Speak Now for Kids
Speak Now For Kids’ 2020 Virtual Advocacy Week Goes Virtual!
In light of social distancing requirements to minimize exposure to COVID-19, The Children’s Hospital Association held their annual Speak Now for Kids Family Advocacy Week virtually this year.
Over the course of a week:
- Families participated in virtual meetings with legislators where they shared their unique health stories and discussed the importance of prioritizing children’s health care.
- Patient families engaged in activities leading up to, during, and after Family Advocacy Week through the FAW Countable microsite.
- Families followed along by taking part in activities including a live virtual kickoff event, themed days such as “Selfie Monday” and “The Future Is Me Thursday,” a singalong with the band Cake for Dinner, and a live Q&A session with a superhero.
- Participants were encouraged to share their experiences on social media and SNFK reshared these posts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, while also promoting and sharing its own organic content to promote the week.
How Did Beekeeper Group Support The Event?
While the Children’s Hospital Association took the lead in creating the event strategy for the advocacy week, they charged Beekeeper Group with carrying out many of the social media strategies including:
- Blog Management
- Organic Social Media Management
- Paid Social Media Management
- Design Services
- Video Services
- Reporting on Outcomes
Blog Management
CHA provided Beekeeper Group with a blog post and social media graphics that highlighted the unique health stories of each of the 58 patient advocates who participated in the Family Advocacy Week. Beekeeper Group uploaded each participant’s blog post and photo to Speak Now For Kids’ NationBuilder site leading up to the advocacy week. See an example of one of the blog posts here.
Organic Social Media Management
Beekeeper Group also crafted individual Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram social media posts for each participant. Each post included a social graphic and linked to the participant’s full blog post.
While CHA wanted to include the hashtag #TheFutureIsMe to use with promotional posts, Beekeeper Group encouraged the use of #FAW2020, a hashtag specific to the week. By using both of these hashtags in the promotion and encouraging SNFK’s social audience to do the same, it allowed our audience to easily connect with each other and also increased the event’s online exposure.
Besides posts highlighting individual patient advocates, the Beekeeper team also crafted key general promotional social media posts. Beekeeper Group additionally provided day-of monitoring throughout the week on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram by tracking the hashtags #TheFutureIsMe and #FAW2020, and by following mentions of @speaknowforkids. We leveraged a shared Google Sheet to manage engagements in real-time, where Beekeeper Group worked to flag posts that would be good RT opportunities (and flagged negative posts as well).
Paid Social Media Management & Design ServicesBeyond organic promotion, our Advertising Practice Lead created a comprehensive paid promotion plan to further promote the event. The primary goal of this plan was to promote the daily themes of Family Advocacy Week 2020 to generate more engagement on the content and boost its visibility in users’ feeds on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Beekeeper Group drafted the ad copy for the social media ads and used CHA design files to produce ad creatives for the various platforms.
The ads were targeted at a wide net that included participating hospitals, children’s hospital supporters, parents, and government employees. As a result, the ads received:
- 170,093 Impressions
- 5,462 Engagements
- 1,511 Link Clicks
Video Services
Throughout the week, Beekeeper Group compiled various images, screenshots, and videos shared on social media by patient advocates and their families, children’s hospitals, and legislator’s offices. CHA also provided Beekeeper Group with additional video stories that were captured by families throughout the week and submitted to CHA directly.
Using these resources, Beekeeper Group’s videographer created a short highlights video to recap the Family Advocacy Week, which was shared on all social channels. The sound used in the video is an original song by CHA.
Reporting on Outcomes
After the week’s events, Beekeeper Group reported on organic and paid outcomes using Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook analytics for engagement metrics, as well as a paid-for Keyhole report that analyzed #TheFutureIsMe and #FAW2020 metrics. The event’s social media promotion produced great engagement from participating children’s hospitals and patient advocates, as well as from children’s health advocates. There were also many quality engagements that included retweets and mentions from several Congressional social media accounts.
Aside from high-quality participation, the effort generated tens of thousands of social impressions and over 10,000 social media engagements. In the end, the client was extremely satisfied with the engagement and the work that Beekeeper Group did to support their conference. See their blog post-write-up of the week’s events here.
