Land conservation organizations — all those nonprofits and public agencies who are working to prevent land from being paved over — could do a lot more to use social media to get their work done. Gone are the days of putting a paper brochure up on the web and thinking you’re done. Gone are the days of starting a Facebook page and thinking you did your job.
The internet has evolved and grown so much, and land conservation organizations need to use it to actually get stuff done. Like getting their target audience to show up at an event. Like advocating to policy makers on land use policies. Land conservation organizations need social media to do almost anything, because almost everything involves people and 99.9% of those people are on social media.
So we convened 125 people at the David Brower Center in Berkeley yesterday to talk about this. I was joined on stage with the hilarious Veda Benarjee and creative Megan Mederios.
Megan is the Executive Director at the Committee for Green Foothills and has successfully used YouTube and Facebook to advocate for land use policies. Veda is the Director of Communications and Digital Marketing for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy and uses analytics to find the people the Conservancy wants to attend and support the parks. They’re both talented and skilled. And the best part… they’re both funny. We had so much fun talking and being together.
I talked about Outdoor Voice, and it looked like this:
I asked the audience to take pictures and post them to Instagram and Twitter with #OSCsocial. Here are some of my favorites:
The best question of the day? This one:
Check out more on Twitter with #OSCsocial. It provides just a taste of the good energy, curious minds, and fun that was had yesterday.
David Brower said, “Have fun saving the world, or you are just going to depress yourself.” Social media provides the tools land conservation needs to do its work, and have some fun at the same time. That’s a perfect combination in my book.
Annie S. Burke 