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.
Facebook had millions of members in the UK and was the obvious place to start. We also experimented with MySpace and Bebo, but it was Facebook that has proved really successful for us.
We now have a steadily growing membership which is currently over 3,500 (our previous Group page reached 5000). We’ve used as many Facebook services as we can – we list our fundraising events under Events, we post photos and videos and encourage our members to do the same, and we use both the Wall and the Discussions tab to answer people’s questions about stroke.
Despite stroke being the UK’s third biggest killer and the largest cause of severe adult disability, stroke remains a much misunderstood condition and we consider it a vital part of our work to pass on information and advice wherever people find us, including on Facebook.
We also use the Wall to post weekly updates to our members and, with people being able to post comments and show their support for a particular update, this is an excellent way to gauge interest in our campaigns, news, fundraising events and other activities. It’s always exciting to post an update and see the supportive response!
Have Facebook supporters done something wonderful for you?
Many of our members have taken part in our fundraising events and we are always hugely grateful to them – their support is essential in funding the work we do, from pioneering stroke research to campaigning for better stroke care to our Life After Stroke Services for stroke survivors and their carers.
In addition, our members’ feedback on campaigns and their willingness to take part in surveys has been invaluable. But the most wonderful thing that we have found about our Facebook page is actually not what our members have done for us, but what they do for each other.
Our page is simply a venue for them to get involved and offer personal advice and support to other people in similar situations – this has created a very real sense of community that we at The Stroke Association are very proud to be part of.
Do you consider Facebook an important part of your work online?
We believe that Facebook is a hugely important part of our online presence. It allows us to have a much more intimate, personal and equal relationship with our supporters, and demonstrates who we are and what we do as a charity perfectly.
In addition, with many stroke survivors unable or unwilling to leave their homes due to disability, the online community that has formed on our Facebook Page is proving vital in breaking down this isolation and the resulting depression.
Have you encountered any problems using Facebook?
There have been a few technical hitches along the way, particularly during the changeover from a Group to a Page, but on the whole, Facebook has been very easy to use. We particularly appreciate the Insights section which allows us to see some simple statistics about our membership – very helpful in thinking about what our members might be most interested in.Do you have any tips for other charities?
We believe it’s very important to have an informal, personal tone of voice on Facebook. Facebook users are there to meet their friends and socialise, so rather than having a formal “voice of the charity”, try to fit in with this tone in order to engage your members.
Anyone at The Stroke Association who posts a message to our members on Facebook always writes as themselves and signs off with their name so that people know there are personalities behind our Page.
Allow members to offer their own support and advice to others and don’t be too concerned about the lack of control or the possibility of negative posts. We only remove posts that are commercial in nature or abusive (and we’ve had very few of those).
If someone posts about a bad experience, this can be a great opportunity to demonstrate that you are there to help out and turn a bad experience into a good one.
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