be a struggle accessing conventional support channels due to time, financial, childcare and at times emotional restraints.
We primarily use Facebook Pages (www.facebook.com/contactafamily) and whilst we don't have the largest commnuity (2,119 fans to date), we do have a very friendly, engaged network of parents who become fans to access parent-to-parent support, information on conditions, personal stories, advice directly from our helpline team as well as news on disability issues, events and campaigns - all of which seek to empower families with the message that they are not alone and that there is support out there.
Yorkshire Cancer Research Facebook campaigns, for a cure
- 26 Nov 09
What is your charities name and Mission
Yorkshire Cancer Research.Our mission is to promote research, principally in Yorkshire, into the causes and cures of cancer and to publish and share the results of this research with the world's scientific community for the benefit of mankind. We do this by fundraising in Yorkshire and providing grants to Yorkshire academic institutions.
Why do you use Facebook and which services do you use?
More than 10 million users become fans of Pages each day...this is a pretty hard statistic to ignore, so we didn't we created a fan page for Yorkshire Cancer Research & now have over 1,300 fans.We are able to share good news stories, comment on current affairs, invite fans to our events & keep fans in the loop with what we are doing on a day to day basis aswell as featured campaigns. With page insights we are able to see where awareness of our charity brand is strong & where we need to increase this awareness.
Taking Action for Children on Facebook
- 26 Nov 09
What is your charities name and Mission
We are Action for Children, committed to helping the most vulnerable children and young people in the UK break through injustice, deprivation and inequality, so they can achieve their full potential.
Why do you use Facebook and which services do you use?
We use Facebook to reach out to all of our supporters, letting them know what Events we have on, linking them to research, news stories and uploading photos to show them what we get up to! We have about 1,600 fans which has increased by an astonishing 1,400 in just 2 months which we're over the moon about!
We take full advantage of the photos, links and video capability of status updates. It makes them much more fun and interesting to read on people's news feeds!
FibroAction using Facebook to syndicate accurate information
- 25 Nov 09
What is your charities name and Mission
FibroAction. Our mission is to raise awareness of the chronic pain condition Fibromyalgia Syndrome, partly through making accurate, up-to-date information more readily accessible.
Why do you use Facebook and which services do you use?
A lot of Fibromyalgia Syndrome (Fibro) sufferers use the internet and social media to interact with other people and learn about the condition. Facebook is useful for raising awareness of both the condition and our work. We can also help answer questions and provide information for sufferers and their friends or family. I’ve started up a couple of Facebook groups and we post links and answer question on those, and on other Fibro groups. We’ve also posted events and sometimes message group members if there is something in particular we want to publicise or ask for help with.
